Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill

I move that the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill be now read a second time. [Singing begins in the gallery]

💬 SPEAKER: Order! Order! Order! Order! I’m warning the people in the gallery to stop now. [Singing continues] All individuals in the gallery will face a one-year ban from the buildings. Please take all their names. And I’ll say that as someone with some experience of similar behaviour in 1977. [Members of the public were removed from the gallery]

You would never have done a thing like that, Mr Speaker.

💬 SPEAKER: The Hon Chris Hipkins, start again.

I move, That the Education (School Donations Amendment) Bill be now read a second time.

This bill amends the Education Act of 1989 to support schools to access the Government’s extra funding in lieu of school donations scheme that we announced in this year’s Budget. [Interruption]

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Order! Could I just ask—the Minister’s struggling to even hear himself, let alone anyone else here. Thank you.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This bill reflects the Government’s commitment to breaking down the financial barriers to participation in education at all levels, and it delivers on our commitment to restore the right to a free school education for all New Zealand students.

The bill is actually very simple. It creates a new category of grants called discretionary grants. It enables the Minister to place conditions on the payment of this extra funding—primarily that boards would stop soliciting voluntary donations from parents, or voluntary payments from parents, and if these conditions are breached, then the bill allows that the funding can be recovered from the boards. These changes are necessary because they give participating schools a strong incentive to comply with the conditions of the extra funding in lieu of donations scheme, and it will ensure that parents are actually relieved of the pressure to pay voluntary school donations.

I’d like to thank the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration of the bill, and to thank those who took the time to make submissions. One issue that arose very clearly during the submissions process was the place of school camps. I think everybody recognises that school camps are a very important part of the Kiwi tradition of schooling, and they are one that we want to see continue. School camps are a great tradition, but we also need to be very clear that under the current law, schools cannot legally charge for school camps that are part of the curriculum, and that’s an area that’s been hotly contested. But the current law is clear that if a camp is part of the delivery of the curriculum, a school can ask for a donation to cover the cost, but they cannot charge a fee for the school camp and they cannot exclude a student from the school camp if their parents don’t pay that donation. Now, there’s often been a lot of misunderstanding about that, but that’s the state of the current law.

We will be moving, in the committee of the whole House stage, to exempt school camps from the prohibition on asking for donations. So schools who accept the extra funding will still be able to ask for a school donation to cover the cost of a school camp. They will not be able to exclude a child whose parents do not pay that donation from the school camp. They could not do that now under the current situation. So if, at the moment, they ask parents to donate money to cover the cost of the camp, and those parents don’t pay, that child is still entitled to attend the school camp—that’s the status quo, and that will prevail even for those schools who opt in to the scheme.

I want to briefly cover the amendments that the Education and Workforce Committee have recommended. They recommended, by majority, some changes in response to the submissions. The first of the changes is a recommendation that any extra conditions attached to the payment of the discretionary grant, beyond the mandatory requirement not to ask for solicited payments, must be communicated by a Gazette notice. That means that everybody is clear and up front about what that is. I agree with that change.

The second recommendation is that the bill should clarify that a school board may receive a discretionary grant only if it is decided by resolution to do so. We were very clear when we announced the policy on Budget day that we expect boards to go and consult with their communities before making a decision as to whether to opt in to the scheme. This makes it very clear that it will be, ultimately, the board, by way of a formal resolution, that will make that decision.

I acknowledge that many of the submitters who went to the select committee submitted not on the bill itself but on the policy that the bill allows the Government to implement. In particular, there were submissions from decile 8, 9, and 10 schools who argued that they should be included in the eligibility for the policy. The bill itself allows them to be included in eligibility. And at any future point that a Government chooses to do so, it can change the eligibility criteria so that additional schools can be made eligible for the scheme. I want to be clear here that this is the first roll-out of this and we are open to extending that to other schools to those decile 8, 9, and 10 schools in the future. And, of course, we’ll be considering that actively as part of our work around ultimately deciding the future of the school decile system.

Too many schools are dependent on financial contributions from parents, and we know that for those low-decile schools—particularly those decile 1 and 2 schools—many of them receive very little by way of donations from parents, because those parents simply are unable to pay. When you stack up the donations that those low-decile schools get compared to those decile 8, 9, and 10 schools, it is a substantial difference in the overall revenue that those schools are able to generate through school donations. And that is one of the reasons why we targeted this policy to the decile 1 to 7 schools in the first instance.

So this bill will go a long way to allowing the Government to deliver on its commitment to reduce the financial pressure on parents to pay donations—of course, we’ll keep the policy that underpins this under review. But the bill itself is a very sound bill, and I commend it to the House.

Look, I rise to speak on this piece of legislation. At the outset, I do want to say that National really does believe we need to do everything possible to ensure that we have better fairness and equity in our education system. We believe passionately that there are parents out there that struggle in terms of costs of living. But we also do believe that, unfortunately, this bill has been so shambolic that it’s going to actually lead to a lot more inequity for disadvantaged kids, and we do not believe in entrenching that type of system. It’s been a shocking and appalling process; actually, undemocratic—and I’m going to talk through that. And also it is very complicated and there are a whole lot of things that haven’t been determined, and I’m going to talk to that.

But I do want to take a moment just to acknowledge one thing that occurred before the Hon Chris Hipkins and I got up to speak. There were a group of young people here that were just taken out and banned from Parliament for a year. I accept that in this House we cannot have disorder. But a year-ban from Parliament for having their voice heard, I think is excessive—and I want to put that on the record.

So from my perspective the first—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: I just remind the member that she is, actually, herself breaking the rules of the House by making comments about a ruling that the Speaker has made. So she—

I take on board the comments.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: —will have to take the consequences of that.

Thank you.

So from our perspective, the process has been atrocious. What we know is that this bill was rushed through in a truncated way, when the Government has had—and committed to this in the election campaign—a whole lot of time, and what we had was a truncated select committee process. As a result, we didn’t get the amount of schools being able to engage with this as we could. We raised this at the outset, but they barged on through with a truncated process that affects 800,000 students, but also more than a million parents.

The second issue that I want to raise around the process is, again, in my time at Parliament, I have never seen this before, but we had issues with access to information. And, again, this was referenced in the Minister’s speech, but we had real issues with the officials saying, “Well, actually, this bill is not necessarily about the detail of the donation scheme.” The reality is that if we had taken that approach, then 90 percent of the submissions would have been knocked out, because what people were raising is the approach that Labour has taken—which is breaking their promise to only provide this for decile 1 to 7 schools—is hugely inequitable given that you have disadvantaged children and families in many decile 8, 9 and 10 schools. So, again, this issue of process of access to information, I’ve never seen in my time in Parliament, and we had to go through a process to actually get decent information about donation schemes—and I was very disappointed with that.

The final issue regarding those issues of process is that we’re on a truncated time frame, we’ve had issues of access to information, and then thirdly, instead of the Minister putting very substantive amendments to—because they’ve realised they haven’t thought through the policy, and you’ve got a whole lot of people submitting about the future of school camps and what that means in terms of take up—the Education and Workforce Committee, which he could have done, he’s chosen to completely bypass the select committee. And I’ve said it before: on this particular issue, it’s very undemocratic and we completely disagree with it.

So the next issue is around that substantive point: how do we ensure that we have funding equity? How do we ensure, actually, in my view, that donations are voluntary? It is true that some parents have felt that this is more of a fee.

I do believe we could have strengthened the law to make it absolutely clear that a donation is voluntary, but we haven’t been able to do that. Instead, we’ve got a scheme whereby we’ve even had to go to the extent of defining “parent” in the law. Again, we have a whole lot of unanswered questions about what schools can and cannot charge for. Again, I would argue that that stems from the fact that at the very outset the Minister didn’t clearly define “donation”, and that was a fundamental flaw in terms of the approach that he has taken.

The other issue, as I say, that I’ve raised is we’ve now heard from the Minister that he’s going to exempt school camps. Again, it may be a generic Supplementary Order Paper. People have raised with me the issue of “How do you define a school camp?” An outdoor education trip, is that covered? What about music education? Is there a difference between certain types of music education and that being core curriculum or not? But these are really serious issues because, at the board level and the principal level, they’re trying to determine whether they take this $150 payment or whether they’re better to actually be able to ask parents for those costs.

The other thing that I would say is that the reason that National is opposing this is we had a very fundamental view around funding. We said we need to do an absolute review and look at some of the inequity that exists. We said we need to scrap the decile system and put more funding into schools to enable us to have equity so that no school loses. That is a very equitable process that enables schools to be able to deal with the social challenges that they’ve got. We know the decile system is crude. We know that it’s complex. We know that it’s not targeting those kids it needs. We’re now nearly two years in and the Government stalled that decision. So National’s view is that rather than going and spending $200 million and entrenching more inequity, we should have gone on with scrapping the decile system and provided more equitable funding into schools rather than doing this.

I think the other thing that I would absolutely raise is that 95 out of 139 submissions in this process raised this issue of eligibility. I’ve had principals upset, I’ve had parents upset, where they have pointed out to me the tens of thousands of dollars of disadvantage that they will be at because, basically, Chris Hipkins didn’t get the money in the Budget and he broke this promise to New Zealanders.

I think the other point that I’d raise that I’m really concerned about is there are a whole lot of parents out there that heard from Labour that we will scrap school donations. So their expectation about what they’re getting—and there’s a whole lot of people that are waking up to the fact that a third of the schools, potentially, in New Zealand are not going to have access to this. They’re upset. They feel really let down, not only because it’s hugely inequitable, but also because they feel that this is a broken promise.

So look, from National’s perspective we are upset with the process. We think it’s completely undemocratic. We think this is aligned with a number of other education policies whereby they’re not well thought through and they’re bypassing the public and principals. We also know that there is significant inequity in the system. From our perspective, we would have proceeded to scrap the decile system and provide more equitable funding. We also believe it would’ve been better to spend time making it absolutely clear that donations in New Zealand are voluntary, because we do want to enable schools to be able to do fundraisers if they want to be able to do that. And we would have taken that approach.

So we’re really, really gutted and disappointed to be in a situation where, at a principled level, we can’t support this bill because it’s complicated, it’s inequitable, and there are a whole lot of disadvantaged kids that are going to miss out. We’ve got upset board chairs and principals because they’re not clear about whether they should take up this policy, but also because it is another broken promise, alongside 37 other broken promises in education from this Government.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for this opportunity to speak on the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. This is legislation that will alleviate the financial pressure on thousands and thousands of our New Zealand families, especially our parents. This is not a complicated issue. For us on this side of the House it is pretty simple and it is about ensuring that more of the cost pressures don’t continue to go on our parents, especially those parents who are from the lower decile parts of Aotearoa New Zealand.

Before I go on to the rest of my contribution I’d like to thank the Minister of Education, the Hon Chris Hipkins, for his leadership on this and many other issues in the education sector. I’d also like to thank the chair as well as the members of the Education and Workforce Committee for their careful consideration of all of the submissions to the select committee. I’d like to thank each and every person that submitted not only in writing but, as well, those who came to Parliament to submit in person.

One of those submissions was from the New Zealand Principals’ Federation (NZFP). One of the points that the Hon Nikki Kaye covered before was about equity in funding. The New Zealand Principals’ Federation covered this. They basically stated in their submission that schools at the lower end of our decile system have warmly welcomed this announcement of $150 per student in lieu of asking for donations. NZFP is one of the largest professional organisations of educators, representing over 2,000 principals from primary, from intermediate, as well as from area school principals. One of the things that they actually stated in their submission is that many of the schools within their membership report that they have actually already stopped asking for donations from parents within their schools. Why? Because parents keep telling them that they cannot afford to pay. Others within their school membership have asked for minimal donations, and they only get between 10 to 20 percent of donations, because these are the only numbers of parents that can actually afford to pay.

I’ll give you an example from Waterview Primary School, which has a submission that was also made to the select committee. This is a decile 3 primary school. They have 300 students. They say that they only ask for an $80 donation voluntarily from parents, which equates to about $24,000. However, when they budget annually, they only budget somewhere around about $9,000 because this is the only amount that they get per year.

However, with this legislation that is going to be put through, the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill, by the Minister of Education, this particular school will get a total of about $45,000 per year, and they say that this would allow them to actually employ one extra teacher, which is something that they actually need. I’ve been around so many of the schools in South Auckland from the area that I represent and they also tell me the same thing, that they themselves have stopped asking for donations from parents because many of our parents just do not pay, because they cannot afford to pay for this voluntarily. So, yes, it is said that it should be voluntary, but when you’re a parent that cannot afford to pay it, this is why these fees are no longer paid, and this is why we need this legislation.

We have gone through the right process. Yes, it has been a shorter than usual process, but that is because we want this legislation to be enacted and we want our parents to no longer have to pay this voluntary donation and we want our schools, especially those in the lower socio-economic areas of Aotearoa New Zealand, to be able to get this assistance from their Government. I strongly commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This side supported this bill in the first reading but now we have decided that we cannot support this bill from here on, the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. But before that, as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee, I want to thank all members from all sides for their contribution. I also want to acknowledge all the officials for their work, but most importantly I want to thank all the submitters. We received 139 submissions on this bill, and it looks like it’s a big number, but if we look at the number of schools that we have, if we just look at schools that are from decile 1 to decile 7, schools that are going to receive this discretionary grant to compensate for not asking for school donations—a number of parents, a number of students—I think 139 is a very small number. It’s a small number, and I believe that there was an effect from a shorter, truncated select committee process. I believe that if the select committee process was for the full length, then we would have received more submissions on this legislation.

Why I say this is because I know that some people—they have resources, they understand when to submit, they know when the legislation is coming before the House, they’re prepared, but then I know that there will be some people that would have never submitted in their whole lifetime, and for them, if they ever submit, it will be like a one-time opportunity in their life. For them, they need that time, because after their routine work and other things that they have to do in their daily life, to get into this legislation, to understand what this legislation does, and to get over that hesitation of not having the experience of submitting before—it takes time. So truncating the process definitely impacts the number of submissions that we receive, and I think we should have received a lot more submissions on this legislation.

This legislation, when it was introduced, it sounded like it was a good thing, and that’s why we supported this legislation in the first reading. We wanted to see that this legislation goes through to the select committee, we wanted to hear from submitters, but now, based on what we heard in the select committee process, we have decided that we cannot support this legislation any more. If I summarise what submitters said in just two points, one point would be that using the decile system to decide who gets this grant to compensate for their school donation and who doesn’t is not a fair system. The second thing is about the amount of this discretionary grant per student. We understand it’s going to be $150 per student, but we know that in schools, it’s not like there is a random donations box and you walk in and you donate as much as you like. Schools actually have a fixed amount that they go out and ask for. They proactively communicate to parents at the start of the year. What they do is in that letter, sometimes, some schools also explain how this money is going to be helpful for their child, and they also go on to explain that if parents are not able to pay that amount in one go, then they can set up instalments with their school. So that makes parents feel that this is something mandatory, not voluntary. They feel that there is an obligation to pay this payment. As I said, schools have a set amount that they ask for. So it’s important for us to know what this amount is going to be and how it’s going to impact various schools.

In the select committee process, we did clarify that this is going to be an opt-in thing. It’s not like, automatically, all schools from decile 1 to decile 7 are going to get this grant to compensate for school donations that they will be told not to ask for. This will be a choice for schools that will be provided, and it looks like a lot of schools won’t actually like to opt in for this option, because there are a lot of schools that ask for more than $150 per child.

The second thing which we clarified in the select committee process was that if schools are not compliant, then some amount can be recovered, but that amount should not be more than the original grant that was given to that school. In the select committee process, what happened, after we had finished listening to all submitters, was the Minister informed the select committee that the Minister intends to introduce a Supplementary Order Paper in the committee of the whole House, and that is to do with exemptions. That actually makes me laugh, because the purpose of this bill is to reduce that burden that parents have because of that letter they receive from their child’s school to pay this donation, but then there will be some exemptions. So while schools can still be accessing the discretionary grant, they can go out and ask for donations. How does this make sense? It doesn’t make sense to me. It is very jumbled legislation, and with that Supplementary Order Paper, if that is introduced in the committee of the whole House, as the Minister indicated to the select committee, then it’s going to become even more jumbled, because it won’t be able to deliver anything that the Minister thinks this legislation should deliver. So it’s really important that we understand what the policy intent is and what we are trying to achieve through this. If the policy intent is that there is financial burden on parents because of school donations that they pay—which is not mandatory but voluntary, but sometimes parents feel that they should—then this legislation is not going to deliver that purpose. This legislation will not.

During the select committee process we received several submissions. There were some that were quite to the point and there were others that shared some of their own experience. One question that came from around 70 percent of submitters was why there is a cut-off at decile 7—so why is there a cut-off at decile 7? That means: why is this going to be applicable only to schools that are from deciles 1 to 7? Some submissions from decile 10 schools, before the select committee, said that parents of students that come to their school are not better off than parents of students that go to lower decile schools. So it’s unfair. And one submitter, Belmont Primary School, they finished their submission by saying “Equity, Minister, equity.” That is what submitters are asking for and that is why we have decided not to support this legislation. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

It’s an absolute pleasure to rise on behalf of New Zealand First to support this Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. Contrary to what we’ve heard from the Opposition, this is a very simple bill. It is bringing in a discretionary grant of $150 per student, or the option of doing so, and, in doing so, stopping the necessity to solicit voluntary donations. This will make a huge difference to those decile 1 to decile 7 schools, and we’ve heard from many of them, both in the select committee, and certainly anecdotally, just how appreciated it is. For those schools from less well-off communities that haven’t got the ability necessarily to raise so much outside capital, it takes the pressure off. It gives them some certainty of funding to do the things they want to do that they just can’t budget for, and we’ve heard, as the Hon Jenny Salesa said, that can be down to 10 percent or 20 percent of students actually paying these fees.

What a miserable lot the National Party are, because what’s the counterfactual here—what’s the counterfactual? Let’s do nothing. That’s what they were going to do. Let’s do nothing. Let’s just throw it to the wolves, have a voluntary donation out there, see what comes in. We are moving to support schools in our poorest communities. It’s just the same argument, actually: the running against these learning support coordinators. We’re putting 620 learning support coordinators in.

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Sorry—let’s just focus on the bill, shall we?

I will, Madam Speaker, but I guess how I was tying that in—

💬 SPEAKER: I know, but you weren’t.

Yes, OK. I will take your guidance. We are doing something to help those schools, we’re doing something to help learners, and we’re certainly doing something to help those schools from lower decile communities. This is a $265 million injection into those schools over four years and it is targeted.

Of course, the other line the Opposition runs at times is that we are a tax and spend Government. Not true. We are a fiscally responsible Government. We are set to achieve our target of a debt to GDP ratio of under 20 percent by 2021. So we are not throwing cash around willy-nilly. We are targeting those communities most in need.

The other point that keeps getting raised is that this is a broken promise somehow because Chris Hipkins, who was the Labour Party spokesman for education in the election campaign, outlined the Labour Party’s policy. This is not the Labour Party’s policy. This is a coalition Government’s policy. That’s the fundamental thing that the Opposition, the National Party, do not understand, and they do not understand the reason they sit there is because the Labour Party work in a coalition and were prepared to work in a coalition in terms of those negotiations. What I do recall from those negotiations—

💬 DEPUTY SPEAKER: Well, again, negotiations aren’t in the bill. You can talk about the select committee. You can talk about the broken promises—that’s fine, because that’s relating, but actually the coalition documents are not in the bill.

OK, Madam Speaker. Our priorities are aligned and one of those priorities, of course, is to make sure that we get equitable outcomes for our children. We actually heard in the select committee process on a petition that was presented this week about how—it was on postgraduate education. One of the things that came through from one of the submitters was that almost a vast majority of the people in postgraduate education—students—come from decile 8 schools and above. So that ability to access funding has a flow-on effect right through even into postgraduate tertiary education.

I’d like to thank the officials that worked so hard on this bill. It was a simple bill. The select committee process itself—and it’s had some criticism that we have actually expanded this out or are going to expand this out through the committee of the whole House. Now we’ll have a provision coming in there for school camps. Well, that’s exactly what the select committee process is about. It’s about hearing submitters and when they do make relevant points that are good and perhaps weren’t as clearly articulated in the bill as they should have been, that is now something that we can effect and change for the better in the committee of the whole House stage. So to say that the process was flawed is wrong. It’s showing exactly the opposite. It’s showing the process working as it should. I’d commend the Minister as well on bringing this bill forward. He has been a reforming Minister and this is yet another one of the wave of reforms that we have coming through the Education and Workforce Committee.

In conclusion, this is a good bill. It does for our most disadvantaged people and communities—and, actually, 70 percent of our communities are going to be advantaged by this bill and the $150 per student. I go back again to the announcement of the Government and the Rt Hon Winston Peters talking about putting back the human face of capitalism. This is just another example of how this Government is going about addressing the inequalities that have been created in our society. So within this bill is just yet another component of the direction of travel with this Government and New Zealand First. I’m very pleased to commend it to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. This is a confusing concoction of policies put together by this coalition Government, led out by the Labour Party, who did promise this. They have failed to deliver, and there are no two ways about that. It’s crystal clear. Whether it was policy or practice or party promise, we went back and back and back as select committee members trying to get a hold of where the clarity was on this particular policy. We had Ministry of Education officials come back to us probably about three times trying to clarify where the clarity was on policy, and we couldn’t find it. Neither could all the schools that submitted, which is why so many schools submitted on out-of-scope matters.

The Government has led out on this policy and they’ve kept out—they have kept out, in my electorate, one school. I’ve got one State school in my electorate that is above decile 8—one school. That one school, I happen to have been the chair of the board of that school back in my day. I remember with crystal clarity one particular gorgeous lady that I knew and I got to know her because I also ran, as well as being the board chair, a coffee group with mums. Her name was—and I’m going to change her name, actually, because I don’t think it’s fair to her—Milai. Milai used to come to me because I personified the school to her as the board chair, and she used to apologise to me every February when school started up, because she couldn’t pay the school donation. I used to remind her that it was not lawful. She had the capacity to not pay. It was a donation; it was not a fee. I remember her talking to me, crystal clear. She was in a Housing New Zealand home. Yes, the school at the time was decile 7; it’s now just gone above that, and she couldn’t pay the donation. She couldn’t pay for kids’ shoes.

There was a raft of things she struggled with, and as a committee of mums we’d get in behind her and we’d help her out. That is the type of person that this bill excludes and the Government—and, yes, all the coalition partners, thanks to the last speaker, Mark Patterson—they should be fronting up to the Milais of this world because you’re leaving her out. You’re leaving her out and the many other people who are in decile 8, 9, and 10 that don’t fit your stereotype, the Government’s stereotype, of everyone being really wealthy if you’re in deciles 8, 9, and 10. That’s not the reality and they should be very, very mindful of their broken promise. It was supposed to go to all schools; it has not done that.

Now I’m going to finish speaking with a quote from a fantastic principal who came to submit to us from a ropey school, and he said, “It will not save the greater problem of inequity because it’s not a positive step for all children and whānau.” Simple as that—you couldn’t get any more straightforward than that. “This will not solve the problem for all children and whānau. This plan is aligned with a blunt tool from the past”—and he’s referring to the decile system—“that only seems to perpetuate inequity and competition.” And that’s why we on this side of the House were looking to scrap the decile system and do something different. I’m not sure what the other side of the House are doing. I’ve never even seen it. “To me”—he said—“this announcement is tinkering. The Budget announcement seems to perpetuate a lack of collectivity providing a band-aid using a simplistic tone from the past with the hope of addressing the issue of inequity in our system.”

Well, it doesn’t. The Milais of this world deserve the Government to front up and tell her why she has to once again approach the school board chair and wonder why she should personally feel sorry for not being able to pay her school donation.

E Te Māngai, tēnā koe. Tēnā koutou e Te Whare. What a day! I never thought that I would be sitting in this House and hearing the National Party extolling such socialist virtues as equity and complete free access to education in this country.

But before I get into the cut and thrust of what is actually contained in this Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill, I want to acknowledge not the ruling but the action which just occurred in Parliament, which was raised by the Hon Nikki Kaye, and to state that, pertaining to the education system and the young people that are included in it, young people, rangatahi, in this country currently do not have a straightforward means to express their view to the House of Representatives, let alone elect us. When they take to the streets to protest, they’re belittled and when they try to get the right to vote, they are patronised for a lack of life experience. So my question is: what are they to do if not to organise actions such as what we have just seen in the House today?

But turning to the bill, I stand today on behalf of the Green Party of Aotearoa in support, and I want to acknowledge the incredible mental gymnastics of the Opposition to pretzel their logic beyond the point of comprehension such that I think it’s kind of worthy of an Olympic medal. This legislation is not perfect, as has been raised by many speakers from the Opposition, but actually also it was a point that was acknowledged by the Minister of Education himself and the Associate Minister of Education. This bill isn’t perfect and I would like to say to members of the Opposition that frequently we don’t actually get perfect pieces of legislation—of law—in this place, but what we don’t typically do is throw the baby out with the bathwater. We do our darnedest to take a step forward and improve things and continue taking those steps forward.

I also want to touch on the point that’s been raised by a number of National Party speakers—that being that the decile system isn’t perfect. We know that the decile system isn’t perfect and of course it absolutely currently excludes the fact that there are a number of children who are deprived or from lower socio-economic backgrounds who do go to higher decile schools. But what I also want to say is that the way to fix the problems of the decile system was not to move towards the minority report - type social investment approach, which would have further, I think, moved towards stigmatising certain characteristics of certain children, certain rangatahi and tamariki, in our education system—the likes of those who are born and raised in single-parent households like myself, those like myself who were the first in their family to go to university, and those like myself who eventually signed their dropout forms from their high school.

But I want to note in particular that I am continuing to advocate for—and the Minister has it on record that the Greens want to see this extended to deciles 8 through 10, as I think all of us in this House want to. But this is an important step forward. And I’d also note, to the point raised by my colleague Mark Patterson of New Zealand First, on the point of also reinstating the postgraduate student allowance that I continue to keep that on the radar of the Minister of Education as well.

Aotearoa New Zealand prides itself on our education system. We are frequently, in overseas rankings, seen as having one of the best curriculums, for example, in the world and the performance of our students is somewhat rather incredible, given the resourcing that is available for it. But my old man used to always say that there is no such thing as a free education, unfortunately, in this country, despite that mythology that we continue to peddle, because it is, in fact, the case that regardless of whatever school you go to in this country, frequently kids need uniforms. Uniforms do not grow on trees—in the same way that the National Party frequently likes to say that money does not—nor do schoolbooks or stationery.

The important thing to recognise here, as has been raised by other speakers contributing to this debate but also by recent research, is that the inequities that start to show themselves and manifest in the early stages of someone’s education journey—right at the point of early childhood education through the compulsory system—continue to get bigger the further that somebody goes down that education journey. And if we can do something to increase access and affordability to the education system, starting with 70 percent of the country who presently are identified among the characteristics that we have, which are the decile system—notably to implement something like the social investment approach, even if it were to be implemented and not as flawed as I’ve already articulated—the problem would be that that would take a number of years to roll out to uproot the current system. Meanwhile, we would not be providing that quarter of a billion dollars, as mentioned by Mark Patterson, to provide support to those in deciles 1 to 7 schools. So I’m glad to hear that the National Party are talking about values such as universalism, because, interestingly, it’s actually a point that’s quite in opposition to the notion of social investment.

But, finally, I just want to touch on the point which has been raised by a number of speakers—most recently, Denise Lee who is the representative for Maungakiekie, which is the area that I grew up and went to school in—speaking about the fact that these donations are currently voluntary and that it is illegal to put it forward that they are somehow mandatory. The fact of the matter is for the experience of so many of these kids who are fronting up to the fact that their parents may or may not have paid that $150 donation, when you are a kid in school and your parent has not fronted up with that $150 donation and your school is refusing to release the school yearbook to you, as was the case when I was at school and my family, my household, was not able to put forward that donation, it feels a lot like coercive behaviour. It does not feel like it is a voluntary donation.

I understand that one of the many points that the Minister has tried to put forward in this legislation is to really re-emphasise the fact that these are voluntary donations and to really, really make it clear. And it’s an attempt to balance things out, because on the one side we want to make sure that schools are not worse off, but at the same time we want to make sure that these kids and their families are able to have access to the education system without unnecessary barriers that may mean the trade-off of things like healthy food on the table or school shoes or a raincoat, of all things, to get to school whatever the weather may be.

So just in summation to address the points that have been raised by the Opposition, which seem rather confused, I think that it’s important that we acknowledge where a step forward has been taken. I really, really want to ask those members of the National Party who presently oppose this legislation at its second reading, after we have heard from the Education and Workforce Committee where they themselves note that 95 out of 139 submitters want all schools to be eligible: why would you begrudge schools from deciles 1 to 7 that opportunity to be those who are recipients of the first step?

If the purpose is, ultimately, getting to a point of universalism, where all schools are able to get this, why would you begrudge those students and their families—70 percent of the schooling population are at deciles 1 to 7—being able to receive that first step? Why would you not accept that this is a starting point, and we move forward from this point in time?

The Green Party of Aotearoa New Zealand is incredibly pleased to be supporting this move towards a more equitable schooling system, towards more equitable and fair and just access to our education system in this country. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to take a call on the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill in its second reading.

I found it quite interesting when the Minister of Education said that this bill will stop schools from soliciting donations from parents. I can almost guarantee that that won’t happen. I think that even though the $150 will go to deciles 1 to 7 schools in this bill, it still will not stop schools in those deciles from actually soliciting further money from some of those parents, because it is not enough per head, per student, to cover all the costs that schools need to meet out of those donations.

Now, the Hon Nikki Kaye talked a little bit about outdoor education. My children went to a rural school and then they went to secondary school in Palmerston North and Feilding. Each time, every year, we were asked for donations. Every year, as parents, we went out fund-raising just to make sure that all the children of those respective schools were able to participate in areas of education activities that their parents could not afford to contribute in the donations side of the school. It has been one of those areas that I have been brought up with, that my children have been brought up with, and that they have now brought others up with as well.

It is an inequitable bill, this bill: only deciles 1 to 7, not deciles 8, 9, and 10. Why not all the deciles? Why did this Government change its mind over including all the deciles in this particular bill? Why, in fact, did not this Government look at wiping the decile system, as the National Party policy that we had prior to the 2017 election as one of our election policies would have done? All of these things were handed to that Government across the way on a platter, and they walked away from it. So that would have been more equitable, had the decile system been wiped out and everything been evened out.

One area that I haven’t heard spoken about in this bill today is there’s a clause that’s been added by the Minister, who will have wide discretion to cut payments for schools if he thinks they haven’t complied with the conditions of the scheme. One of the things that I haven’t seen in this bill is what the monitoring process that this Minister is going to do to actually see whether or not the school has been compliant—there has been no detail around that monitoring system, and that is actually very unfair, because every organisation that I’ve worked with and that I know of is monitored for their funding actually have some sort of audit and monitoring system as part and parcel of their contract.

In this particular bill, there is no detail around how the Minister’s discretionary processes will be enacted within this bill to actually take funding off those schools, and if he or she does that, then how will that school recover from that loss of donation? How will they recover? So there’s that big gap around how is the Minister going to use his discretionary powers and how is it monitored. Where is the detail?

Anyway, without any further ado, this is just one of the key areas that I looked at in this bill that has big, gaping gaps in it and that needs to be addressed. I think that the process that this Government has gone through to bring this bill to a second reading has been shoddy and has actually disrespected all the schools of New Zealand. I do not support this bill.

Tēnā koe e Te Māngai o Te Whare. Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m very privileged to take a call on the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill.

The message from the Opposition is clear—if it’s not good enough, then better to not do anything at all—and that is something that we’ve seen from them very much over the last nine years. There’s been nine years of neglect and, basically, they’re continuing that narrative: “Let’s just do nothing. It wasn’t bad enough.” So I am proud to be part of a Government that is tackling the big, long-term challenges facing this country, and one of the things that we are doing here, as we have heard, is that kids have missed opportunities for education and we are tackling that.

What this bill does is it actually acknowledges that child wellbeing and the ability to become the best you can be and to get the best out of life is linked to educational outcomes in life. So with this bill, families of nearly half a million children at 1,700 schools will benefit from no longer having to pay school donations. So why on earth anybody would vote against such a bill is an absolute mystery to me. This bill is supporting the implementation of the school donations—$150 per student. There are some conditions attached to it, with one of them being that schools shouldn’t lie, but we are not assuming schools will do that.

The Opposition seem to think that schools are dishonest and that boards will lie to try to get the funding and still get donations—well, no. We believe that people will do the right thing because this is actually a really good opportunity for kids and parents to get ahead in education.

Just very quickly on our select committee process: we received 138 submissions on this bill and we heard four oral submissions, and a lot of those submissions related to the scope of the voluntary payments from parents that boards would be prevented from requesting under this bill. We’ve heard from the Minister of Education already that one of those was about camp payments, and that will be addressed in the next stage, so I won’t talk about anything more.

I do want to mention something that NZEI talked to us about. They spoke about the right to free education. They spoke about the very creative idea, they believe, that sits behind this particular bill. They also said that the levies had become an intolerable burden and an embarrassment, and when it comes to an embarrassment, it is about the poor children that are missing out because the parents can’t afford the donations, and then they are excluded—and that was a very good submission from Emma Pearce. Emma Pearce said that “This is a sensible solution to the problem of families not being able to afford the donation, or some families paying in, and others don’t, and the child being singled out or excluded from additional activities if their parents haven’t paid the Donation.” Now, we don’t believe that is correct—we don’t believe that people should be denied the opportunity to participate. This bill is working on that equality and trying to bring many more opportunities together.

So, once again, we are building a New Zealand that we all can be proud of. We know that there is a lot to do. We know it can’t all be fixed overnight, but we’ve started to address those neglected problems of the past, and we’re getting on with the job under the brilliant leadership, of course, of our Prime Minister, Jacinda Ardern. I commend this bill to the House. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I missed the early speeches in this debate as I was attending a meeting elsewhere, but I arrived as Mr Patterson from New Zealand First was telling the House that this is a good bill. Well, no, it could have been a good bill, but, yet again, here’s an example of a Government that has mucked everything up. Rather, what we have here is a bill that reflects a Government that breaks its promises. It’s a bill that reflects a Government that doesn’t do its homework, that doesn’t dot the i’s and cross the t’s, and which, time after time, lets down not only those who voted for them, assuming they would keep their promises, but, instead, let’s—in this case—down all New Zealand families with school-age children.

Well, Ms Lubeck has just, effectively, argued in the House that a poor bill is better than no bill. Well, no, a poor bill is a poor bill. No wonder people are suggesting that Labour’s election campaign slogan next year should be “It’s the thought that counts”, because here is another example of a ludicrous sort of expression of good intentions without the ability to deliver on the promises.

Well, National speakers who have spoken before me in this debate have made the point that we think it is wrong and inequitable to exclude deciles 8 to 10 schools from the donations scheme, and in part that is because the decile scheme is a blunt and, in this particular context, sometimes quite unfair mechanism. Chlöe Swarbrick, when she spoke a few moments ago, acknowledged that point, but was unconvincing in her rejection of the National Party’s alternative proposal, because for Ms Swarbrick to argue that adopting a fairer model risks stigmatising some children and their families is not a given, as she has suggested, and, worse, it leaves them at a distinct disadvantage under this bill—that’s just wrong.

I just want to conclude by making the point that the National Party is also very concerned about the truncated select committee process that was undertaken, because this is a bill that, in just the 13-day period that it was open for submissions, received 139 submissions, which suggests that there was huge public interest and considerable anxiety and unrest, particularly in our school communities around the country. They should have been given the opportunity to submit in a normal process. After all, the Minister has got plenty of time to include whatever decisions arise from this in next year’s operational funding decisions. But, no, they’ve rushed through with their half-hearted, poorly conceived idea. This is an unfair bill, it’s a poor bill, and it’s very disappointing that yet again the Government has mucked things up.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. It’s kind of interesting, really, that in the speeches this afternoon from the National Party they’ve all focused on the deciles 8 to 10 schools, and there’s been very little talk about the rest of the schools in the country from deciles 1 to 7.

Last Monday night, I visited one of my schools and sat down with the board of trustees and the principal. They told me about the very high percentage of at-risk children from vulnerable families at their school, who had suffered enormously under the policies and actions of the previous Government. They told me that this Government’s school donations policy, in this bill that’s going through Parliament to provide the regulatory framework for that, is going to make a huge, huge difference for their school because more than half of the families at the school could not afford the school donation. The school never put those parents under pressure and, as a result, really struggled. This policy and the legislation that we’re debating today are going to make an enormous difference to so many schools around the country.

Gosh, I listened to what the Minister said. He has not ruled out extending this legislation to deciles 8 to 10, but can anybody in this House get up this afternoon and say that we should not have prioritised the deciles 1 to 7 schools. I mean, that’s really the guts of it, and the other points that are made around “shambolic process” and “hastening things through” and changes that are made at select committee—goodness gracious, often those comments were made, largely, from first-term members who, clearly, haven’t sat on that many select committees, which is where you do the work to make sure that you bring back the best bill possible to the House. And that is our job. That’s our job—all of us—to make sure that the bill that comes back to this House is in the best possible shape, and that’s what this bill is, even though the National Party members didn’t support it.

The Minister and the Associate Minister have acknowledged that it’s not the most perfect that it could be, but it’s dealing with one of the long-term issues that we have in this country—and, boy, did we have a lot of issues, particularly in the education sector: huge infrastructure deficits with school buildings; the high cost of the donations that families just simply cannot afford; the cost of NCEA. The vocational reforms that this Government is putting forward in less than two years are enormous reforms that are needed for our education sector, looking forward 30 years, not just the three-year cycle, which is what that Government when they were in Government always did.

This legislation is an example of how we cannot fix all of the problems at once, but this is an enormously important step. The amendments that have been made—and we are going to be discussing one of them in the committee of the whole House stage—all of the questions around how that’s going to work can be put to the Minister then. As my school told me on Monday night, they are enormously grateful. They, of course, want more, and of course learning support is the other area that every single school that you go into talks about—learning support for children with special needs. We’re making huge strides in that. This is a Government, a reformist Government, that’s looking to the long term and is taking a balanced approach. I commend this bill to the House.

I’m concerned that people listening to this debate, particularly parents, could become quite confused about their current right to a free education in New Zealand, because, if we are to believe the Government speakers this afternoon, somehow this bill is resolving for parents a fact which is that they have had to pay school donations. So I just want to read from the Education Act 1989, section 3, which is explicit about the existing right to free education: “Except as provided in this Act, every person who is not an international student is entitled to free enrolment and free education at any State school during the period beginning on the person’s fifth birthday and ending on 1 January after the person’s 19th birthday.”

We already have a right to free education in this country, and it is a right that has been maintained by Governments of both colours in this House. What we do have is a real problem—so all this bill is is a band-aid, because the underlying problem we have with the school funding system in New Zealand is a decile system that has become inequitable and that does not target funding at the children who are most vulnerable and who most need support.

So what should we do about it, Madam Speaker? Well, the National Government had acted. The National Government, in 2017, made a Cabinet decision—it’s minuted—that said that we would rescind the decile system and that we would replace it with a fairer, more targeted decile system that would ensure that no school or service would lose funding. That was a brave, reforming decision because that was about getting to the underlying issue, which is to ensure that those children who have greater need get greater funding when they go to school.

And what has this Government done, this allegedly reforming Government that Clare Curran refers to? What did they do? They rescinded that decision, and so, instead of getting to the root of the problem, they will put in place a mere band-aid which is a mess, which got hurried through, on which there couldn’t be full submissions, on which we couldn’t get full advice at the committee—officials were constrained by the Minister in what they were and weren’t allowed to tell us—and which creates all sorts of inequities and problems over what can be charged for, what can’t be, what can be policed, what can’t be. This is not a great step forward; it’s a mere band-aid, and National will do much, much better when we are sitting on those benches.

I am absolutely delighted to have the last call in the second reading of the Education (School Donations) Amendment Bill. I, sadly, didn’t get the opportunity to listen to all of the speeches here, because I, like Mr Macindoe, had another meeting that I had to go to. But I’m actually sad and a little bit pleased, because what I have heard from the other side wasn’t quite correct. I’m actually having to stop as I say that because I’m having to think about polite language to use that is in line with what I can use in this House.

First of all, I’d like to say that I’m a little bit perturbed that we’ve got the National Party sitting on the other side of the House who are constantly negative towards this Government. They have no new ideas—no new ideas—and this is absolutely one of those examples of that. They are like the kids that won’t go out and play four square because they weren’t the ones that came up with the idea first.

They are absolutely and totally against this bill because they didn’t come up with that idea first. And to say that this is a band-aid? I challenge that member Nicola Willis to go and talk to the principals in deciles 1 to 7 schools what they are making of this bill. And I challenge that speaker to go and say to them that this is a band-aid.

I will also tell the previous speaker that their decision to look at the funding review was widely criticised throughout the sector, because there wasn’t enough detail in that review. That is the reason why that was stopped in its tracks. We are looking at that at this present point in time to find a better way through. Just replacing one blunt instrument with another is simply not good enough.

This might be a simple bill, but it will have huge positive implications for the schooling sector. Yes, we are prioritising deciles 1 to 7 schools, but, as the Minister said in his speech, this does not prevent deciles 8 to 10 schools from being eligible for the scheme in the future. We can’t solve all the issues that happened over those nine years—we cannot solve all of those issues in one go—but this is an extremely good start and I am proud to be part of the team that is putting this through.

This bill is another example of this Government tackling the big long-term issues in this country, and school funding is one of those issues. We are making education cheaper for our families not only by allowing schools to apply for this particular grant but also by getting rid of things like the NCEA fees.

I was really concerned when I heard the member Jo Hayes questioning the integrity of school principals and boards of trustees. I found that one of the most shocking things that I have heard in this House—by saying that schools would still be doing this and that they would, effectively, be lying when they would say that they weren’t asking for school donations. How frustrating for school principals when you get a member from the other side who stands up and says, “Oh, well, they don’t have auditing systems; they won’t have an audit for this. This hasn’t been thought through.” Does she not realise that schools have extensive audits every single year?

💬 Marja Lubeck: No idea.

No idea. And already, recovery systems are in place when there have been overpayments or different payments in the school system. That was embarrassing, absolutely embarrassing, and shameful.

This, as I’ve said, is a very, very simple bill. We heard from the submitters—we only had a few that came in, but we had a number that made submissions. I really enjoyed reading through all of those submissions. They highlighted the complexities in school funding, and if some of those members on the other side had actually taken the time to read through them, they might have a better understanding of the school funding system. And I really thank those submitters for helping this House understand how complex school funding actually is.

This bill will make a difference to those deciles 1 to 7 schools. I know this. I know that as a school principal, I would have been really excited. I would have been excited because it would have meant a difference, and $30,000 to my school funding.

💬 Marja Lubeck: How much?

$30,000. That makes a big difference to young people in that school. It makes a big difference to parents who don’t have the ability to be able to afford—

💬 Nicola Willis: What about the refugees at decile 8 schools in my area—what about them? They get nothing.

Now, I can hear this noise coming from the other side of the House, talking about deciles 8 to 10 schools. Let’s talk about that for a moment. Those deciles 8 to 10 schools—as the Minister said, that doesn’t stop them being eligible for this in the future.

But let me tell you about one decile 10 school that I went to two weeks ago—actually, it was with the member here Dr Duncan Webb, in Christchurch—which charges $350 for their donations every year, and was it 80 percent that they get in?

💬 Dr Duncan Webb: At least 80.

At least 80 percent. She said, “I wouldn’t even look at this bill. It’s not something that I would look at.”

💬 Angie Warren-Clark: Or need.

Or need. But in the future, there might be that opportunity there for her to actually have that, because that’s what the Minister has said.

We did recommend changes in select committee. They have been highlighted by the Minister, so I don’t need to talk about those here. But I will finish up by saying that this is a wonderful step towards free education—a really truly free education system in this country, one that I am really proud of and one that will make a difference to a large number of families, but, more importantly, a large number of students in this country. I commend this bill to the House.

The question was put that the amendments recommended by the Education and Workforce Committee by majority be agreed to.