Delahunty Catherine: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Delahunty Catherine: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Sitting date: 12 February 2013. Volume:687;Page:7732. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green) 
: 
 I would just like to take an opportunity to congratulate our new Speaker. I hope that we can have a great relationship with him and that the opportunity of free speech in this present Parliament will be upheld by all of us for the benefit of all of us as an important right that should be protected by all Speakers and also by all MPs irrespective of the political bias of any political party. 
I would also like to acknowledge that the debate on the Prime Minister’s statement came at the end of a beautiful summer but after that I slightly lost my will to live. I find my will to live struggling when we listen to motherhood and apple pie which we can all agree with but underneath it the ideology the rhetoric and the attempt to justify the attack on education in the Prime Minister’s speech but also in the Minister of Education’s speech were quite notable. The Prime Minister’s speech was focusing on national standards as the only—and deeply unpopular—method by which educational outcomes are going to be changed. Hekia Parata’s speech was very defensive. It was understandably defensive because there are so many debacles on the list. 
 I want to talk a bit about the debacles but also about the positive vision because out there outside the beltway there are some fantastic people working in education who absolutely believe in quality public local education. I had the privilege of attending a hui at Waitangi for engaging Maori learners which occurs every year. It is a conference of teachers and principals not only in Northland but often Northlanders. They were very welcoming because what they are really interested in is how quality local self-managing schools with a good relationship with the Government can actually achieve the goals of supporting their young people. 
We have schools such as Moerewa School where Ngati Hine have worked so hard to make a curriculum based on their own community’s desires for how their children will become good citizens and then the school is cut off at the knees by Government policy and by Government action. It was distressing to see people from that community in tears while talking about the loss of their children. What has happened is that with the axing of the school’s senior class which was being taught in Te Reo we have lost young people from the system. We have lost young people who did not want to go to other schools and who now have had the message that the Government does not want them to be part of education on their own community’s terms. A punitive approach to education and towards schools that have an aspiration—a favourite Government word—for their own children to be educated according to their own beliefs has been lost and that is a very sad thing. 
I could also pick on Wanganui Collegiate School if I felt like it. It is really tempting. My partner went there and he has got some interesting things to say about it. The Government is certainly spending a lot of money on it bailing it out to the tune of $3 million a year through integration because that school cannot stand on its own feet. But it is still going to charge thousands of dollars of fees and we are going to help pay for that—a very bizarre scenario. When you look at the deed of Wanganui Collegiate School in 1852 Sir George Grey actually said that the school was to benefit Europeans and Maori. And if you look further down the deed you will see—and this is something my partner has often quoted to me—that it was supposed to be for the poor of Aotearoa and the Pacific and Maori as well as Europeans. Instead of which we have a private school that has now been bailed out which is going to cost the taxpayer at just the time when the Christchurch schools are facing tremendous stress about their viability—and that announcement is coming up really soon. 
We are talking about Wanganui Collegiate School Novopay national standards charter schools and early childhood education fees going up because of the targeting of people who are 100 percent qualified. I met somebody this weekend in Invercargill who lost her job because she was qualified. That is the kind of perverse incentive for any country that wants to build a stable strong viable system where all our children have access to a quality creative participatory education system when somebody in early childhood education loses their job not because they are not good at their job but because the early childhood centre under this Government cannot afford to hire them any more. That consequence will ripple through the generations because our smallest people need our best. Just because they do not vote does not mean we should not focus our attention on the smallest people. They need the quality teaching and the quality support instead of which we have a privatised sector where the not-for-profits are struggling and with baby barns where the babies are lined up and all have their nappies changed at the same time. That kind of robotic universe prepared for some kind of weird production line is not the future for early childhood education. 
If you look at Te Whariki which is a fantastic curriculum there is now pressure that there should be more assessment of children. So in early childhood education we are going from portfolios and the idea of child-centred integrated learning to the idea that we need to have more assessment like national standards for 3-year-olds. That will really work because it is really not working in schools. There is an alternative to national standards and that is actually called trust. It is called trusting schools and trusting parents to actually develop a curriculum that works and to stick within the broad parameters of a very good curriculum instead of imagining that measuring is going to work. Instead of actually feeding the cow as they say in Canada it is about weighing the cow. No matter how often you weigh things especially if you weigh them differently in every community you are not going to end up with any information that is going to be worth having about how to improve the so-called long tail of underachievement. 
I would never belittle the reality for children who are struggling in our school system. I would never belittle that. That is why at the Engaging Maori Learners Conference we heard from principals and teachers who are actually innovating. They are not measuring they are not labelling they are not putting on their website they are not competing they are not trying to be privatised they do not want to be charter schools they do not want to have secret contracts and they do not want unregistered teachers. Actually what they want to do is make sure that they are meeting the goals of the families and whanau of their communities in terms of actually making our teachers able to be culturally inclusive and responsive. 
What we have is Te Kotahitanga—one of the most culturally responsive programmes—which allows Pakeha teachers to become reflective practitioners on their bias against Maori children. 
David Bennett 
: How can you say you’ve got a bias? How can you say you’ve got a bias? 
CATHERINE DELAHUNTY 
: It has been blocked. Forty-four schools have seen great success. One in Hamilton which the member from Hamilton may not know about saw National Certificate of Educational Achievement results go from 23 percent to 77 percent. That happened because of Te Kotahitanga because of the fact of that programme and the Government has limited it to 44 schools. It has cut it. It has been limited because the Government thinks it might cost money. I am speaking about the importance of Ka Hikitia—Managing for Success and Te Kotahitanga as instruments of allowing teachers to reflect on their own practice and when you have that instrument blocked you have got to ask why and what the alternative is. 
National standards versus proper professional development of teachers is a very very sad thing because what we are seeing is that proper professional development has been sacrificed. Everything has been sacrificed to national standards. The Government Budget has been sacrificed to narrowing the curriculum. Science advisers drama advisers all of those advisers who have lost positions are constantly contacting the Greens and saying that a broad curriculum allows a child to learn differently. It may be news to some people but all kids start at different stages. Some talk when they are 2 some talk when they are 3 months—I was one of those—some talk when they are 4 some cannot stop talking. The fact is that they all develop at their own rate and so when you start trying to measure them and put them in boxes and when you start saying that the only pathway to literacy is through literacy—rather than through drama for some kids it is through science for others it is through Enviroschools for others—you have narrowed the curriculum. National standards—everyone knows they are not national or a standard so that is another sad debacle. In hindsight as we have heard from Hekia Parata quite a bit lately national standards will be another of those jokes. 
Moving right along to the education amendment bill that is before the House at the moment it is reflected by the Government’s commitment in the Prime Minister’s speech that these are going to be the solutions. Privatisation is the solution to inequity. The trickle-down theory was introduced in the 1980s by former members of this House with disastrous consequences for people who did not happen to be at the top and who happened to be trickled down upon. So the trickled down upon will now have the opportunity to go to schools with no registered teachers if those schools desire. That is an extraordinary response but it is not a local one. Unfortunately it is part of what we call the GERM—the global education reform movement—which is the neo-liberal fight-back because in education early childhood is being privatised tertiary is being privatised and there is one thing left: the school system. So let us do it. Let us take the school system and privatise it and let us say that choice the mantra of choice is actually about the mantra of privilege. You have only to talk to people from New Orleans who actually saw the consequences of Hurricane Katrina with the loss of their schools to see that the privatising agenda which is driving the Government’s education policy is not going to be a vision for a healthy happy just and equitable community. The Green Party has a much better vision. Kia ora koutou katoa.