Goff Phil: Budget Debate 
Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume 
Goff Phil: Budget Debate 
[Sitting date: 12 June 2012. Volume:680;Page:2819. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.] 
Hon PHIL GOFF (Labour—Mt Roskill) 
: 
 There are a couple of things that the Minister of Justice who has just resumed her seat forgot to mention. Sure the crime rate has come down. Perhaps that had something to do Mrs Collins with the 1000 extra police officers on the front line that the Labour-led Government put on in its last term in office. Perhaps it had something to do with totally revamping the thoroughly inadequate rundown prison system that we inherited from the last National Government. Perhaps it had something to do with the total overhaul of legislation for the Sentencing Act the Parole Act and the Proceeds of Crime Act. Perhaps it had something to do with that.  
But what Mrs Collins has not told us is what this Budget is doing for policing. This Budget represents a real cut to police funding: 125 staffing positions cut and that is just to begin with. Dozens of police stations Mrs Collins will close during this term. Do you know what I found out about my local police station? I found out that they might not close it but they will close it to the public. They will close the police station to the public. What does that mean for community policing? I was standing there talking to a member of the police force who is also on the local community board when a woman biked up in distress and said that she had been sexually threatened by a man just down the road. In future do you know what she will have to do? She will have to bike to Avondale. That is 9 kilometres away. Do you think she is going to report that crime? Do you think the police are going to be able to respond immediately to it? Not on your life. Police stations mark my words will close in their dozens and that is the very opposite of what community policing is meant to be about. Then the Police Association told my colleague Kris Faafoi here that the Government is going to cut the pay of front-line police officers over the next 10 years—it is going to cut it. The previous Minister of Police boasts about how uncorrupt and competent our police force is and she is largely right about that but how is it going to help to cut their salaries?  
But today I do not want to talk about that so much as about the evidence last week that we saw of National’s education policy to increase class sizes and to cut technology learning in our intermediate schools crashing and burning. What a humiliating backdown for Hekia Parata. What an embarrassment that was for her and the National Government. I will give you this guarantee. There will not be a single National MP who gets up and praises the National Government’s Budget policy on education. You know the only thing I regret about the embarrassment that Hekia Parata faced was that the two major architects of that policy John Key and Bill English were nowhere to be seen when she had to front up and back down. They were nowhere to be seen.  
Do not tell me members of the National Government that Bill English did not know exactly what that Budget policy meant. It was in the briefing paper to him as Minister last year—increase class sizes it said. Then the Secretary to the Treasury Gabriel Makhlouf gave a speech just 2 months ago saying that the way to improve quality in education was to increase class sizes—increase class sizes. Did National members actually believe that? They parroted it for a fortnight. I bet we never hear it again from them.  
I was looking at a copy of the  
Listener 
 the other day from 28 May 2005. There was an interview with one Mr John Key. What was Mr Key saying? He was asked why he sent his children to private schools. He said really it is “for educational reasons. Their schools have smaller classes and are better resourced...”. That is what he said. 
Hon Nanaia Mahuta 
: One rule. 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: One rule for Mr Key and for the majority of Cabinet who send their kids to private schools and another rule for the rest of us whose kids proudly go to public education in this country. I want to say that if it is good enough for kids in private schools to have small classes so they have more individual learning then it is good enough for all of our children. If we have a philosophy as New Zealanders a set of principles and ideology it is the ideology of fairness. It says that some kids will come from privileged and wealthy backgrounds—fine. Other kids do not. But the really important thing is that every child should get equal opportunity. Every child should be able to achieve his or her potential. I will fight and fight and fight again against this National Government which says it will put more money into private education but for the kids who go to public schools it will increase their class sizes and close down their technology classes.  
You know I do not exempt Ms Parata from the blame of this policy altogether. She has a job as Minister of Education—I once did that job—and her job was to understand the policy that was being proposed to subject it to scrutiny and to make a judgment as to whether it was the right policy. [ 
Interruption 
] I will ask Paul Goldsmith this question. If she knew the impact on intermediate schools why did she not tell her colleagues? 
Paul Goldsmith 
: Is that a rhetorical question? 
Hon PHIL GOFF 
: He has no answer—he has no answer. If she knew and she did not tell her colleagues that was appallingly bad judgment. And if she did not know the consequences that was simply incompetence and inadequacy on her part.  
You know we heard her going through the parroting of all of the explanations. Here is a commentator in Saturday’s  
New Zealand Herald 
: she was “spouting meaningless blather. Repeatedly mouthing platitudes …”. It is just not good enough to parrot a line. “The truth is”—and this is word for word—“that the Education Minister’s botched handling of the cost-cutting blunder which initially would have seen some schools losing up to five teacher positions has brutally exposed her political shortcomings.”  
Under a Labour Government the education spokesperson is always on the front bench and to get on the front bench you have to have political competence to be there. But we have seen anything but political competence from this Minister. This policy was a disgrace. It was a disgrace that she was hung out to dry by Bill English who did not front up alongside her despite the fact that he knew what that policy meant and it was an equal disgrace from John Key to support a policy that was absolutely rejected by parents right across our community. It is strange I often think how a number of people in this House have benefited from the welfare State in their time of need but when it comes to extending the hand of help to kids who have need today they do not want to do it. They just want to cut; they want to make things worse.  
John Key did say one thing that was interesting on Newstalk ZB. He said that he is not arrogant enough not to listen to what people are saying. Well I have got some advice for Mr Key. In every public opinion poll that has ever been held in this country people have said that they do not want to see New Zealand flogging off its public assets. I wonder whether Mr Key is not arrogant enough to ignore their views because those on the Finance and Expenditure Committee who have been going around the country over the last month or two time and again heard submissions from people utterly and emphatically opposed to the sale of assets. Why would you sell the best-performing assets that you have got? These are the assets that Treasury itself admits are so efficient that privatisation will not improve their efficiency. Why would you sell the assets that returned to us 2 years ago $700 million in 1 year which as John Key admitted went towards our hospitals and our schools? Why would you hand over ownership of something that all of us as New Zealanders as Kiwis and as taxpayers own and benefit from to only those who can afford to pay for it? And why does the Government not admit that most of those shares the cornerstone shareholding will go into foreign ownership? That is what Treasury says in its briefing to the Government.  
This was a zero Budget: zero extra spending zero contribution to growth zero vision and zero hope. The only thing that it will continue to do is to send New Zealanders the 1000 a week who are leaving out of this country and into Australia. One school in my electorate which was mentioned in the paper this morning Wesley Intermediate School has lost 14 percent of its roll in the last year to Australia. This Government has failed this Budget is a loser and we are seeing the last term of this National Government.