Delahunty CatherineCATHERINE DELAHUNTY (Green): Tēnā koe Mr Deputy Speaker. Kia ora anō e Te Whare Pāremata. I would also like to acknowledge the Minister of Education. I agree that she has been a passionate Minister. I think we have disagreed on virtually everything but I am not disputing her passion and I think that passion is really important in education. There is nothing worse than people who are not interested and do not care but also sometimes passion can do a lot of damage as well. So I think she and I would both agree that we both care but we may not agree. With regard to this bill I just listened very carefully to the Minister's third reading speech and I tried to understand it. It is curious some of the language such as that this bill is driven by parents having choice" which can be translated as meaning "people who already have choice will get more choices'; that there will be "flexibility"—see "people with choices having more choices"—and "personalised and diverse needs of our young people … in real time … fit for purpose". I absolutely do not think that has any meaning whatsoever. I do not think that is what the bill is about and I do not see the point of talking like that to the country because people want the Minister and MPs to talk like human beings. So "real purpose" "fit for time" "personalised"—what? "Whole-of-pathway organised efficiency and effectiveness"? I mean sorry but I think the public deserves some coherence around the education system and this is not it. Perhaps she had to make the stuff up because this bill is actually a bit of a messy omnibus which the Education and Science Committee—and I do respect the members on the select committee—had a big fight about and I think Tracey Martin outlined that very clearly. A couple of things that we disagreed on: one there was no reason for some of these things. Officials could not answer questions about why some of these things were happening—where the demand was—because a lot of the stuff was just something the Government made up for other reasons. And then there was the embarrassing debacle over the Supplementary Order Paper (SOP) around Teach First NZ where the Opposition had to fight tooth and nail to make sure that affected parties like the Post Primary Teachers Association which is heavily involved—not opposing Teach First but heavily involved—actually got heard rather than having this big SOP suddenly dumped on the select committee with the Government pretending that it was nothing to do with the teachers' organisations which actually have to manage the relationships through Teach First. So I do not think this is the crowning glory of the Minister's career or anyone's career. It is a weird bill. It is probably not as bad as the next one in education is going to be to be honest but apparently it is a "whole-of-pathway organised efficiently and effectively". I do not know who for. However maybe all will be revealed. I think it is really important to talk about the word "choices"—such a misused word by the Government. It is its main platform. It is like a "Hands off." "Trust the community." "Everything's fine." "We're on a level playing field." "All people have choices." blah-blah-blah. But if you think about for example the flexible school hours—I have never forgotten meeting a parent who said that she had huge stress being a good parent to her children in school because she was working three jobs and so was her husband. This was in Porirua. They loved that their kids were getting a good education and they had an excellent school but they needed their school to be very predictable because they were already juggling these three jobs each and the constant interchange between them to actually even see each other and do the handover. So mucking around with the structures of the lives of people who do not have the same choices as other people—it is absolutely fine if you are a couple of professionals working from home. I know people who are doing this. You are running a small business from home and managing your lives and you can shoot down to the school at 2 o'clock or 3 o'clock. But it is absolutely not fine when you are on a fine balance to risk that being put out of balance. That is what people are concerned about because those people are already struggling. I do not want to make laws for people who already have multiple choices and privileges. I want to make laws for people who are vulnerable to the variabilities of the world and who need more support and need things to be predictable. Also the Government could not come up with a good reason—because actually lots of schools already have flexible opening hours. I do not know what the problem is. Schools where it has been proven—because actually I would have liked an education bill to be about learning but none of them seem to be about learning. They are always about some kind of governance or ideological privatisation agenda. Actually in some schools the older kids—because we know that older teenagers seem to like to sleep in and stay up late the schools already have adjusted their school hours. That flexibility already exists. So you know do not come and tell us that we need this rubbish. It is not true. And no one could come up with a good reason for it. The Teach First stuff—well I always feel really sorry for qualified people who have come out of 3 years of serious training and then have a debt and then someone comes along and does not have to do that. It does undervalue the importance of what people go through in terms of the serious learning about what education means. I guess that is what I mean by this bill—which is all about governance. It is about flexible hours and having a principal at several schools—again something dreamt up by somebody who sees it as an efficient pathway to organised effectiveness or whatever. It does not seem to be connected with education. Actually we are here on the Education and Science Committee and in this House to talk about learning and what is best for kids but they are not getting a look-in while we are so busy being flexible and full of choice and opportunity. Opportunity in education is nothing to do with the hours of the school or multiple-school principals. It is to do with relationships and the commitment to allowing the New Zealand Curriculum—which is owned to be an excellent curriculum—to be developed and communicated. It is the content that matters and it is the teachers' understanding of what learning is that matters. It is not all this stuff. I am really disappointed that I cannot think of hardly any bill except for the ghastly national standards debacle that has had anything to do with the content of education in my entire 7½ years on the select committee and this bill is another deep disappointment to my passionate soul. So I am sorry that we are going to vote against it but we are. I also want to talk about another rather unfortunate idea in the bill which is that tertiary institutions should run charter schools. Again opportunity is not about imagining that universities are the best capable of teaching in primary schools. So like the Teach First thing where the Government would not rule out primary these charter schools could be primary charter schools run by the universities. Actually that shows that the experiment is not working because it is trying to inveigle the universities—and we did not really get a lot of enthusiasm from most of the universities about this—to come and put forward proposals that at least sound educationally credible because some of the charter school applications have been a disaster and one of the existing schools has fallen apart. Watch this space. But actually I think it is really important that a law about this acknowledges the importance of the difference between tertiary education and what happens at other levels. I am sorry but we in the Greens just do not have confidence that the universities—apart from the fact that we do not believe in having charter schools. It is a rather internationally failed and controversial model that is yet to show benefit to this country let alone to the children—especially the children of Whangaruru. Who cares what happened to them? Where are they? Guess what! I asked and it turns out many of them are back in the State system which was so dreadful. Actually I am a critic of things that happen in the State system but I do not think that charter schools run by universities is the answer. I think we should be strongly critical and strongly innovative but guess what! The review of the innovation qualities of charter schools said that the only innovation of the first nine was in governance structures. That is the only innovation that it could find. Marching is not innovation. That is just prep for the army because you are too scared to look these kids in the eye and say that they have got potential to be all kinds of things not just the cannon fodder of this country's nationhood. So I am actually challenging what this Government is doing particularly for the tertiary institutions. I just do not have faith. Honestly I have heard submissions from some of the academic and convoluted people from the tertiary institutions when we talked about that in various bills and I would not put a 5-year-old in a classroom with these people because they do not know how 5-year-olds learn. They know how to give lectures. That is not education for younger people. It is not even education for anybody actually. Most lecturers are pretty disappointing. There are a few people—brilliant people—who can lecture but there ain't many out there. You know we have all experienced that at university. You never forget the ones who can actually communicate memorably but should they run a school? I do not think so. I do not think that is what professors and universities are best suited to doing. So we are really opposed to that. We are really opposed to this bill. There are a couple of good things. We support the Ngārimu scholarships and the redefinition of "Pacific person" because I think it is important to modernise. The rest of it—you know it really is not where we are at. Thank you."