Rurawhe Adrian: Annual Review Debate — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRurawhe Adrian: Annual Review Debate — In Committee[Sitting date: 13 April 2016. Volume:713;Page:10515. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]ADRIAN RURAWHE (Labour—Te Tai Hauāuru): Tēnā koe Mr Chair. Thank you for this opportunity to speak in this debate. In the Ministry of Education’s annual report Māori are referenced 108 times which is quite a lot. I think in carrying on and contributing to this debate it would be remiss of us not to acknowledge that. One of the big issues—and I support what my colleague Chris Hipkins has said around the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA)—is that although the NCEA results for Māori have improved as it says in the report “disparity of achievement remains a challenge.” There are a number of things that the Ministry of Education has been doing. For example it has been working with 11 iwi which have worked with around a hundred whānau each to develop Whānau Education Action Plans.My contribution to this debate around that is that that is great—but there are a lot more families out there and I think that maybe we are just tinkering around the edges a bit. There needs to be a lot more engagement at that level for it to be successful. I think the really important thing also is that plans are great but if you have not got the means to implement them then they become just ideas on a piece of paper. So we need to look at how that can be done and from my point of view I support what Chris Hipkins has just said: free post-school education would be a huge contributor to making those plans work for our people.Over the years we have had this thing called historical and intergenerational trauma. That means the population today—this generation—has inherited the hurt and the problems that have been passed down generation by generation. Unfortunately we let that impact on our lives far too much. I think it is more important for us to acknowledge that and to actually put things in place that address those issues. That is why I stand to say that the 305000 children living in poverty today are a huge barrier—and a huge number of those children are Māori children—to overcome in an education system that should be addressing all of those issues for all children.Today we heard the opinion of the Deputy Prime Minister around a cohort of people. I would suggest that a number of those people are brown people. And to systematically write them off as being “pretty damned hopeless” is absolutely not good enough. No matter how you characterise that group there is no doubt about it that Māori and Pasifika make up a huge part of that group. I am really disappointed that this House has accepted the answers from the Deputy Prime Minister around that because it is actually not good enough. I think that there are things that need to be addressed within the education sector—although there are a number of programmes within this annual report that deserve credit—and I would say that it needs to go a lot wider and it needs to include a lot more people for them to be successful.Unless we make major major changes to the way that we deliver education in New Zealand then these results here as part of the annual report will continue and that gap will just move incrementally along with everyone else. So we might make some gains but unless we address that fundamental issue I think that we are doing the future generations a disservice. Thank you.