Delahunty Catherine: Budget DebateText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeDelahunty Catherine: Budget Debate[Sitting date: 20 May 2014. Volume:699;Page:18151. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]CATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green):Tēnā koe Mr Assistant Speaker.Tēnā koutou e te Whare. I would like to follow on from the previous speaker Simon O’Connor who evoked a Dickensian universe which is somehow suitable given what the Government’s Budget does to beneficiary families by ignoring their needs. Now is the winter of our discontent and the Budget has not relieved it for many people. It was as I think one educator described it underwhelming. I think that is quite a good description. But we can be grateful that we are not in Australia under Tony Abbott.In the last couple of weeks I have been visiting many schools and communities in between listening to submissions on the Education Council of Aotearoa New Zealand Bill and that is a bizarre experience on its own. That bill is about creating a professional body without involving actual professionals on it when it is about them. I have been asking parents teachers and principals from Invercargill to Whangarei about their views on the money that has been confirmed in the Budget—it was not news; we knew that there was going to be $359 million spent on executive principals and expert teachers etc.—and asking them what they feel about it.What was interesting was that nobody was opposed to professional pathways for teachers improving schools and collaboration—not at all. They had very nuanced ideas. But all of them were dubious about the idea of a principal spending 2 days a week in 10 different schools instead of in their own schools. I think that principals in the mainly decile 1 schools that I visited realise that their schools are very dependent on their leadership and it is important that they are there. They are not against valuing and enhancing the profession but interestingly virtually everybody said that if we are going spend $359 million the top priority is dealing with inequality.I guess it would be no surprise in a decile 1 school that its top priority is the fact that their children are sometimes coming to school without food and with inadequate clothing and with transience from school to school being a major issue. I talked to two principals who said that children are bouncing back between their two schools as their parents lose housing and this is in the supposedly wealthy city of Tauranga.What these principals told me was that they are all for improving the education system but let us make it equitable so that we can improve it. Without equity we have no improvement. What they talked about was the fact that if you are going to spend a large sum of money they would love to see school support staff paid a living wage from a centralised fund rather than from their desperately stretched operations grants. Yes they were grateful that the operations grant had a small amount put into it that would just keep up with inflation—Hon Hekia Parata: Well it was ahead of CPI actually.CATHERINE DELAHUNTY: —actually it would just keep up—but they would rather see school support staff properly paid a living wage and more of them because then all children all parents and all teachers will be able to work together on improving learning. School support staff do not support only vulnerable children with learning disabilities; they also support teachers by allowing them to then focus on other children.There is a real logic to what these principals and teachers were saying about the necessity of putting money into the issues of equity first. They were not at all negative about the idea of collaboration. They want to collaborate but they are collaborating right now around addressing extreme poverty in some of their communities. Many of these decile 1 schools are fantastic schools. I am so impressed with these schools and especially with their commitment to Te Reo Māori and their commitment to culture. The struggle that they have is that in some schools virtually every single child is a special-needs child because they do not have enough food on the table and they do not have enough money in the home for that child to be able to participate fully in school life. That is an indictment on any Government. It is an indictment on all of us.What I would like to talk about is the Greens’ good idea. Our good idea is to focus that money instead—which is $100 million and a lot less than $359 million or $800 million—on making schools the hubs of our communities: giving a school lunch to all children in decile 1 to 4 schools; making sure that they can have out-of-school care and recreation and after-school holiday care programmes for free; having a schools coordinator to coordinate programmes that will engage parents with the school and help the school meet the parents’ needs for services; and building a positive model based on schools like Victory and other schools which have succeeded in changing the conditions for their students not through some expert external process but through an internal community-building process. That is the positive solution and that is where the money should go. Kia oratātou.