Goldsmith PaulEDUCATION (STRENGTHENING SECOND LANGUAGE LEARNING IN PRIMARY AND INTERMEDIATE SCHOOLS) AMENDMENT BILLSecond ReadingHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Madam Speaker. I move That the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.This bill for people listening in is a member's bill that was originally to amend the Education Act but has subsequently been changed and the idea is to improve students' access to second-language learning in primary and intermediate schools. It would enable the Minister of Education to issue a national language policy and it would also allow regulations to specify a list of at least 10 national priority languages—a list of 10 which must include te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language. If this bill was passed State primary and intermediate school boards would need to develop adopt and maintain a priority language programme in their schools after consulting with the school community. Boards would have to choose at least one language from the list of national priority languages and arrange for that to be taught at their school—they could choose more. The bill would require the Government to allocate money for schools for the costs associated with teaching a second language through the normal Budget cycle. The bill would also require the Minister to report on the effectiveness of the priority languages programme. We think it is a great bill.I just want to start by acknowledging the member who introduced the bill the Hon Nikki Kaye who has since left. Nikki Kaye put her heart and soul into this bill. She fought hard for it. She was a member of Parliament with very strong beliefs. She was determined that New Zealand kids would have access to the enormous cognitive cultural social and economic benefits that come from having the opportunity to learn a second language in those early years of education. As most people would be aware at most secondary schools we have the opportunity to learn different languages but at primary and intermediate schools it is much more mixed—certainly I didn't learn any at my primary and intermediate school. So Nikki Kaye fought very hard for this. She managed to convince the Minister Chris Hipkins for Labour to support this at first reading and Nikki Kaye certainly had an indefatigable style about her argumentation. She was like a dog at a bone with these issues and she fought very hard for this bill. In fact her basic style was to hammer away so that people would eventually give in to whatever she was arguing for just to get her to stop and it was quite effective. I'm sure she applied that technique on the Minister. I was glad that he gave us the opportunity for this to be considered.So the first reading was passed. It went off to the Education and Workforce Committee and there was very considerable support for this bill at the select committee stage. We saw the many many submitters from an enormous variety of backgrounds coming in excited about the possibility that a language from their culture—whether it is Punjabi or Tamil or Samoan or Tagalog or Korean or a whole bunch of languages they all came up with very convincing arguments as to why their language should be one of the 10.Now the worrying thing is that members on the other side—Labour—indicated during the select committee process that they no longer support the bill and indeed want to kill it. My hope is that the Minister will take a much more considered view and reconsider that and maybe even find it in his heart to support it at the second reading and continue the conversation about any changes that could be made at the Supplementary Order Paper level at the next level in order to get this piece of legislation through. I'm desperately sorry for Nikki Kaye that we appear to have missed an opportunity to equip our children at our schools with the opportunity to learn a second language particularly given that we are in Chinese Language Week this week and we'll have lots of discussions about that.At my local primary school in Auckland around 50 percent—and I'm not exaggerating: 50 percent—of the new entrants at our school do not have English as their first language; they are mainly Mandarin speakers. Our education system is proving to be brilliant at bringing in kids that are multilingual—or have the potential to be multilingual—and churning them out as monolingual English speakers at the end. That's a real missed opportunity. I can certainly understand why parents of those Chinese-speaking kids would be very keen for their children to have the opportunity at school to continue learning their language in order to bed it in so that they can continue on in life as multilingual or bilingual speakers. There are many other cultures in our city in that case. But apparently that is not to be the case.It seems to me that the situation we're facing is as one submitter put that the perfect is the enemy of the good". By that they meant that the opposition to the bill seems to look at the broad situation in New Zealand and conclude that te reo Māori is the absolute priority and until everybody in this country is bilingual in that we shouldn't be looking further afield effectively. I'd be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on this topic. I think that is a mistake. Fundamentally our party comes from one of choice. Nothing in this bill takes away the existing obligation on schools to ensure that all schools have teaching in te reo Māori and tikanga Māori available and makes best endeavours to achieve that. So every child in theory should have access to an element of that. It is a separate question to decide: "Well do you want to study in depth that particular language through your primary and intermediate school years?" The reality of the situation is that some will and some won't. There will be children from many cultural backgrounds in particular who would be more engaged and more interested in picking up their language as a second language and they are not going to have the choice if that carries on and I think that would be a pity.So if we looked at some of the submissions—and there were many many; the Asia New Zealand Foundation made some very strong points—it is a remarkable fact that in the last decade the number of children in our school learning Asian languages has decreased by 29 percent. So there is nearly 30 percent fewer children in our schools learning Asian languages than there were a decade ago and at a time when we are trading more with Asia our economy depends on trade with our region with our neighbours and in an era where we will face the reality of China being an enormously powerful country over the next few decades—and at that time we are turning inwards rather than outwards and looking out to the rest of the world. I think that is a tragedy and it is a real missed opportunity. As a result of that we sometimes forget that we do have neighbours and that we can learn about them and their cultures and learn to communicate with them and trade with them and understand where they come from.So here we are at a time when everybody across the House agrees—it appears to me—that the discipline of learning a second language is a good idea useful and something we should support but we are faced with a Government that says "Yes but that second language has to be te reo Māori and if this bill doesn't achieve that"—which it doesn't because it provides choice—"then we'll not support that." It was summed up to me by one of the ministry officials who said "The problem with this bill is that it offers schools and parents an open-ended choice when what they really need is a guided choice as to what they should learn." That struck me as a rather Orwellian way to go about education policy. I do hope that the Minister reconsiders in the next few minutes. Thank you very much."