Mackey Moana: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
Mackey Moana: Financial Review Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:637;Page:7914] 
MOANA MACKEY (Labour) 
: 
 I want to point out to the member who has just resumed her seat Paula Bennett that she could just have tabled all those letters then maybe spent part of her 5 minutes actually telling us what National would do with the 20 free hours policy that will be in place should it—perish the thought—ever become the Government. 
Paula Bennett 
: You can’t dis a policy that hasn’t been implemented! 
MOANA MACKEY 
: I say to Ms Paula Bennett that I am happy to take a few seconds out of my speech to explain it. By the next election this policy will be implemented and I want to know what the National Party would do with it. National members should not just tote out the standard line they have all been told to give in caucus which is that it is not policy yet. They should tell us what National would do should it become the Government in 2008 lest we have another series of speeches from National members who waste the time of this Committee by simply reading out letters that could have been tabled. We are all very keen to know what National’s position is. Its members are all very concerned that there might be children in this country who miss out on this policy yet at the same time they say they do not agree with this policy. They do not seem to notice the contradiction. 
Contradictions have become just a matter of course in the National Party at the moment. Its leader John Key contradicts himself from supplementary question to supplementary question so it probably should not surprise us in this Chamber that those members cannot get their key line straight on this 20 free hours policy either. 
I point out to the National Party that at the last election its policy was about tax credits. That party’s answer to everything is tax. Under them people could get a tax rebate for anything—and it was not just education; it was babysitting services. That is great but what about those families that cannot afford to pay upfront—families that since the last election the National Party apparently now cares about? What about those families that cannot afford to pay upfront for early childhood services? They miss out under National’s policy because all that National cares about is those few who can afford to pay at the top and all those families who are traditional National Party supporters. Again that contradicts its line now that it cares about all those families in New Zealand who struggle. 
Well National has never cared about them before. National does not put in place any policies that actually support such families. The only difference now is that its members go around hoping that if they say the right thing—quietly so that hopefully the media do not pick up on what they say and report it widely—they might get individual votes. But then at the election of course they will come back with a policy that will benefit the few and not the many which is what we have come to expect. 
That is not what this Labour-led Government believes in. This Labour Government wants to find a policy that works for everyone. We do not cop out just because it is difficult and take the path of least resistance. The vision of this Labour-led Government is for quality early childhood education for 3 and 4-year-olds in New Zealand. We never said that it was going to be easy; we never used that as an excuse to go about enforcing policies that once again benefit the few and not the many. That is always National’s excuse. That is always its excuse for not bringing in policies that will be evenly spread around the entire community in particular those sectors of the community that desperately need access to quality early childhood education. 
The Education and Science Committee is doing an inquiry at the moment about children who seem to fall behind in the system. I have no doubt that when we look at its results we will find that a small percentage of kids do not engage in any early childhood education whatsoever and that they will not under any of the policies that National puts up either. At the end of the day I do not think that the National Party really cares. Despite its members saying that they want to appeal to people as being a softer kinder more caring Government they simply do not put up their policies. I would love to see a U-turn on this policy just as we have seen—or are about to see—on housing. 
At the end of the day when it comes to education for our 3 and 4-year-olds only a Labour-led Government will deliver to all the kids in this country—not to just a few whose rich families support the National Party but to all of them. When that happens maybe we will see fewer problems down the line with literacy and numeracy—problems that this Government is addressing along with all the other programmes that are going through. 
The other day I went to Whakatane High School and was shown the results it has achieved from the Te Kotahitanga programme that is being rolled out. The principal wanted me to say in the Chamber what a fabulous job Whakatane High School is doing at being above the National average on many of the indicators for a decile school at its level. I gave him the assurance that I would continue to feed that back to the Minister so that he would know which programmes were going well. This is one that has been going well and it is one we have looked at in our inquiry. The Labour Government will not be like the National Government and talk about decile 1 schools being awash with cash which we can only imagine means that under a National Government that cash will go. Of course these are the kids who apparently those members opposite say they now care about in these schools. I do not buy it.