Willis Nicola; Robertson Grant; Dean JacquiNICOLA WILLIS (National): I want to ask the finance Minister about the fiscal bomb that went off today the little land mine in the Budget. There are a lot I'm told and that was the one relating to the teacher pay settlement. How is it that the Government so under-provisioned the funding available in this Budget for the teacher pay settlement that today we are told that the finance Minister has resorted to raiding future Budgets in order to fund a settlement that should have happened last year? How is it that so much money has gone into backroom bureaucracy and wasteful money that the finance Minister hadn't provisioned enough for a decent teacher pay settlement? And would he care to explain to this committee why it is only today that the education Minister saw fit to say Oh well look you know there's $300 or $400 million worth of savings we can find overnight down the back of the Ministry of Education's couch." So wasteful are they that it's just that easy to find it. And where exactly does the Minister think the sacrifice will come in relation to the rating of future Budgets that has had to go on to fund that settlement? Could he outline for us his thoughts on that? And could he rule out for the committee that there aren't any other ticking time bombs in this Budget that will go off the way the teacher settlement one did today?Hon GRANT ROBERTSON (Minister of Finance): So to answer the member's question about the arbitration process delivered to the Government and the need to find about another $660 million around $3 billion had been provisioned for the teacher and principal bargaining. I think that was a reasonable provision at the beginning of that exercise and we continued to monitor where it was. It's a negotiation. So we continued to negotiate in good faith but we reached a point—and this I think is a very interesting question for the member—where we along with parents students and teachers themselves felt like we were at an impasse. I did not want to see another day of children's education lost. Through COVID we had seen enough disruption—Nicola Willis: You locked down Auckland.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: Ho! There it is the great ultimate revisionist history from the National Party! Suddenly the lockdowns were wrong. All the hindsight starts coming out now doesn't it? Well here's the thing: what we have managed to deliver in terms of teacher pay vastly—vastly—outsizes what the National Party did over 9 years. Once again we are making up for the failure of the National Government to invest properly in our education system and to invest properly in our teachers. What I said when I met with teachers was that the offer that was on the table was the extent of the money that we had. So therefore arbitration happens and we have to go and find more. And we did. We went and we went back and there are things now that won't happen that had been set to happen—some of those around what's called the bank staffing hours that schools are able to draw on; some of that is around further work on the public-private partnerships that we—Nicola Willis: Taking from the front line.Hon GRANT ROBERTSON: No not at all because that's the point. The front line are the teachers. And once again what we're hearing from Nicola Willis is "Don't care about them don't care about the parents don't care about education." That's the record of National. Today we have managed to find ourselves in a position where we can do this. It will cause some issues in the broader delivery of our education sector. Some of that means the Ministry of Education will have to cut back and some of it yes comes from looking at Budget 2024. In every Budget there is an allocation for cost pressures into the future and we have said this is the priority for that—in education. This will lead to some tough conversations at Budget 2024 but the judgment we have made that our kids getting into the classroom learning and having teachers who are paid well and paid properly is the priority—clearly not for the National Party.CHAIRPERSON (Hon Jacqui Dean): Members the time has come for me to leave the Chair for the dinner break and the House will resume in committee at 7.30 p.m.Sitting suspended from 6 p.m. to 7.30 p.m."