Coddington Deborah: Education (Disestablishment of Early Childhood Development Board) Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
Coddington Deborah: Education (Disestablishment of Early Childhood Development Board) Amendment Bill — Second Reading Instruction to Committee In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:616;Page:12128] 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON (ACT) 
: 
 The ACT party will vote against this bill because we think the Minister has done a really bad job in bringing this bill to the House a year after he closed down the Early Childhood Development Board and brought it into the ministry. As ACT said in the minority report that is totally unparliamentary and unconstitutional. The Hon Brian Donnelly talked about the benefits of this legislation in that it would get rid of the duplication of taxpayers’ money. That is exactly what it will not do because when the Minister announced he was bringing the board into the Ministry of Education he said that no jobs would be lost. We will still have a bloated bureaucracy and more people employed even though in April last year the chairman of the Early Childhood Development Board Michael Morris told the Education and Science Committee that contrary to what the Minister had said he did expect some staff redundancies. To date there has not been any. 
There has also been little if any consultation with the early childhood sector. The New Zealand Education Institute was not consulted and the Early Childhood Council—the biggest organisation that represents those who work in the early childhood sector—has not been consulted at all. It demonstrates once again this Government’s contempt for that most important area of children’s education the under-6-year-olds. It gets the least amount of money from the education budget is pushed around and ignored and is not consulted with at all. 
As I said the reduction to one agency will enable the Minister to exercise control from Wellington which he loves doing. In a speech to the early childhood symposium in July last year he grandly announced that his 10-year plan for early childhood education  
Pathways to the Future: Nga Huarahi Arataki 
 was: “…why I decided to integrate Early Childhood Development (ECD) into the Ministry of Education. The expertise of the Early Childhood Development agency staff will be critical to work on Pathways to the Future.” 
Pathways to the Future: Nga Huarahi Arataki 
 was going to focus on the needs of groups with lower participation rates. It would increase participation and quality and promote collaborative relationships. What has it done? It has produced a rort of bounty hunters. Talk about duplication of funding! I have lists and lists of community agencies revealed through parliamentary questions where two or three of them are owned by the one organisation claiming several times for the same children. What did “participation” mean as championed by the Minister bringing Early Childhood Development into the ministry under this legislation? It meant that those organisations cruised around the neighbourhood looking for children signing them up and collecting the money. The bounty on those children’s heads was $1000 per child. No checks were done to see whether they remained enrolled for more than 3 months—or even up to 3 months. No cross-checks were done to see whether those children were enrolled in two or three different centres or to see whether they actually existed. It was just a feel-good look-good  
Pathways to the Future: Nga Huarahi Arataki 
. It even had a feel-good look-good name. 
The ministry had a meeting in Auckland last week as a result of the  
New Zealand Herald’s 
 story on the bounty hunters. It decided to “facilitate dialogue” to try to stop the rort from carrying on. The amount of money will be reduced by $200 per child so the agencies will get $800 instead of $200. Audits will mean that 10 percent of enrolments will be audited. I suppose that is an improvement from none being audited but why 10 percent only? Why not audit all of them? The targets of greater participation that the Minister boasted about when he announced the disestablishment of the Early Childhood Development Board will not now be met because the contracts have all been frozen.  
I say to the member on the other side of the House who stood up and talked about how wonderful that was for his people who would be having more of their children participating in early childhood education that it will actually not happen at all. Why? Because it has been stuffed up by this Minister not keeping control of what has been going on. Now as a result of those bounty hunters all the contracts have been frozen. The targets for 2003-04—1278 Maori and 450 Pacific children enrolled—will not be met and the Minister has admitted they will not be met. At the Ministry of Education’s meeting last week officials admitted that the eligibility criterion is for people to have some Maori or Pacific Island ancestry. When asked whether they were considering extending it to other ethnic groups shown as being under-represented in early childhood education such as Asian they did not have an answer. That is another example of this Government’s race-based policy when it keeps insisting that its policy is based on need.  
There are people in poor areas who cannot afford the fees of early childhood education. They do not send their children to such centres. Why do they miss out? The reason is that their children are not of Maori or Pacific Island ancestry. That is the only way people can get help from this Government in terms of getting their children into early childhood education. What will the Government do? It is going to set up a discretionary grants scheme which will mean that organisations that no bank would formerly lend money to will now get taxpayer money for new buildings in areas where there are already vacancies in existing providers. 
Mr SPEAKER 
: The member will come back to the bill please. 
DEBORAH CODDINGTON 
: I am. That is why we are voting against it. The Minister brought in this bill to increase participation in early childhood education. That is what he said when he announced it and that is why I am showing why we will not vote for it. It is not increasing participation in early childhood education. It is not even increasing it for Maori and Pacific children because the Minister stuffed it up so much. Instead what will he do? He will give out taxpayer money to build more buildings in areas where parents cannot even afford to send their children to early childhood education because that Minister has raised the standards for qualifications and brought in pay parity for kindergarten teachers. That is why we are voting against the bill.