Education Amendment Bill

I was rudely interrupted last night at the closure of the House. I was really disappointed that we could not go for an extra 4 minutes after 10 o’clock, and that we could not go another 2 minutes in order to have the vote, because members opposite wanted to get home and lick their wounds, as they do every night at 10 o’clock after the House has closed. That is why we have not finished this bill. It would have been only 6 minutes; we would have had to wait only 4 minutes for me to speak, then 2 minutes for the vote. It would have been all over but, oh no, it had to be put off until the next day so that members opposite could rush home and, most probably, watch the end of Boston Legal, because therein lies what members opposite are like. Darren Hughes is like Denny Crane in Boston Legal. But I digress.

We are talking about the Education Amendment Bill—the regulations, the micro-management of this legislation, the bureaucracy, and the sanitised way in which we go about educating our young people. Next year we will have cotton wool on the ground so that little toddlers will not hurt themselves when they go outside to play. Our mothers and fathers, and our grandparents—

💬 Dianne Yates: Somebody bounced you on your head.

What was that? Did the member say that she does not have a grandmother or grandfather?

The ASSISTANT SPEAKER (H V Ross Robertson): There are to be no interjections while members are walking on the floor of the House.

Our grandmothers and grandfathers, our mothers and fathers, went through the Second World War, for goodness’ sake, and they went through the Depression. They brought up their kids, they sent them to school, and nothing happened. Yes, there were broken legs; yes, there were scratches when we fell out of trees. But we are not allowed to climb trees any more, because nanny State has taken the responsibility instead of parents. Nanny State tells us how to educate our kids, what sort of education they are to have, and where to send our children, whether it be to kōhanga, kindergarten, or whatever.

The Education Amendment Bill will do one thing that I abhor, and it is that after 20 years of the kōhanga movement, 20 years of great Māori work in early childhood and whānau development, this lot over here, without a skerrick of consultation, want to make kōhanga like kindergarten, playcentre, and everything else—a one-size-fits-all approach, and members opposite think it is OK. That will never happen.

The other thing is that over the next couple of years every early childhood centre in this country—educating 180,000 children—will have to be relicensed. Who will pay for that? It will certainly not be this Government and it will certainly not be the Ministry of Education; it will be those individual centres, which can hardly run now because education is so, so costly. This is nothing more than a PC look at how education is supposed to be delivered, and not an opportunity to let individual centres work it out for themselves. The legislation should make sure there are minimum standards, but it is over-bureaucratised, over-sanitised, and over-regulated.