Norman Russel William: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
Norman Russel William: Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill — In Committee Third Reading 
[Volume:651;Page:617] 
Dr RUSSEL NORMAN (Co-Leader—Green) 
: 
 The question that has to be asked about this Education (National Standards) Amendment Bill is how it will improve educational outcomes which surely should be the purpose of the bill. A bill should not come into the House for purely ideological reasons. There should be some reason one would hope why the bill will actually improve educational outcomes. 
We have quite a lot of information about children who do not go to school or who have very poor outcomes from our education system. One of the things we know most of all is that they live in poverty and they are more likely to be Maori. We know that children who are missing school are more likely to come from difficult backgrounds. 
I am quite interested in the relationship between this bill and the 90-day bill. If a parent is working a couple of part-time jobs in order to pay the bills and he or she gets a new part-time job and finds out that his or her child is truanting from school what choice does that parent have at that point? The choices are either to take some time off work to sort out what is happening because the child is missing school or stay at work. If that parent stays at work and does not deal with the problem of the child not going to school the Government will come in and say “We’re going to whack a $3000 fine on you because your child is missing school.” 
Let us say that the parent decides on the alternative of not going to work and asks the boss for the day off to try to sort out the problem of the child missing school. Let us say that the parent is within the 90-day period where he or she can be sacked at will. That parent knows because of the new legislation that has just been passed that if he or she takes time off work during those 90 days to do something about the child who is truanting from school the employer can sack him or her at will. The employer will say: “Oh that’s one of those useless workers who tries to make sure their child gets an education. I don’t want one of those workers; I will just sack that worker at will.” 
How will fining those workers $3000 help them to deal with the problem in front of them of trying to put food on the table pay the rent while their child is missing school and meet the principal and teachers to find out what the problem is? If they do those things the employer can say “Well you’re obviously not the kind of employee we want in our workplace and we can give you the sack because the National Government has just given us the right to sack people who try to make sure their kids go to school.” Well thanks to the National Government people are caught between a rock and a hard place. 
How does this bill help people who are in those kinds of difficult real-life situations—not pretend ideological situations because let us face it this measure is just an ideological burp—deal with the problem of trying to get their kids to go to school when they are in a 90-day period in a new job? Has the Government thought about how these two pieces of law which it has been ramming through the House—and we are sitting on a Saturday now—might interact when it comes to real people living in the real world who are not sitting on Ministers’ salaries but are actually doing their best by their kids and paying their way? Has the Government thought about how these laws might work together? 
What about the parent who works two jobs because the minimum wage is so low and has kids who are truanting? The fact that the minimum wage is so low puts enormous pressure on parents. These are the real issues faced by parents whose kids are not going to school. They have to have more than one job in order to pay the bills instead of having the time they need to pay attention to their kids. 
If this was a family-friendly Government surely its first priority would be to make sure that parents have enough time to spend with their kids in order to make sure they are not truanting from school. What about the fund to insulate housing that National has now said it is not going ahead with—the $1 billion to help insulate cold damp houses? We know kids get out of the habit of going to school when they get sick. They get sick when they live in cold damp houses. They get glue ear they have poor educational outcomes because they cannot hear what the teacher is saying they get isolated and alienated from their school they do not want to be there and they get sick. What do we do? We could insulate the houses so kids do not get sick so often but instead we say “Oh no that would be bad—we wouldn’t want to do that. Let’s get rid of that billion-dollar fund that was going to insulate houses so kids could actually get to school more often. That might help reduce truancy but we do not want to do that; we’ll get rid of that as well.”