Martin Tracey: Estimates Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Estimates Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 30 July 2013. Volume:692;Page:12088. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First):Kia ora Mr Chair. Thank you for the call. Before I start into my comments about the estimates I just want to pick up on Mr King’s comments with regard to vocational pathways that the reason there has been a drop in young people entering those vocational pathways is a lack of numeracy and literacy skills suggesting that it is our teachers who are failing here. He forgets to mention the 2009 cuts of $17 million down to $2 million which meant that those young people could not attend night school to get support while they continued to do their vocational training.The National Government did once have strong vision around education and it did some fantastic work with the education sector. I am referring to the work that was done by the Rt Hon Lockwood Smith in the sector with regard to the New Zealand Curriculum. There are still glimmers of some of that inside the estimates. One of the areas that the Minister of Education should be commended for and the Government should be commended for is $14 million being set aside to support boards of trustees. There is some concern however having seen an internal review document of the School Trustees Association that that $14 million should be used quite rightly to support the improvement of professional development delivery to boards of trustees and to support them in their work but it should not be used as a way to tie the School Trustees Association closer to the Government and therefore be dependent upon its whims as the association seeks to remain independent and represent the views of boards of trustees on education in this country.This Government has been very quick to pat itself on the back and to tell the New Zealand public again and again and again that it is investing more than ever before into the education budget and this may well be true. However it is also highly likely that this Government currently presides over the greatest waste of valuable education dollars New Zealand has ever seen and I would warn the New Zealand public about listening to anybody who uses statistics as there is a great saying “Fill the figures to fit the facts”.Between the 2009-10 and 2012-13 financial years close to $20 million of the estimates was expended on national standards. In these estimates—the 2013-14 estimates—another $8.5 million will be spent on those unnecessary and flawed national standards in an attempt to make them relevant. That is another $8.5 million of taxpayers’ money to support a façade of a crisis in data collection perpetrated on the parents of New Zealand by the National Party during the 2008 election campaign. So that takes us close to $30 million on an untested and an unnecessary set of bureaucratic markers that tell us absolutely nothing we did not already know. Our schools knew those children in the 1 to 3stanine areas of the bell curve—the tail of underachievement. The Minister still uses that term because we knew it then we know it now and $30 million has not changed that fact.But wait there is more. In Budget 2013 there is another $7.5 million to be spent on the introduction of thePaCT tool—a tool that this Government hopes will distract the education sector and New Zealand parents long enough to delay the hard questions around spending until after the 2014 election. If we add this to the leaching away of education dollars on unproven and unnecessary data collection processes and if we add to this the $19 million to be wasted on charter schools wasted on investing in the assets and profits of private trusts and individuals—if we add all those numbers together—we find a figure of close to $50 million. That is $50 million of education money wasted. That is close to 50 million of taxpayers’ dollars that have never touched a single New Zealand child. At the same time we have children sitting in schools in Newlands in schools on theKāpiti coast in reality in schools all over New Zealand that are unable to gain State funding for literacy support while at the same time the bureaucracy around national standards grows daily. That is what the teachers and the schools and the Opposition try to get across to the public of New Zealand: do not accept the rhetoric that is given to you that the collection of data makes a single difference for a child sitting in your school. It does not make a single difference for your child.