Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
Mallard Trevor: Education Amendment Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:662;Page:10640] 
Hon TREVOR MALLARD (Labour—Hutt South) 
: 
 There is a saying that an old friend of mine used with me on one occasion and it went something like: “Slow horses fast women and lost causes.” I think this matter might be in the last category but it is important to put on the record the Opposition’s reason for voting in this way. I will directly address the chief Government whip as I do this and indicate to him that there will be four or five further opportunities this year when the Government introduces bills around the Public Finance Act validation and matters that are normally uncontroversial and that the Opposition would normally support and not insist on a Committee stage for. But we will keep bringing in amendments to this effect in relation to finance bills until the Government sees sense in this area. 
There is actually not a lot of debate around the Education Amendment Bill. Most of what the Minister of Education the Hon Anne Tolley says is true: the mistakes occurred in my time as Minister; the recommendations to the board occurred in my time and probably in the time of David Benson-Pope. The matter was considered by Mr Maharey and Mr Chris Carter and neither of them made the decision that I think is appropriate. 
The Minister is right that three other schools are in this category: Kaikorai Cashmere and Rangiora. This amendment does not take account of those schools but I make the point that their issues could be solved by the Minister if she chose to do so. The Minister made some points about the costing and size of the school facility. She said that the facility is 60 percent larger than a school of that size would normally have and she is absolutely right but it is a joint school facility for King’s High School and Queen’s High School. It is not a hall for one school; it is a centre for two schools and the Minister left that out. She went on about the costing of the facility and it was expensive. I happen to know quite well a house in south Dunedin which is not very far away from the site of the facility and there is no doubt that it is hard to put in foundations in that area. Because of modern requirements about three-quarters of a million dollars’ worth of slab had to be put down for the facility to be built on and that added to the cost. So we have to take those two factors into account. The Minister spoke about the full cost but unfortunately she got mixed up between building costs and fitted-out costs. She added the fit-out costs into the building costs and was confused on that point as well. 
Notwithstanding all of that as a result of the poor advice given to a previous board by a previous principal we now have a situation whereby a school is paying $4900 every month—not every year but every month—to the Westpac bank when at the same time it has a credit sitting in the ministry. If there was a little bit of flexibility on the part of the Government that credit could be used and it would not cost the taxpayer one extra cent. That money is set aside and ring-fenced for that school. The money is sitting there and the school has indicated that the use of that money would be its highest priority. I think that it is a relatively simple issue. 
I accept that the school made mistakes in my time. I think that the Ministers who followed me took the ministry’s advice in a way that they should not have. I think it is fair to say that some parts of the ministry are more rigid and think less about the quality of education and the purpose of operational funding than others. My view is that on occasion the property division of the ministry can be fairly narrow in its thinking rather than having the flexibility to ask what the best thing is for kids and what best educational outcome can come from the situation. The amount of $4900 is enough for another staff member and enough for a couple of nearly full-time teacher aides to work with kids with disabilities. That amount gives the school the ability to buy five computers every month and to do some routine maintenance. Lots of things from my perspective can add much more to the quality of education at King’s High School than giving $4900 every month to Westpac. I reiterate to Government members opposite that I am not asking the Government to appropriate any extra money. 
The Minister says that that measure does not meet the Public Finance Act requirements but I am now briefed by two experts that it does. She says it is a terrible way to validate expenditure when it has not been properly validated in the past. I went to get a pile of legislation from the library on this issue and I pulled out at random the Appropriation (2007/08 Financial Review) Act 2009—and I emphasise 2009—passed under her Government. The Act validated tens of hundreds of millions of dollars of expenditure. The money was not appropriated; it was spent and validated. 
It is the essence of our constitution that it is the role and the right of Parliament to validate expenditure or to amend its legislation and there is no doubt that a specific amendment like this on a particular issue overrides the Public Finance Act for that issue only. No one should pretend that that is something unusual or does not happen often. As I pick up the legislation I see on page 14 that the Department of Conservation had $44.988 million worth of expenditure validated in this way and the Inland Revenue Department had $123.897 million worth of expenditure validated in this way. I emphasise that the expenditure in respect of education would not normally result in extra expenditure like those examples did. 
In my concluding comments I will say to some of the smaller parties in the Chamber that I appreciate people who come to these things with an open mind. I appreciate Catherine Delahunty who did things very quickly. But I especially appreciate the work that Sir Roger Douglas has done on this matter. Sir Roger Douglas and I very rarely agree on anything controversial. It is not often these days to use the old expression that we go in the lobbies together but I can say that he can work out pretty quickly that something is silly in respect of a Government organisation. He can work out when money meant to be spent in one particular area is being spent on the wrong thing. I appreciate the ACT Party support for this amendment. It is something that we have worked through. Sir Roger Douglas helped to get the wording right so that it met his bill and did the right thing. 
I say to the Maori Party that I am very very disappointed. Kaikorai Valley College is a mid-decile school which for Dunedin is relatively low. It sits in the poorest part of Dunedin.