Hipkins Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
Hipkins Chris: Debate on Prime Minister’s Statement 
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CHRIS HIPKINS (Labour—Rimutaka) 
: 
 I begin my remarks today by paying tribute to the 40000 New Zealanders who through no fault of their own found themselves joining the unemployment benefit ranks last year—40000 extra New Zealanders. They are real people who previously had real jobs. They have real families real homes and real mortgages. Too often in this House when we talk about unemployment we talk about numbers. We saw that with John Key last year when he said that he was happy with the increase in unemployment rates last year given the economic conditions. I do not think that anybody should ever be happy with an increase in unemployment rates. I pay tribute to those 40000 New Zealanders for the work that they have done and the work that they are doing to try to get themselves back into work. 
I pick up a point that Jo Goodhew made before. She talked about the fact that those who can work should work. Well the news is that they can work and they should work but there are no jobs for them. If there were jobs for them then they would be working. Three thousand people lined up outside a Countdown supermarket to apply for 150 jobs—3000 people want to work in those 150 jobs yet this National Government is looking down on the people who are unemployed and telling them that they need to lift their game. It is doing nothing to create the type of environment where there are real jobs for them to get into. It is all very well to say that those who can work should work but if there are no jobs then they have no choice. This National Government talks a lot about choice but there are no choices for people who are on the unemployment benefit if there are no jobs for them to go to. What is this Government doing about creating jobs? It is doing very very little. 
I also acknowledge those elderly people who have found that their home help has been cut in the past year and those people who previously undertook night classes and who have found that those classes have been taken away from them. I acknowledge the low-income earners who have found that the tax cuts promised to them at the last election were taken away by the National Government last year. I also acknowledge our police force which has found that its police cars have been taken away by the National Government whose members said before the election that they were pro-police. This Government has taken its eye off the ball already. It has already taken its eye off the ball and it has no vision for New Zealand. 
John Key’s speech was all sizzle and no sausage. There was absolutely no substance to John Key’s hollow rhetoric about aspiration for New Zealand. It was a regurgitated list of announcements that National had already made last year. There was nothing in there to give New Zealanders hope that the future will be better. As Tom Scott pointed out in his cartoon this morning the message to New Zealanders who want to catch up with the wages in Australia is that they should just move there. If any New Zealanders want to earn the types of wages that people are earning in Australia the message from this National Government is that they should get on a plane and go there. They should join the Australians because this Government has no plan to lift wages in New Zealand. In fact the best thing that this Government can promise is that it will increase the price of a basket of groceries when people go to the supermarket. It will increase the price of a visit to the doctor. It will increase the price of day-to-day living for ordinary New Zealanders so that it can give tax cuts to those at the top of the heap to those who earn the most money. It is doing that so that John Key can get a big fat tax cut and so that the chief executive of Telecom can get a big fat tax cut. That is what this Government wants to do. It wants to increase the cost of day-to-day living for ordinary New Zealanders so that it can give tax cuts to those at the top of the heap. I do not think any New Zealander should look forward to that. I do not think it will give any New Zealander hope for a better future. It does not deliver on John Key’s promise to be ambitious for New Zealand. 
I will talk mostly about John Key’s other big idea in his speech which is national standards in education. The Government’s plan for education appears to amount to little more than turning teachers and parents against each other. The National Government’s goal to lift standards in education is to completely destroy any relationship of trust between teachers and parents and to create the impression in all parents that teachers are simply out to rort the system and that they are not there for the good of the kids. It wants parents to think that teachers are out there to hoodwink parents and to pull the wool over parents’ eyes. Well I have news for the Government. I visited every single school in my electorate during last year. I spoke to all of the primary teachers in their staffrooms. Having visited every primary school in my electorate I did not find one single teacher who thinks that having national standards is a good idea. Every single teacher whom I spoke to thinks that it is a bad idea and that it will actually lead to worse outcomes for the kids. 
Ultimately that is what this should be about: what is best for the kids not what sounds best on a bumper sticker which is all the Government really cares about when it talks about national standards. It does not really care about the research. What does the research the evidence say about what works? The research is from people like John Hattie whom John Key used to hold up as a shining example and whom he used to listen to. John Hattie thinks that the national standards policy is a bad idea. He thinks that it is a bad idea and that it is badly implemented. Anne Tolley is shaking her head. She clearly has not been listening. This Government does not listen to the experts because Anne Tolley’s superior knowledge of all matters to do with education is apparently far more beneficial—according to this National Government—than evidence put together through tested examples through tried and true examples and through careful research! 
I know that there are kids in our schools who need to do better—absolutely. We have to focus on them and we need to focus on the quality of teaching. We need to focus on putting more resources into the kids who are not doing very well. But as my colleague Kelvin Davis has said so many times before weighing the pig over and over again will not make the pig fatter; giving the pig more food will make it fatter. This Government is doing nothing to do with that. Instead it is spending millions of dollars on a massive public relations exercise to promote the National Party. It is spending millions of dollars on little flyers with the National Party logo on them and putting them into people’s letterboxes to tell them that national standards are a good idea. Parents are wising up to it. They are talking to the teachers sitting down with them and realising that these national standards add nothing. They do not actually improve the quality of education; they do not tell them anything that a good sit-down and a discussion with their kid’s teacher could not tell them already. In fact what they do is narrow the scope of what kids will be focused on and what kids will be learning in school. 
Hon Steve Chadwick 
: Self-paced learning—gone. 
CHRIS HIPKINS 
: Self-paced learning will be gone. It is a one-size-fits-all model that is designed to drive out creativity and innovation from our schools. It is designed on the assumption that every kid learns at the same rate but we know that they do not. All the evidence tells us that different kids learn at different rates yet the Government is turning its back on all of that evidence. 
The Government seems to have ignored the fact that some of our most innovative people and some of our most successful entrepreneurs were driven away by the one-size-fits-all education system. A lot of our most innovative people did not actually make it through the education system because it was such a one-size-fits-all education system. The Government wants to exacerbate that problem with its national standards policy. It has no comprehension of what it will actually take to lift student achievement which is a focus on quality teachers and a focus on giving teachers the resources and the acknowledgment that they require. The Government’s launching of a $20 million - plus campaign up and down the country to tell teachers that they are rubbish and not doing a good job will not do that. To somehow think that by telling parents that they should distrust the teachers in their school and that the teachers are not giving them the information they should get we will raise the standard of education in our schools is just rubbish. Yet that is what this Government is focused on. 
John Key’s speech to Parliament yesterday was simply a rehash of announcements from last year. It contained no new ideas and it contained no hope for the future—no real agenda to catch up with Australia. To conclude I say that I can find one example of where the National Government has caught up with Australia. We had a much lower unemployment rate than Australia did before National came into Government and now we have a much higher rate than Australia. It caught up with Australia on only one measure: we now have more unemployed people.