Goldsmith PaulHon PAUL GOLDSMITH (National): Thank you Mr Speaker. The National Party doesn't support this bill. It supports elements of it but overall it doesn't address the major issues facing the education system in New Zealand that is failing to provide the world-class education that New Zealanders need. It's a wasted-opportunity bill. The Government should be passing legislation to address the fact that only 46 percent of students were attending school regularly in term 3 2022 or that 98 percent of decile 1 students failed a foundational NCEA literacy test. Those are the big issues. Instead of tackling the real issues that we face in the education system in New Zealand we have this tinkering bill that focuses on things such as changing the criteria for school board members to include genders sexualities sexes and the school's disability community. Well I'm sorry but that's not where the attention needs to be. Our catastrophic results in reading in writing in science and in maths should be keeping the Minister of Education up at night but instead we have half a decade of declining standards and no plans to turn this around. So we have this legislation here a missed-opportunity bill which tinkers on a series of issues some of which make sense—yes it might be useful—some of which are just fiddling while Rome burns. And we would be focusing in the National Party on teaching the basics brilliantly to ensure that every Kiwi kid can master the basics so that they can have the life they want to lead. The Minister of Education Jan Tinetti stood up last week and said she'd like to work with National on education. Well we'd like to work with her and we welcome that and suggest that a good place to start would be teaching the basics brilliantly and getting our education system focused on that rather than passing the No. 3 education bill and tinkering around with small changes in school board election processes. Lord knows how we're going to actually do that in a privacy sense to work out how we've got the right genders and sexes and sexualities represented on the school board. It's a mystery to me and I don't know how we're going to expect people to send out little notices around the place explaining that and for the schools to hold that information. So what does this legislation do? We have the child protection provisions so that anyone convicted of an offence is automatically ineligible except exempted by the Secretary of Education—requires all compliance of licensed early childhood education centres consider police-vets for non-teaching employees and contractors. How that works in practice in relation to plumbers and electricians turning up will be interesting for the select committee to have a look at in a practical sense. Then we've got the school board election processes which I said expands the criteria for co-opting and appointing school members to include where reasonably practical genders sexualities and the school's disability community. Then we look at the tertiary sector: establishing a new framework for the wānanga requiring annual reports to include remuneration of over $100000 per annum at universities. Well yes again maybe of interest. Meantime we have this burning conflagration of the Te Pūkenga catastrophe in the polytechs area where hundreds of millions of dollars are being consumed in a hare-brained scheme that is not advancing the area at all after three years and hundreds of millions of dollars being spent. They still don't have a clear plan of what they're trying to achieve what they're trying to do and they've got fewer students turning up and an economic catastrophe in that area. Instead of coming up with some sensible solutions and changing their mind on some of those areas what are they doing? Well they've got their mind really focused on the big issues and making sure that we have a complete list of their remunerations in the tertiary sector outlined. I suppose that the theme that we're seeing here is a country where there are some big fundamental issues that need to be addressed and in education it's about the fact that our Kiwi kids are coming out of the education system not equipped to succeed. If we looked at the NCEA literacy and numeracy pilot we'd see that only 64 percent of students achieved the standard in reading 34 percent in writing and 56 percent in numeracy. I tuned in to The Wireless this morning and amidst all the stories about the rot within this Government in terms of Ministers having to be fired—in between all those stories there was a story from the business associations pointing out that their latest survey showed that employees were struggling with the fact that too many of the people that were hired to work didn't have the sufficient literacy and numeracy to do the job. So there are some pretty fundamental issues in the education system that we need to be addressing and this Government is not effectively addressing. Instead we get legislation like this which is tinkering around the edges and not solving the problems. And on that basis we will not be supporting this bill.