Carter Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Carter Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
[Volume:660;Page:8893] 
Hon CHRIS CARTER (Labour—Te Atatu) 
: 
 I am not ashamed that the previous Labour Government ran surpluses because it used that money wisely to invest in the future of our country. Unlike the existing Government we had a plan. Under Labour we had the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD. That was part of our plan. It was by means of active engagement on the part of the Government that that was achieved. Was that not an amazing achievement in today’s world? Under the previous Labour Government we had the lowest unemployment rate in the OECD. We had a lower unemployment rate than Australia’s. Today after 15 months of the National Government we have a higher percentage of people unemployed than Australia does. I am not ashamed that we in the previous Labour Government used that surplus to pay off our Government debt. We had by the time we left office the lowest per capita Government debt in the developed world. 
I am not ashamed that we doubled education spending. We put it into everything ranging from an enormous boost of $1 billion that went into early childhood education developments over 9 years to interest-free student loans. I think something like 22 schools were built in the last year that I was the Minister of Education. It was an astonishing investment in education which I will talk a little more about in a minute. We doubled health spending. We focused it at the grassroots. Primary health care was a major focus of the doubling of that money from the surplus about which we were just criticised by the previous speaker Georgina te Heuheu for running up under the Labour Government. That surplus was used and invested for the benefit of our country. I am not ashamed that an extra $1 billion went into State housing. It went into income-related rents— 
John Hayes 
: Not in my electorate. 
Hon CHRIS CARTER 
: Oh did I hear that it did not go into that member’s electorate? That simply would not be true I say to Mr Hayes. Everywhere the State housing stock the largest asset that the Government owns was expanded and modernised. Most important of all we provided affordable rents to the poorest New Zealanders which lifted up the quality of their lives and the quality of their children’s lives. That had direct impacts on their health as well as their lifestyles. 
Those are things that I am very proud of. No Government would be ashamed of having made that sort of investment in the future of our country. 
The member Georgina te Heuheu kept making reference to Maori. Indeed it was under the previous Labour Government that Maori Television was set up and a whole host of other culturally and practically related things: employment education health and income-related rents for State houses 60 percent of whose tenants are Maori. Those things had a direct and positive impact on the lives of Maori people. 
We heard a lot in the Prime Minister’s statement about national standards. What a joke! I was the Minister of Education before the election and I think the National members came up with a slogan: national standards. They did not know what it meant. They have done no work on national standards at all. That is obvious because we are still going through the process of trying to discover what they are and how we are to implement them. National came up with a slogan; it sounded very attractive to parents did it not? It said we should make sure that someone’s 5-year-old 7-year-old or 9-year-old had reached a literacy and numeracy standard. Of course if National had bothered to do a bit of investigation it would have found that as the Ministry of Education told it straight after the election we actually already had those standards. They were called the Literacy Learning Progressions and the Numeracy Development Projects. They established a benchmark that each child was measured against. They did not establish league tables. League tables happened in the UK and the USA where schools’ achievement rates were set one against the other. 
All of the experts around the so-called national standards will tell us that they are the wrong way to go in measuring students’ success. We can put aside the whole debunked and ridiculous idea because as I said we already have a record in schools that is available to parents. Under the National Education Guidelines all schools have to report in simple language to parents. That is the other thing National members talked a lot about but actually it was already required to be done and the Education Review Office checked on it. That is interesting. 
One of the interesting things that National seems to love to do is to liberate accountability. One of the first steps it took in its new administration of education was to reduce the amount of checking that went on at schools. Now many primary schools will have children going right through the school without any review by the Education Review Office taking place. So parents actually will now have less ability to find out whether their child is being well educated than they did prior to the election. Under the Labour Government all schools were required to undergo a review by the Education Review Office every 3 years so that the community as well as the teachers could know what sort of job the schools were doing. They could get advice about doing things better and there were better educational outcomes. 
It seems to me that slogans have been used to sabotage what is a world-class education system. You know our education system is not failing; it is succeeding. By any international comparison New Zealand students have the highest the best scores overall in literacy numeracy and science in the whole English-speaking world. There are only a couple of countries Finland and Singapore that beat us in numeracy and literacy. We came best in the world in science. Out of the whole OECD scores those of New Zealand students at age 15 were the best in the world in science. Do members know what this Government has done? It did not want to put any more resources into education so it cut science music and art advisers. They were chucked out; they were all sacked so that the Government could employ a few more literacy and numeracy advisers. Our students are the best in the world in science at 15 years of age but now our schools do not have science advisers and 15 months after the election we still do not know what national standards are or how they will be implemented. 
Schools and principals have asked whether we could have a trial so we could have an evidence-based process to see whether national standards would work. For everything else that we do we have an evidence-based process. We have experts work out a programme and we test it to see whether it is working. We leave that in the hands of specialists. But is that good enough for the current National-ACT Government? Oh no it is not. National came up with a slogan during the election campaign. It did not know what it meant. All that it wanted to do was to push some buttons. I think it is called dog whistling politics whereby it was said that if people voted for National there would be national standards against which children could be measured and the schools would have to tell parents all about that. 
Of course as I said we have an education system that is among the best in the world. People come from all over the world to look at the work we do in literacy and numeracy in this country as well as at that in science and in the creative arts. I constantly dealt with delegations of educational experts who came from overseas to New Zealand. Indeed when I was at the education Ministers’ conference 2 years ago in London the education secretary the top civil servant in Finland the country that came top in literacy and numeracy in the OECD scores said to me that we were doing great things in New Zealand and she wanted to come and have a look. I asked her how things were going in Finland and she said they were not going as well as previously. She told me Finland had just elected a new conservative Government and it was starting to erode the processes. Is that not interesting? The chief bureaucrat not a politician but the top expert in education in Finland told me 2 years ago in London that she was really worried about where Finland’s new conservative Government was going in education. Sadly I am afraid we will have to repeat that advice to Finland now because our standards too will be eroded by the divisive process of so-called national standards. 
I heard the Prime Minister speak the other day. He said we need to get the students at the other end of the school those who are leaving school without sufficient achievement into apprenticeships and trades training—alternative paths for education. Then an amazing flash of déjà vu came to me. I thought of Schools Plus the programme that Labour came up with in its last year in Government. We developed it with the education sector with business with trade unions and with industry. Under that programme students staying at school were to explore different paths of learning and every high school in New Zealand was to expand on its Gateway programme which is its taster programme for work. Students were to have the opportunity to be based at a school and supervised by it but to be out working for maybe 3 or 4 days a week and the very able students were to go into tertiary education but be supervised by the school. Schools Plus was a comprehensive plan that was designed to deal with the tail end of underachievement which every developed country has. We have a smaller rate of underachievement than most other countries but we came up with that plan. 
What happened to the Schools Plus plan? It was ditched in the first month. Silly old Anne Tolley is a total embarrassment to the Government. She has recently been demoted and lost the tertiary education portfolio thank goodness. I cannot wait until she loses the rest of the education portfolio because then education might have a chance. Anne Tolley ditched Schools Plus straight away. She ditched another thing right at the beginning of the process. Labour had done an audit to find sites for new early childhood centres in Auckland as land is very expensive there. Twenty-seven schools put up their hands and said they would like to have an early childhood education centre on their land and the centre could have the land for free. But she cut that as well.