Lubeck MarjaMARJA LUBECK (Labour): Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm very privileged to take a call on the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. The message from the Opposition is clear—if it's not good enough then better to not do anything at all—and that is something that we've seen from them very much over the last nine years. There's been nine years of neglect and basically they're continuing that narrative: Let's just do nothing. It wasn't bad enough." So I am proud to be part of a Government that is tackling the big long-term challenges facing this country and one of the things that we are doing here as we have heard is that kids have missed opportunities for education and we are tackling that. What this bill does is it actually acknowledges that child wellbeing and the ability to become the best you can be and to get the best out of life is linked to educational outcomes in life. So with this bill families of nearly half a million children at 1700 schools will benefit from no longer having to pay school donations. So why on earth anybody would vote against such a bill is an absolute mystery to me. This bill is supporting the implementation of the school donations—$150 per student. There are some conditions attached to it with one of them being that schools shouldn't lie but we are not assuming schools will do that. The Opposition seem to think that schools are dishonest and that boards will lie to try to get the funding and still get donations—well no. We believe that people will do the right thing because this is actually a really good opportunity for kids and parents to get ahead in education. Just very quickly on our select committee process: we received 138 submissions on this bill and we heard four oral submissions and a lot of those submissions related to the scope of the voluntary payments from parents that boards would be prevented from requesting under this bill. We've heard from the Minister of Education already that one of those was about camp payments and that will be addressed in the next stage so I won't talk about anything more. I do want to mention something that NZEI talked to us about. They spoke about the right to free education. They spoke about the very creative idea they believe that sits behind this particular bill. They also said that the levies had become an intolerable burden and an embarrassment and when it comes to an embarrassment it is about the poor children that are missing out because the parents can't afford the donations and then they are excluded—and that was a very good submission from Emma Pearce. Emma Pearce said that "This is a sensible solution to the problem of families not being able to afford the donation or some families paying in and others don't and the child being singled out or excluded from additional activities if their parents haven't paid the Donation." Now we don't believe that is correct—we don't believe that people should be denied the opportunity to participate. This bill is working on that equality and trying to bring many more opportunities together. So once again we are building a New Zealand that we all can be proud of. We know that there is a lot to do. We know it can't all be fixed overnight but we've started to address those neglected problems of the past and we're getting on with the job under the brilliant leadership of course of our Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you Madam Speaker."