Donnelly Brian: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
Donnelly Brian: Estimates Debate — In Committee 
[Volume:627;Page:22150] 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY (NZ First) 
: 
 Firstly I tell the previous speaker Lynne Pillay that in fact the extra funding this Government has put into special education is miserly compared with the increased amounts that the New Zealand First - National coalition put into the 1997 and 1998 Budgets. Secondly I say to the Minister that it was a good launch today but that I am the one education spokesperson who genuinely can give a guarantee to the people there that following the election that strategy will be continued. Perhaps it would have been good if the Minister had told people where the $30 million of building money that he has taken out of the code development funding has gone. That would have helped. Nevertheless it was a very good launch. 
I say to the people who are listening to these proceedings that out on the hustings I keep hearing National Party candidates and members say that they are really indignant about the burgeoning bureaucracy that has formed under this particular administration. They often refer to education—they use education as an example of that. People hear the story that 2000 extra bureaucrats are working for the Ministry of Education. I say that those Nats are being fairly loose with the truth. The reality is that the Special Education Service which used to include speech therapists psychologists and all those things was absorbed into the ministry and it had 1600 people. The Nats call them unnecessary bureaucrats and say they will cut them. They say they will cut all those bureaucrats so we will not have psychologists and the people who work in special education. Other people were absorbed into the ministry from Early Childhood Development. There had been a duplication of services and for efficiency gains that group was put back into the ministry. 
Really in this case National needs to be honest with the people it is trying to portray that story to. I have had a look at what is included in the $423 million increase for education in this Budget and at what has actually gone towards what we may call bureaucrats: those responsible for the administration of regulations the administration of education sector resourcing ministerial services policy advice and all those sorts of things. The total increase is $26.7 million—the funding has gone from $227 million to $253.7 million. In most of the areas there has been no increase at all or there has been a reduction. The marked increase is in the provision of information funding for which has jumped from $45.9 million to $61.7 million. 
Then we can look at what comes out of that output class. What is it? It is work arising from the curriculum stocktake—and National would stop that. That work is critical. In fact the stocktake was set in place by the previous National Government. It is work on the development of an Internet-capable assessment tool—that refers to asTTle one of the finest assessment tools that has been developed in the whole world. Will National cut that? It will cut the implementation of an education information programme for families and communities. There is work on effective teaching initiatives and initiatives for adult literacy. When we really look at what National is talking about we see we have to ask some very serious questions. Listeners should not be sucked in by National’s spin and National should be a lot more honest with the people out in the electorates. 
However what the public should be concerned about—and this is something the Hon Bill English referred to—is the  
Education Sector Review 
. The problem is not one of the numbers that have been exposed through that review but of the actual quality and operation of the bureaucracy. That is a really damning report. I do not think that the Minister can be very proud of the report. It demonstrates a whole pile of things. It demonstrates the real reason why Simon Power rolls his eyes every time the education bureaucrats come to the Education and Science Committee and start to give off all their verbiage. 
Simon Power 
: I frown you know. 
Hon BRIAN DONNELLY 
: Oh no. I say to Mr Power that there is a distinctive rolling of his eyes. The report shows a total non-alignment of the different agencies and a lack of progress towards any goals established by the present Government. It questions the leadership in the sector and asks some very serious things as Bill English said. It states that things are so bad that the agencies should not be realigned at this point in time because we have to get things on track. It states that the agencies do not listen effectively. That is what we have continually heard from submitters and stakeholders at the select committee—they say that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in particular does not listen. In general the agencies do not have the essential capability and let us face it that has been the Minister’s responsibility for almost 6 years now. His own  
Education Sector Review 
 states that the education agencies do not have the essential capability at the level required to support the magnitude of the changes that this Government has required of them. 
No one else but this Government can be blamed for that. The present Government has to be blamed for saying that those were the changes it wanted to have put in place but for not putting in place the bureaucratic resources or the capacity for lining things up in a way that would make them happen.