English Bill: Urgent Debates — Education—School Review Programme 
English Bill: Urgent Debates — Education—School Review Programme 
[Volume:615;Page:11225] 
Hon BILL ENGLISH (National—Clutha-Southland) 
: 
 I move  
That the House take note of a matter of urgent public importance 
. It was ironic indeed to hear the Prime Minister giving instructions to this House today that MPs should tell the truth. It was advice that I believe she should take herself. Her record would stand less scrutiny than Lianne Dalziel’s when it came to the finer art of deception in politics. However the truth about school closures is pretty simple. An overrated overconfident Minister underestimated New Zealand’s parents. Closures of our schools have never been advocated on this scale—never. There has always been a continuous process of school closures and that is without question regardless of party. My own electorate of Southland has had demographic change for the last 15 years. I can tell the House that in the last 5 years over a dozen schools have closed in my electorate. Two were closed just before Christmas without getting in the newspaper. So before Labour gets precious about who closed what let us get the scale of these closures in mind. 
Currently 71 schools are designated for closure and the cynical head-grabbing exercise yesterday does not save one of them. Many New Zealanders now believe that school closures will not go ahead but they are going ahead and 71 school closures have been proposed. Let us remind ourselves about the nature of many of these schools. I have found people even in the press gallery who believe that this is just about the closure of some small rural schools. Well there are maybe a couple of dozen out of the 71—maybe 20. What we are talking about are schools like Watlington Intermediate in Timaru. That school has a roll of over 250 children and it has a very special characteristic in that its staff uniquely almost in primary and intermediate schooling are half male and half female. It is very successful is strongly supported has excellent facilities and it will be closed. I could go through a whole raft of such schools each of which has the same characteristics—that is is successful in its education has good facilities has strong community support and strong parental involvement and is in no way failing in its duty which is to educate our young New Zealanders. 
 The Minister of Education thought he would get away with it. He thought he would get away with it because he and the unions sat in his office and did the deal. That is how everything is done in education these days—if they decide then that is what will happen. I say to the teacher unions that they have made the biggest mistake they have made since I can remember watching them and that is to get offside with parents. They will pay the price for helping Trevor Mallard. They will pay a price because for the first time in a long time parents have not had to rely on the unions to lead their position in an argument about education. Parents have done it themselves and for reasons that shock the Minister. I saw the look on his face when he stood up in front of 600 people in Invercargill and parents made it clear to him why they were opposing his network reviews. 
Labour members have always believed that the concept of parents choosing schools is a nasty right-wing Tory idea that has to be stamped out. Government members believe choice is bad and that parents who want it have been duped by right-wing extremists. Well the Minister is wrong. I saw mothers from decile 1 and 2 schools who have voted Labour all their lives stand up and tell him to get back in his taxi get out of their community and stop telling them where to send their children to school. Timaru has elected Jim Sutton overwhelmingly for a number of elections. Forty-five percent of Timaru parents drive past their nearest school. Why? Well actually that is none of his business. Parents make choices not for ideological reasons but because they have children and each of those children is unique. Even when one has six of them they are all different. At the very least parents have the right to withdraw their child from a school where that child is not fitting in not succeeding or in fact may be having his or her educational experience destroyed—not because the whole system is wrong but because in that classroom with that peer group and that teacher it does not work. Trevor Mallard and Labour believe it is wrong to want to do that. That is why they are closing schools; to make sure parents lose those choices—because falling rolls are an opportunity. 
I know about falling rolls; they have been falling in my electorate the whole time I have been in Parliament. That situation puts a huge pressure for performance on the schools. I will tell members what happens. The school that does not deal with the hopeless principal or make sure its teachers are doing their job competently gets crunched and quickly because the parents can go—and they do and that is right and that is how it should be. Parents do not trust the highly centralised bureaucratic State-monopoly mindset of Labour and the unions who say that: “Whatever teacher is in your classroom your child just has to put up with it because that is your zone.” They say: “State education is about creating a democracy.” Actually it is not. It is about educating “my child”. That is what those parents out there were protesting about today. The Minister would not come down to talk to them. Those parents were not there to make some political statement; they were standing up for their children—actually their children ahead of their school. 
Parents are standing up for their children and that is why the network reviews have stopped. I have been saying for 2 months that the Minister would not start another round of them because of the anger of those parents. Is it not strange how 2 weeks ago the Minister went around the country saying that network reviews were absolutely necessary for a sustainable education system and yesterday he decided they were not necessary? What changed? Two things. It was not just the poll but of course the poll made a difference. Invercargill has gone; Labour can forget about it. Mr “Hopeless” Peck will never recover from his pathetic display and Jim Sutton will be very fortunate to recover from his. Their colleague has done them in. Trevor Mallard has done those Labour MPs in and they are starting to send the message back to the leader’s runner. They are sick of being done in. Jill Pettis is finished. She has just been promoted to senior whip but her seat is gone. Trevor Mallard did her in because he overrated himself and it is the sheer arrogance of the network reviews that shows the Government is completely out of step with public and parental opinion about education. It is off on some centralised bureaucratic monopoly trip but parents are out there making well-informed well-judged choices for their children and they will fight to keep those choices. 
The network reviews will not start up again and that is why the Minister must back off on 71 closures. What is the difference between the parents in Invercargill when Labour was polling 45 percent and the parents of rural Southland who would have had a review if Labour was not polling 35 percent? That is the only difference. Three months in the polls is the only difference between having the heart ripped out of the schools and being able to keep them. So whatever arguments the Minister has put up I would ask him to address this because it is a core principle of his own party: a fair go. What about a fair go for the thousands of families who are facing the closure of their schools? The Minister has no mandate to do it. 
 Yesterday the Government owned up to the fact that it does not have a mandate for the radical school closures it plans. Having lost his mandate that Minister should give away his policy. Certainly it will cost Labour politically and he knows that but it is too late. Most of those bills have been sent already. But out of a sense of a Kiwi fair go why should one community that fell on the wrong side of a poll have to go through this when a community that fell on the right side of a poll does not have to? How do I explain that to the 10 and 12-year-old children I will be speaking to in Invercargill tomorrow? 
Rodney Hide 
: What’s the principle? 
Hon BILL ENGLISH 
: As he said on the radio he is a politician. He is an overrated overconfident and destructive politician so why has Helen Clark appointed him Minister for race relations? Tell that to the people of Invercargill! He is the man who will bring us all together! Well parents know that Fraser Crescent School will close because the Minister does not like the way the parents are protesting. Pareora East School will close because he implied on the radio that it was a ghetto school and it asked for an apology. Other parents say to me: “Gosh they shouldn’t have done that because now he’ll close them.” They see the Minister as vindictive. They see not only that he has abandoned any pretence of educational outcomes driving these changes but also that he is vindictive. Of course it is not about educational outcomes at all. I will tell members who wins. Single-sex schools do not get touched. High-decile schools win their arguments and low-decile schools lose. It is that simple. It is the poorer areas of those cities that are being stripped of their schools not the high-decile areas so much. They tend to win. The Minister says he likes intermediate schools but he is closing them all. He says he likes intermediate schools because they produce good educational outcomes but: “By the way in Timaru and Invercargill I’m closing them all.” Some of the answers are just stupid. The “super school” in Invercargill James Hargest High School is merging a 1200-pupil primary school with two intermediate schools on to two sites. If James Hargest High puts the intermediate kids on their site they will get $9 million and if they stay on the other site they will get $4 million. So he is paying them $5 million just to push them all on to one site. The class rooms are already there on the other site and they will be full of intermediate kids so why not just call it an intermediate school and leave James Hargest High alone instead of shifting 2000 pupils around and making every teacher of those 2000 pupils reapply for their jobs? 
I say to the Minister that he can escape from this with some credibility if he backs right off on those 71 schools. In most of those communities there will be agreement about the closure of a small number of schools. In the Grey Valley people will agree to close four schools and keep four. In Invercargill they will agree to close some schools but a lot fewer than 13. In Timaru they will agree to close some schools but a lot fewer than 15. A Government without a mandate and a discredited Minister who have already changed their policy cannot be allowed to punish those communities. I say to the House that they are angrier today than they have ever been because they are being done over in a way that is grossly unfair and highly political. The Minister has some choices left if he wants to rescue his credibility and he will need to because why will anyone else in education believe anything he says? He went around saying how brave he was in fronting up and how convinced he was of his policy. He made a virtue out of it and some people believed it. I never believed that but some people did. What other policy can he ever announce that he might stick to under pressure? There is none. The only way for him to escape with some credibility will be to back off on the closures leave most of those schools open and let us all get on with teaching our kids instead of punishing a Government.