Turei Metiria: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Turei Metiria: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Sitting date: 12 March 2013. Volume:688;Page:8442. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
METIRIA TUREI (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 I do not know where the countries “Selenia” and “Solakia” are. I suspect there were some educational failings on that side of the Chamber at some point. 
Tracey Martin 
: Charter schools. 
METIRIA TUREI 
: A charter school—that is what you get from charter schools. Hekia Parata must go. Either she should be sacked by the Prime Minister or—what I would prefer her to do actually—she should take a dignified exit and admit to her mistakes and step down because she has clearly failed and failed and failed as a Minister. It is awful to see it happening to a perfectly nice perfectly smart woman but it is worse to see the impacts on our kids. It does not matter what you might think about Hekia Parata at the end of the day it is our kids who suffer from her failures. 
The financial review for 2011-12 that was undertaken by the Education and Science Committee actually sets out those failures in quite a lot of detail. In fact the committee looked at only those failures and wrote a great deal about them. Novopay the Christchurch schools restructuring the class sizes debacle charter schools—all of these are set out because those failures were so significant that the Education and Science Committee highlighted them as particular areas of concern and those are certainly the areas of concern to the New Zealand public. 
It has already been said of course that the majority of New Zealanders do not believe that Hekia Parata is competent enough to be the Minister of Education and I agree. We must make sure that we protect our kids from incompetent Ministers who have such authority over their lives not only now as children in the education system and over their school but more important over how their life trajectory will roll out—their capacity and their ability to do well in their future. 
We need to look I think at charter schools and that is my particular focus for my contribution this evening. Charter schools are certainly the best way for the Government to suck money out of the public school system and hand it on to private hands. Along with the sale of our public assets it is just another form of privatisation of public assets but it is the privatisation of our most critical children’s institutions—their schools the places where they spend most of their time the institutions that are the most dedicated to their well-being and to their future. 
The charter schools debate really is a debate about the poor versus the rest and about why it is that this National Government is so committed to providing substandard alternative schools to our most vulnerable learners. 
 To say that charter schools offer poor parents a comparable choice is an insult. John Banks has always maintained that charter schools will be an alternative and not compulsory in any local community but let us just think about what that means in practical terms. This means that the ACT Party board which will decide where charter schools go will be running two schools in areas. So where the Government would never normally build a second school in an area where there is already sufficient capacity or overcapacity the ACT Party board responsible for choosing the charter schools will be doing exactly that and that has very serious financial implications particularly when you look at the application documents for charter schools that were released last week. They stated that these charter schools these private schools should be funded on the same basis as brand new State schools—effectively sucking money out of the public system to establish schools where there is already capacity or overcapacity. 
Let us just have another think about what that means for Christchurch for the Christchurch community and others around the country who have had vibrant successful schools set for closure so that money can be sucked out of them only to be funnelled into private schools where there is already overcapacity. Teachers—rich people do not send their kids to private schools because the teachers are untrained and unregistered yet these are the kinds of schools and teachers who will be in front of our most vulnerable learners under the charter schools model according to the ACT Party board. 
Why should poorer kids be subject to this experiment? That has been the big question that has certainly been raised in the select committee looking at the legislation. Where is the evidence that this will work for these kids? In fact if you look at the evidence there is none. The evidence shows that these schools will harm our kids and certainly not help them. Not only that but these schools will have 3 years to experiment on our kids.