Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I move, That the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill be now read a second time.

This bill, for people listening in, is a member’s bill that was originally to amend the Education Act, but has subsequently been changed, and the idea is to improve students’ access to second-language learning in primary and intermediate schools. It would enable the Minister of Education to issue a national language policy and it would also allow regulations to specify a list of, at least, 10 national priority languages—a list of 10 which must include te reo Māori and New Zealand Sign Language. If this bill was passed, State primary and intermediate school boards would need to develop, adopt, and maintain a priority language programme in their schools, after consulting with the school community. Boards would have to choose at least one language from the list of national priority languages and arrange for that to be taught at their school—they could choose more. The bill would require the Government to allocate money for schools for the costs associated with teaching a second language through the normal Budget cycle. The bill would also require the Minister to report on the effectiveness of the priority languages programme. We think it is a great bill.

I just want to start by acknowledging the member who introduced the bill, the Hon Nikki Kaye, who has since left. Nikki Kaye put her heart and soul into this bill. She fought hard for it. She was a member of Parliament with very strong beliefs. She was determined that New Zealand kids would have access to the enormous cognitive, cultural, social, and economic benefits that come from having the opportunity to learn a second language in those early years of education. As most people would be aware, at most secondary schools we have the opportunity to learn different languages, but at primary and intermediate schools it is much more mixed—certainly, I didn’t learn any at my primary and intermediate school. So Nikki Kaye fought very hard for this. She managed to convince the Minister Chris Hipkins for Labour to support this at first reading, and Nikki Kaye certainly had an indefatigable style about her argumentation. She was like a dog at a bone with these issues and she fought very hard for this bill. In fact, her basic style was to hammer away so that people would eventually give in to whatever she was arguing for, just to get her to stop, and it was quite effective. I’m sure she applied that technique on the Minister. I was glad that he gave us the opportunity for this to be considered.

So the first reading was passed. It went off to the Education and Workforce Committee, and there was very considerable support for this bill at the select committee stage. We saw the many, many submitters from an enormous variety of backgrounds coming in, excited about the possibility that a language from their culture—whether it is Punjabi or Tamil or Samoan or Tagalog or Korean or a whole bunch of languages, they all came up with very convincing arguments as to why their language should be one of the 10.

Now, the worrying thing is that members on the other side—Labour—indicated during the select committee process that they no longer support the bill and, indeed, want to kill it. My hope is that the Minister will take a much more considered view and reconsider that and maybe even find it in his heart to support it at the second reading and continue the conversation about any changes that could be made at the Supplementary Order Paper level, at the next level, in order to get this piece of legislation through. I’m desperately sorry for Nikki Kaye that we appear to have missed an opportunity to equip our children at our schools with the opportunity to learn a second language, particularly given that we are in Chinese Language Week this week and we’ll have lots of discussions about that.

At my local primary school in Auckland, around 50 percent—and I’m not exaggerating: 50 percent—of the new entrants at our school do not have English as their first language; they are mainly Mandarin speakers. Our education system is proving to be brilliant at bringing in kids that are multilingual—or have the potential to be multilingual—and churning them out as monolingual English speakers at the end. That’s a real missed opportunity. I can certainly understand why parents of those Chinese-speaking kids would be very keen for their children to have the opportunity at school to continue learning their language in order to bed it in so that they can continue on in life as multilingual or bilingual speakers. There are many other cultures in our city in that case. But apparently that is not to be the case.

It seems to me that the situation we’re facing is, as one submitter put, that “the perfect is the enemy of the good”. By that, they meant that the opposition to the bill seems to look at the broad situation in New Zealand and conclude that te reo Māori is the absolute priority and, until everybody in this country is bilingual in that, we shouldn’t be looking further afield, effectively. I’d be interested to hear what the Minister has to say on this topic. I think that is a mistake. Fundamentally, our party comes from one of choice. Nothing in this bill takes away the existing obligation on schools to ensure that all schools have teaching in te reo Māori and tikanga Māori available and makes best endeavours to achieve that. So every child, in theory, should have access to an element of that. It is a separate question to decide: “Well, do you want to study, in depth, that particular language through your primary and intermediate school years?” The reality of the situation is that some will and some won’t. There will be children from many cultural backgrounds, in particular, who would be more engaged and more interested in picking up their language as a second language, and they are not going to have the choice if that carries on, and I think that would be a pity.

So if we looked at some of the submissions—and there were many, many; the Asia New Zealand Foundation made some very strong points—it is a remarkable fact that, in the last decade, the number of children in our school learning Asian languages has decreased by 29 percent. So there is nearly 30 percent fewer children in our schools learning Asian languages than there were a decade ago, and at a time when we are trading more with Asia, our economy depends on trade with our region, with our neighbours, and in an era where we will face the reality of China being an enormously powerful country over the next few decades—and, at that time, we are turning inwards rather than outwards and looking out to the rest of the world. I think that is a tragedy and it is a real missed opportunity. As a result of that, we sometimes forget that we do have neighbours and that we can learn about them and their cultures and learn to communicate with them and trade with them and understand where they come from.

So here we are at a time when everybody across the House agrees—it appears to me—that the discipline of learning a second language is a good idea, useful, and something we should support, but we are faced with a Government that says, “Yes, but that second language has to be te reo Māori, and if this bill doesn’t achieve that”—which it doesn’t, because it provides choice—“then we’ll not support that.” It was summed up to me by one of the ministry officials who said, “The problem with this bill is that it offers schools and parents an open-ended choice, when what they really need is a guided choice as to what they should learn.” That struck me as a rather Orwellian way to go about education policy. I do hope that the Minister reconsiders in the next few minutes. Thank you very much.

It’s a pleasure to take a call on this bill, and I too want to begin by acknowledging the bill’s original sponsor, the Hon Nikki Kaye, who, as Paul Goldsmith so eloquently put, harassed me into agreeing to support the bill at first reading. I did so with a good degree of enthusiasm but with also some concerns about the bill.

Let me talk about the enthusiasm first. Ultimately, I understand completely how important language is to everybody throughout the country but also, particularly, to those communities where English is a second language for them and where they want their young people to grow up with access to what has been their primary language. I absolutely understand how very significant that is. I understand, and the Government understands, how important te reo Māori is to our Māori communities, but actually to the wider New Zealand community, and how important it is that we foster and cultivate te reo Māori as a language in New Zealand. We have not done a good job of that in our recent past, and we need to do better. I want to acknowledge the many Pacific communities who have indicated and expressed their passion for their languages and their desire to see them better represented within our education system, and I also acknowledge the importance and the special role that we have in New Zealand in protecting the Realm languages—those for the Realm countries—and I acknowledge that.

Language is intrinsic to who we are, and, therefore, it is important that people see their language represented in learning. But there are wider benefits to language than just that. There are actually cognitive benefits in learning a second language. People who learn a second language tend to do better in their first language than they otherwise would have done. It can help with things like long-term problem solving. There are really good studies that demonstrate the benefits of second language learning. So Mr Goldsmith is absolutely correct that the Government completely supports the objectives of this bill.

When we approach this topic, though, it’s worth remembering we’re not starting from scratch. There is second language learning happening in our schools at the moment. So if we just take last year as an example, there were 126,000 enrolments in years 1 to 8—primary and intermediate years—for students learning a language other than English or te reo Māori. To give a breakdown of those, 54,700 of those were enrolments in Asian languages—these are Asian languages at the primary and intermediate school level—49,400 were in European languages, 7,900 were in Pacific language—I have to confess that was lower than I thought, in terms of Pacific languages—and around 14,300 were other languages. These are all second languages. There are a further 176,500 year 1 to 8 children—primary and intermediate aged children—who are learning te reo Māori either as a second language or as their primary language of instruction through our Māori-medium settings. Already, more than 15 different languages are offered in our primary and intermediate schools, so it’s not correct to say that we haven’t already made a start as a country. We are doing language learning. There can be more of it, and we should certainly be focused on that.

But I want to turn now to the concerns that I raised when the bill was introduced. I had many conversations with the Hon Nikki Kaye about these, because they’re not insurmountable challenges. But, unfortunately, the bill that we have before us in the House today doesn’t deal with these issues.

First and foremost, I have to say—as the Minister responsible, should this bill pass, with implementing it—there’s no reference whatsoever to the very significant resourcing implications of this. We could not pass this bill in good conscience knowing that the education system would not be able to deliver. We would passing a law that the education system would not have the capacity or the capability to adhere to, and that is one of the fundamental problems with the bill. So we need to have a pathway. If we want to improve language learning in our schools, we must put in place a pathway that leads us there. It is not going to happen simply by Parliament passing a law.

We’re talking hundreds of millions of dollars in extra funding. We’re going to need to be strategic about that. We’re going to need to make sure that we’ve got the workforce in place who are able to deliver on the commitments. This bill is completely silent on those issues. No consideration appears to have been given by the member currently sponsoring it to how those issues might be addressed, and that is, realistically, a big stumbling block to being able to pass the legislation in its current form.

It also doesn’t consider the language learning pathway through a student’s life. While it focuses on primary and intermediate school levels, it doesn’t then consider the language learning pathway through secondary education. I think it would be wrong to say to young people in a primary school that they could undertake language learning which they then couldn’t continue in secondary schooling because we just haven’t thought that far ahead. Actually, if we’re going to do something like this as a Parliament, we have to actually make sure it’s coherent, it’s well-thought-out, and it’s well structured. This bill does not do that, unfortunately.

It doesn’t recognise that te reo Māori has special significance in New Zealand, and that is a flaw with the bill, and it also doesn’t recognise the importance of Pacific languages and the Realm languages in particular. So those are weaknesses.

I want to recognise the recommendation of the select committee that the House not proceed with the bill and instead propose the development of a national languages strategy. I think that provides the opportunity to take this debate forward, to take forward the very many positive submissions put forward at select committee—the very heartfelt and passionate submissions asking for more action in this area. We can take those forward with the development of a national languages strategy, and that is exactly what this Government is going to do. So I have already asked the Ministry of Education to start working on that, to ensure that we develop the strategy, in consultation with parents, teachers, schools, and communities, so that people can continue to have their say on this, they can continue to express those views, and so that we can work through the very many issues that this process, unfortunately, was not able to address.

That can also deal with issues like the place of the Realm languages and other Pacific languages in New Zealand. It can deal with issues like the capacity and the capability of the teaching workforce to be able to deliver on it. It can deal with the debates, like how prescriptive we want to be in our curriculum around which languages schools should offer and how we guide school’s decisions about this. Simply putting another burden on schools without giving them the resources—and by resources I’m not just talking money; I’m talking other resources—to be able to actually grapple with that, that wouldn’t be right, it wouldn’t be fair, and we can deal with that through the development of the languages strategy. That will align with the work that my colleague the Hon Jan Tinetti is doing around the refresh of the New Zealand curriculum, so I think the development of the languages strategy is the way to take this forward.

The Government is not opposing this bill because we’re opposed to the concept of second language learning; we are absolutely very, very supportive of that, we absolutely recognise the views that were put forward by submitters, and we do want to see this work progressed. The bill itself is flawed. It doesn’t provide a platform that is implementable. It doesn’t consider the resourcing issues that passing the bill would throw up, and they are not insignificant. They are hundreds of millions—not quite $4 billion, but hundreds of millions—of dollars that would have to go into implementing this. No consideration of that has been given.

I want to acknowledge, again, both of the members. The Hon Nikki Kaye, I think did put her heart and soul into this legislation and into the topic and into the portfolio, in fact. I had a good working relationship with her in the time that she was the Opposition spokesperson for education, and I want to thank her for that and thank her for the work that she has done there. I want to acknowledge the current member in charge of the bill. I won’t let the fact that he just now did an absolutely dreadful speech introducing the second reading of the bill dissuade me from the fact that it still has a lot of merit and that the topic, in fact, is one that is worthy of taking forward. I certainly hope that we can continue to progress these debates. I know the member will be disappointed that the Government’s not supporting the bill, but I hope that he will continue to engage constructively—maybe start engaging constructively, given that he hasn’t actually spoken to me about the bill at all since he took over the sponsorship of it—with the Government on the topic, because I do think that there is common ground that we can find here. I do think we can take forward the issue around getting more language learning happening in schools. I think there would be huge educational benefits for all of our tamariki, and, if we can continue to progress that, then certainly the Government is keen to take that forward.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’m pleased to take what will be a short call on the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. I say “a short call” because it’s obvious where this bill is going tonight, and that is that it will not proceed.

But I would like to start by acknowledging Nikki Kaye and the incredible work she did around this bill and the fact that she started the conversation—through her unique way of doing that, she got us all to this point where we are now talking, and the Minister of Education is now talking, about a national languages strategy. That is something that would not be under way if it wasn’t for the very tenacious Nikki Kaye, so we owe her a huge debt of gratitude.

I was looking back over her first reading speech, and she acknowledged in that speech that the bill wasn’t perfect. She knew that there were flaws in the bill, and she had hoped that some of those things would be able to be ironed out through the select committee process and via working with the Minister. But, as it turned out at select committee, some of those things were insurmountable and not able to be worked through. In fact, I would actually argue that there wasn’t much appetite to actually work through those issues collegially. It was very apparent quite early on, in fact, in the select committee that this bill wasn’t going to stand a chance.

But, in saying that, I would like to thank all of the submitters who came. They were incredibly passionate about the languages that they came to represent. My favourite submitter was—I forget his name—the man who came to talk to us about Latin. Never had I wanted to learn Latin so much in my entire life than after listening to that man and his particularly passionate speech about Latin.

What this has done, though, has made us all think about the incredible benefits of learning a second language in terms of brain development, cultural competency, and economic impact with the business and trade links that open up to us if we speak multiple languages. If you think about every other country in the world, or most other countries in the world, they offer second languages, in fact, many countries offer more than one language. And if you look at countries like the UK, who have just adopted this within the last decade, we are certainly far behind those other countries. We had with this bill, I guess, a really wonderful opportunity to give our youngest learners—our year 1 to 8s—the opportunity to develop parts of their brains that they wouldn’t otherwise have the opportunity to do, by learning a second language, learning about other people’s cultures, and opening their minds to the world.

We heard from the ministry that their view was that the bill wasn’t consistent with the Treaty of Waitangi, and we did point out that this didn’t take away from the things that already exist. School boards have to make best efforts to have te reo Māori and tikanga Māori in their schools—it didn’t take away that, it just added something extra on top. We have to remember that in reality, most schools would have chosen te reo Māori, around the country, and would have been funded for that. So the fact that we’re not passing this bill tonight is really taking away a huge amount of benefit to the Māori language and the fact that it won’t be able to be funded in that way, and so we go back to what we already have.

The bill, although it had flaws—and the Minister mentioned some of those, and we weren’t able to work through those—has returned unchanged. It did have some quite good parts to it in that it required school boards to consult with their communities and to make sure that they selected a priority language that was in keeping with the wishes of their community and their parents. As I said, most schools would have chosen te reo Māori, I believe.

So while we’re not progressing with this bill, I’d like to reiterate what I said at the start, which is that we now are at a much more progressed state than we were before Nikki Kaye fought so hard for this bill. I was encouraged by the Minister’s words in his speech about how much he values the learning of a second language for our youngest learners and he fact that he has got the ministry doing work on that is extremely encouraging. I think that if Nikki Kaye is watching or goes back and watches these speeches, she will feel encouraged and proud that she started the conversation and that work is under way that would not have been under way, and that work would not have been done if it was not for her efforts—incredible efforts—in this area. So, Nikki, well done, and we will keep fighting. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

I’d firstly like to acknowledge the member across the House the Hon Paul Goldsmith for his enthusiasm—almost four months too early to acknowledge Chinese Language Week, but it’s great that you understand the importance of these weeks to lifting the profile of language learning in this country, so ni hao. I just want to start by going to The New Zealand Curriculum, because it’s a critical part of how we address the challenges that have quite rightly been brought to this House. “Ko tōu reo, ko tōku reo, te tuakiri tangata. Tīhei uriuri, tīhei nakonako. Your voice and my voice are expressions of identity. May our descendants live on and our hopes be fulfilled.” Ambitious words from Te Ao Māori in our New Zealand Curriculum. I think these really help us.

I think everybody’s already talked about the why; the why is actually quite easy. Again, like the other speakers before me, I acknowledge the communities and the individuals and the professionals who came and submitted—the more than 130 who made written submissions and the dozens who turned up to share their experiences and their knowledge with us. As far as the why, a few things stood out to me. The New Zealand Sikh Youth community came and eloquently talked to us about intercommunal integration—that language connects us with our own culture and with each other. We heard from professionals who really clearly understand about identity, engagement, and wellbeing when language is included in our curriculum. We heard from a parent who talked about her children feeling at home and settled if they felt acknowledged through their language being acknowledged. The Punjabi women’s association from Wellington talked about improving ethnic cohesion and their opportunity to change public perceptions of second language speakers so that New Zealanders will cease to experience the “Speak English” challenge on the bus or in the supermarket. The why is easy.

So what is happening? How are we rising to this challenge? Because it is absolutely appropriate that our Minister of Education has a very significant role to play in this, nationally. So what is happening? We already heard from the Minister about the numbers of students engaged and the numbers of languages being engaged with in schools. We were told by schools that they can already explore any language, and you see it happening, and well. They told us it’s because they’ve got access to resources, not because they’ve been made to do it.

I just need to reflect for a moment. I need to acknowledge a fabulous little school down the road in Te Aro, and I need to share with the House the experiences, as a member of that school community for a few years, of their commitment to their students, from day one right through to the end of year 8, learning Mandarin and Chinese culture—not just language but calligraphy and art, celebrating New Year—because they had support from the Asia New Zealand Foundation and from the Ministry. We also got to experience Matariki—not just te reo, but the wonderful celebrations and rituals that have been brought from Te Ao Māori. Alongside that was their ability to nurture first languages, home languages, heritage languages, so their students felt included and knew that they were valued. But that required commitment from the community to bring the experts in and support the teachers in what they were trying to do, to support and engage their students.

The Post Primary Teachers’ Association told us the desire, the will, is absolutely there to improve the provision—we know why—but that provision isn’t everywhere. We need to look, again, to our submitters, to work out what it is we need to do to improve the situation. Again, like the other speakers, I need to reflect on the fact the intent of the bill is a very solid one: it is to make it easier for schools to provide at least one additional language to their students. So what was the plan in the bill? Well, first of all, the Government decides 10 priority languages to be resourced—I know it is a minimum, but Mr Goldsmith did tell us that you needed to be quite diligent about not spreading a resource too far. So the Government will decide the 10—and we had more than a dozen languages proposed as those which those 10 should be—and then the school community will consult. The school community decides the one—probably—that attracts the additional resourcing.

There are unintended consequences to this. This approach is not inclusive or student centred. It could undermine the other commitments the school has to te reo. It’s been made clear that it doesn’t preclude other languages being included, but it makes it very difficult. So how do you decide—as a Government or as a school? Is it the largest group in the community? Is it the easiest to resource? We heard from Berhampore School, from Mark, the principal there, who said he’s got over 35 languages in his school, and there was something quite sad when he said the one that was the hardest to resource the teaching of was te reo. So the solutions to this problem are very complex and they are not going to be fixed by compulsion and a bit of cash being given to a school board to enable them to make some decisions. The general policy statement says the Government is to “fund professional development, language specialists and online resources”. These grants are to be paid to boards. There is nothing strategic, sustainable, efficient, or effective about doing it this way; 2,500 school communities making their own decisions is not going to make sure that we make progress.

So what do we do? How do we respond to the passionate, committed communities and teachers who came and shared their experiences and knowledge with us? How do we support those pockets of excellence, the exceptions to becoming the norm, in every school, whether they are a school that already has 65 communities represented or a school that has only two or three, a school that is in the middle of an urban setting like Te Aro or a rural community that needs access via online learning, for example? Compulsion doesn’t solve the problem; we need a better plan.

So that is why it is with great pleasure that we support the idea of a national languages strategy. What will it do? It will build on the current work that’s happening—there’s a curriculum refresh going on, we have NCEA being developed, and, of course, we’ve got policy development around Māori medium, Pacific bilingualism, and immersion.

So what do we need to do? We need to take note of what is working. Those little pockets of miracles around the country—how do we scale that and sustain it? We need to look at the current resources that we heard about in the Education and Workforce Committee: the rich resources that come from our communities, professional development opportunities, the Virtual Learning Network, Te Aho o Te Kura Pounamu, Auckland University dropping in, Asia New Zealand Foundation, other Governments, Kāhui Ako collaborations, churches, and community schools on weekends. The people and the knowledge and the commitment are there; we just need to make sure it’s coherent and cohesive so we can leverage off that. The opportunities to hook into a language learning pathway—how does The New Zealand Curriculum really fit into this, and how do we develop subjects through NCEA? The opportunity to engage and consult with our communities, with iwi, and with kids is a really, really important part of this strategy. And, of course, finally, workforce development—it’s a long-term plan but one that is absolutely important.

We need a coherent and strategic development, in collaboration with the wider community, of a strategy; support for effective and appropriate programmes in the short term; and staged investment and development over the medium and long term. We must include considerations around workforce and resource development and wider curriculum expectations. And we need to make sure that—unlike the proposition from across the House that there’s a suggestion we are trying to kill this—what we are going to do is feed it and make sure that our languages grow and thrive. I commend the idea that this bill is going to be turned down to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I’d just like to thank my colleague Angela Roberts for sharing her whakaaro and this hard work that the select committee did on this bill. They could see that the intentions on this bill were really, really strong, but I was just reminded of a whakataukī which goes: “Mate atu he tētē kura, ara mai rā he tētē kura.”—when one fern frond perishes another rises to take its place. So I was buoyed to hear that there will be a national languages strategy policy coming from that corner of the House. So all of the submissions that were made during the select committee process will hopefully—should, right?—feed into what this language strategy should look like. I think that’s something that we should be looking forward to.

This Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill, we supported to the select committee because we felt that these ideas needed to be talked about, they needed to be teased out. But in order to actually carry the intentions from one place to another the waka needs to be waterproof. The waka needs to be able to float on the water to actually get from one part of the river to the other. I think the select committee were correct in terms of the majority recommendations in the report that this waka, unfortunately, had some holes in it. So that national languages policy strategy would be really great once it gets up and going to sort of kick that around the select committee room, around the halls here as well to see where that will go.

One of the major holes was actually being able to properly acknowledge the place of te reo Māori—being able to properly acknowledge the place of te reo Māori in Aotearoa New Zealand. We’ve got the Māori Language Act. I was fortunate to just come from the theatrette where Rāwiri Paratene is doing a performance in there, and in that theatre is actually a lot of these Māori language advocates. A lot of these Māori language advocates who came to the steps of Parliament to lay down the take and lay down the wero about making sure that we recognise the indigenous language of Aotearoa New Zealand, te reo Māori. Because the thing about te reo Māori is that it was my parents—my mother was in the generation that when she was at school they’d just get whacked. They’d just get whacked for speaking te reo Māori. Because on the balance, colonisation was not good for te reo Māori. On the balance, colonisation was not good for indigenous peoples at all. On the balance, it is really important that when we talk about second language acquisition and language acquisition as well, that we properly place all of that within the context of the indigenous languages of the place that we’re in, Aotearoa New Zealand. So for me, having a list of priority languages is one thing, but you also must also ground that within the official languages of the country, of the whenua, so that’s te reo Māori, that’s sign language, and, of course, the language that we generally speak in this House, English.

There are a couple of other things. I’m going to keep going on about the national languages strategies because I know that a lot of people working trying to support the heritage languages of our Pasifika languages would like to see some of that support going to some of our early childhood education (ECE) units, our Pasifika ECE learning places. Just to reflect on the state of the Pasifika Realm languages, so I’m talking about Cook Islands Māori, we’re talking about a Vagahau Niue, I’m talking about Tokelauan, and then also the significant numbers of people from Samoa and Tonga as well, and the long history that Aotearoa has with, between, Samoa and Tonga, and also around the Pacific Realm as well.

Because it’s more than just the language. Language is also about identity as well. It’s about helping young people and children to ground themselves in terms of their cultural identity, what that means for them in their communities, what that means in terms of the connection that they build with their communities, and also within other communities as well. That helps with a whole lot of things. That helps with child wellbeing, helps with whānau wellbeing, but also helps with community wellbeing as well. So when the national languages policy comes out I would like to see a really strong emphasis on making sure that those things are there for our Pasifika languages, our Pacific Realm languages, and also stepping out for Samoan and Tongan as well.

I think there also needs to be the other focus on the maintenance of heritage languages as well. Because when people come here, they come here with their languages. So it’s not like some nice extra thing where they roll in to school and so on and so forth and they pick it off a shelf and go, “You know what, that’s nice.” Actually, for a lot of our migrant kids these are the languages that helps to keep them grounded within their communities as well. So having that included into a national language policy is really important.

Probably my final reflection is just for us to be aware of the linguistic context that we are here in New Zealand. New Zealand is a very monolingual country, and I don’t think monolingual people really realise how different that is compared to a lot of the other places around the world. You go to Europe and you’ll listen to five languages on the street. I’ve got heaps of friends that can speak multiple languages. You go to Asia and Africa and it’s the same thing as well. So being fixated just on secondary languages when, actually, what we could be focusing on is tertiary languages and multilingualism as well. Because what we know is once you’ve learnt your second language, then the third one becomes a lot easier because you can code switch between those first two languages and on to the other languages as well.

So just to end, the intentions of this bill continue, and I look forward to working constructively across the House to make sure that those intentions grow fruitful. Nō reira, tēnā koutou katoa.

Madam Speaker, tēnā koe. It’s an honour to speak on this bill, the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. This is my first call since I have returned to the House following the birth of my son James, and I just wanted to take this opportunity to thank my colleagues for assisting me during the time that I had on leave and also my colleagues from both sides of the House, now that I’ve returned to Parliament. So thank you very much for that.

It’s a pleasure to take a call on a matter that I feel very strongly about, and that is the issue of learning a second language. This bill was originally, as we’ve heard, introduced by the Hon Nikki Kaye and then on her retirement from this House adopted by the Hon Paul Goldsmith. I also, along with my other colleagues, wanted to pay tribute to both of them for bringing this important issue before the House.

You will recall that my Labour colleagues voted for this bill at first reading. I was also privileged to be on the select committee for part of the consideration of this bill, not the entire consideration, but part of it. On the select committee, we received a large number of submissions highlighting more than a dozen languages, all diverse, all important as possible second languages. The most suggested language was actually Urdu. As part of our considerations, we also heard from the Minister and from the ministry. Just this morning, we were in select committee, the Education and Workforce Committee, and we heard Minister Hipkins. He was asked about this bill and he emphasised that he is a big fan of second languages, as indeed am I.

We also heard in the reports and from experts that there are many benefits, both cognitively for children who learn second languages and in terms of cultural understanding. In fact, this year there are more than 126,000 enrolments in years 1 to 8 learning a language other than English or te reo Māori at school, and this was reflected in the committee’s final report that was delivered to this House. It also reflects what was identified by teachers, principals, and education unions who submitted on this bill. The report identified a space for growth in the education workforce capacity to teach second languages and also to ensure substantive consultation and resourcing, and that a considered implementation in this area would be warmly welcomed.

However, not every tool is suitable for every task, and indeed it is the case with this bill. There are three key concerns with this bill, and I think some of these were touched on by the previous speakers. The first is that the bill would make second language learning in primary and intermediate schools mandatory. There is currently no such requirement in primary or intermediate schools. As you would expect, this comes with some significant cost. In this case, we’ve just heard from the Minister that to implement this bill would cost hundreds of millions.

The second issue with this bill is that it requires a significant workforce in order to implement the proposed mandatory language learning. This workforce currently does not exist in New Zealand. So even if the funding did exist, the workforce does not exist to deliver this bill. This is in part due to teacher shortages that occurred under the previous National Government, and we in this Labour Government have been investing in teacher training and we are seeing the numbers of teachers increase, actually. However, for this bill to be implemented, we would need many, many more teachers.

The third reason that I wanted to highlight, which has also been touched on by a member opposite, was that during the select committee process we also received advice from the Ministry of Education raising concerns regarding our obligations under Te Tiriti o Waitangi in relation to te reo Māori. It is for these reasons and for other considerations that we would not be supporting this bill to move forward.

However, that does not mean that there is no need for further work on the issue of second language learning. In fact, it is my view that we as a country must do better in this area. This is why the Government, as we’ve heard the Minister announce today, has a new strategy to address this issue. This national languages strategy, that we just heard the Minister announce this evening, will focus on talking to parents, teachers, schools, and communities. And it is my view that that is the appropriate way to develop such a strategy in order to further second language learning.

I just wanted to take another moment, before we move on to that strategy, to just reflect on what this bill would have done had it been implemented—just to emphasise the position that we’re taking on this side of the House. This bill would have led to the identification of least 10 priority languages. Then schools would have been funded to deliver their priority language, and that priority language would have been a language that was determined by their board of trustees. This bill would not have taken due regard, in my view, of the place of te reo Māori, te reo tūturu o tēnei whenua, the original language of New Zealand. It does not recognise a special place of Pacific languages, in particular the importance of Pacific Realm languages. It also does not, in my view, take due regard to New Zealand Sign Language, our other official language.

It does not provide for some communities that may have more than one important heritage language that they wish to resource at the same level, and I think this point was raised by my colleague already. It does not provide for transitions from schools with different priority languages. The situation of a student in primary school having one priority language and then not being able to learn it at high school would be a concerning situation. And it does not address the issue of curriculum crowding, which I understand, for those who are educators, is a legitimate concern. It does also not address the shortage of teachers that New Zealand currently has for just one language, te reo Māori. This language, as we’ve heard—and I think we need to emphasise—is an extremely important language, unique to this country.

As I’ve said, not every tool is suitable for every task. And so that is why at select committee we recommended that we not vote for this bill now at second reading, but we will be developing a national languages strategy. This strategy that should be developed, as I’ve said, with parents, teachers, schools, and communities will provide a robust framework for sustainable provision of second language learning in New Zealand. Such a strategy could incorporate existing programmes, new programmes, and, with the help of the Ministry of Education, look for what more is needed for teachers in this space.

A well-thought-out implementation that considers the wider aims of the school curriculum and allows schools to tailor learning to individual students’ needs—these are the things which we should include in a national languages strategy, which, as the Minister has said, is the likely conclusion of this bill not going through to a second reading. It’s also important to take a holistic view of education, in my view. The Minister of Education recently announced a programme for curriculum refresh. By developing a strategy with this curriculum refresh in mind, I think we can set the scene for a refresh of our curriculum, including languages, as a whole.

Now, I just wanted to also reflect on my personal experience with second language learning. I was actually incredibly lucky to learn a second language at primary school. The language that I learnt was te reo Māori. I learnt it in a bilingual class at Thorndon primary school, which is not too far away from where we are now. I felt hugely honoured to be able to learn that language in that context, and then I followed through to do Māori as a subject at secondary school in what was then bursary, which is showing my age a wee bit. I then went on to do a degree in Māori studies. I did not realise at the time that I was learning te reo Māori how unique I was in terms of a Pākehā child in the history of this country being able to learn te reo Māori at a State school. I felt incredibly honoured when I became aware of the huge work that went into promoting te reo Māori in what’s known as the Māori renaissance before I was born and before I entered into the education system. Learning te reo Māori has been a significant gift for me and one that has given me great insights into myself and into my place in New Zealand as a Pākehā New Zealander, and for that reason I’m in support of second language learning.

However, as I said, not every tool is suitable for every task. And so in relation to this particular issue, I think we will not be supporting this bill, but we would hope to acknowledge the work done by those on the other side and also continue this incredibly important kōrero that will, I hope, assist our children in being mostly bilingual by the time that they finish primary school and, if not primary school, secondary school. Thank you.

I call Mark Baillie.

💬 Chris Baillie: Chris—close.

ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Hon Jacqui Dean): Chris, I beg your pardon. I call Chris Baillie.

I rise to take a short call on the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. ACT opposed this bill at first reading but understand its importance. The reason for this isn’t the intent; teaching a second language is a great thing. It’s something we should be encouraging if it’s feasible and desirable for a school and its students. My own kids many years ago became quite fluent in Spanish from watching Dora the Explorer. Young people just soak it up and this has to be encouraged. The reason for ACT’s opposition is not the intent of the bill but the way Parliament, along with so much of how it seeks to involve itself in education, seeks to mandate and restrict the choices of schools.

Submitters provided an insight into just how many languages are spoken in New Zealand: many more than 10 and all very important to them to retain their self-identity. If this was a policy to provide more funding for schools to decide where and what they should target and the best way that suited their students, that would be great. That would get our support. The point is school choice in tailoring their resources to their particular students and circumstances. It is a principle that is fundamental to ACT’s approach to education. Where this bill and so much education policy from Parliament seeks to mandate and restrict; ACT wants to free up and allow choice. It’s why we proposed our own teacher reward fund to allow schools to reward demonstrations of excellence. It’s why we believe strongly in charter schools.

This kind of approach could be used by schools to incentivise second-language teachers to come to their school, to reward a particular demonstration of excellence in second-language teaching, or to support extra-curricular support provided from teachers who help students with languages. Schools can determine what is best for their students based on their own community demographics and teacher availability. The difference is that the resources provided at the discretion of the school itself; not mandated from Wellington. A number of submitters and committee members were worried that this bill would undermine the current teaching and progression of te reo Māori in New Zealand schools. I don’t believe this would be the case, and ACT believes all New Zealand children should be catered for and treated equally. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

Thank you, Madam Speaker, for the opportunity to take this call on the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. Now, I, like my previous colleagues, rise in opposition to this bill. I also rise as the chair of the Education and Workforce Committee who considered this bill, and many of my members on this committee, including the member who just took a seat, Chris Baillie, have spoken on this bill already.

I guess, for the benefit of the House—we haven’t really gone through the history of this bill. So I’d like to just quickly run through the history that this bill has followed. It got introduced in September 2018 and then initially referred, in the 52nd Parliament, to our select committee on 1 July 2020. Submissions were opened up with a closing date of 28 January 2021, and we received a lot of submissions, 313 to be to be correct, and many people also submitted to us in person. So 35 submitters in total came either to Wellington or submitted to us by Zoom. I know that Erica Stanford singled out a specific submitter, and it is a bit dangerous to do because many of the submissions were very passionate and very heartfelt. And it would be remiss of me not to mention the specific one from the Malaysian and Indonesian ambassadors on Bahasa Indonesia. But the president of the New Zealand Association of Classical Teachers, his name was Robert, Erica Stanford.

💬 Erica Stanford: Oh, Robert. He was amazing.

His name was Robert. And so here is the proof—the living proof for you. So I had six languages in school, and as they say, it improves your neurological and other pathways in your brain. I managed to retain, for some reason, this piece of information when I can’t remember what I had for breakfast this morning. I don’t know what I’m trying to prove here but anyway, so there it is. We saw so many submitters from such a wide variety of backgrounds, all really good, heartfelt submissions. We saw educators, education-based unions, cultural groups, community groups, a district health board from Canterbury, and also many who spoke on their background and experience as teachers and from their teaching backgrounds.

The views of the submitters and main issues raised can fit into a few distinct but clearly interconnected categories, as we have detailed in our final report. And many have spoken on it, but I’d just like to reiterate that. Firstly, there was an overarching concern when it came to the resource and funding that would be required to give effect to this bill, and the Minister himself mentioned the hundreds of millions of dollars of extra funding that would be required. But also, we did hear very clearly from our advisers that this bill would impose obligations on schools that they cannot fulfil. Submitters told us that there was a relatively small workforce equipped with teaching second languages, and that leads to predictable issues with retention of teachers or even just having to resource them in the first place. Already there is an obligation on schools, we mentioned this in our report, and I quote, “Take all reasonable steps to make instruction available in tikanga Māori and te reo Māori.” But several principals and education unions expressed that meeting this obligation is already a real challenge for the school’s capacity. We heard from the Waitakere Area Principals’ Association representing over 100 schools, and he told us that while they’re in support of any initiative for our children, they also called themselves pragmatists. They said that this bill would increase the workload and put pressure on the schools to a point that it wouldn’t be to the best experience of the students because of that additional pressure. So we heard that from several principals with up to and even over 30 years of experience and teaching background.

The second main issue that we put in our report was in the way we were thinking about te reo Māori in relation to other languages in schools. The Ministry of Education noted in their report to our committee that, in their view, “The bill is so significant for Māori that enactment without full consultation with iwi, hapū and whānau Māori would be inconsistent with the Māori-Crown partnership.” So they said that the passage of this bill in itself, in fact, without the consultation would be a breach of Te Tiriti. And they said it couldn’t be resolved by amending the bill.

So we also saw a similar concern from NZTI Te Riu Roa, noting in their submission that te reo should be a priority as one of the official languages of New Zealand. Particularly, they also mentioned the challenges that schools already face when it comes to teaching te reo. They mentioned, and I quote, “We need to make sure we look after the priority languages we have already recognised before we move into others.” The Post Primary Teachers’ Association also spoke about another concern, basically saying that having a student go through primary school learning a language and then perhaps only finding out once they go to intermediate or college that the language is not available would be a source of great frustration.

It was already noted before that the smaller workforce of teachers that can teach te reo is an underlying issue, which is leading to limitations in support for those teachers to be able to take non - class time for further development. And this is something that we heard very clearly from NZEI again, who told us quite plainly that one thing needed to be done properly and then others will follow.

We heard from submitters, and many were at pains to tell us about benefits that they knew firsthand from knowing a second language, some I already mentioned before with my particular example. But they also spoke about social development, cultural competency, and other real benefits. We did hear from submitters and from many cultural groups talking about many of the languages that they would like to see taught in schools, and we had dozens of proposals put to us. But as it was said before, what this bill doesn’t do, it doesn’t recognise the huge workload, the huge resource, the huge funding that would be required to upskill our teaching workforce in being able to teach 10 different languages, let alone to carry it out in practice as well. So while we recognise there is a very strong and a very justified support for improving access to learning other languages, the majority of our select committee, as is shown in the report, didn’t think that this particular bill is the most appropriate way of achieving it.

Instead, as has been mentioned, we believe that a national languages strategy could help and provide a useful framework for both existing and new programmes so that New Zealanders would be given more opportunities to learn other languages. So what this strategy would do is it would allow for more comprehensive consultation to take place. And again, as the Minister also mentioned, taking, of course, forward the submissions that we heard, taking the debate in itself that we have engaged in forward, to come to a really good place when it comes to developing and having the kōrero on the national languages strategy. And, in fact, it was great to hear the Minister mention that he had already asked the Ministry of Education to start work on this particular bill.

So I guess in my last minute, I would like to just thank those who supported our select committee with their work on this bill. A lot of work goes on behind the scenes and not always are we, you know, thanking those enough. So that’s our officials, our advisers, our fantastic Office of the Clerk team who’s helping us in our select committee, all my committee members, and also not forgetting Nikki Kaye, who was the member who brought this forward. As a previous speaker mentioned, that all contributes to having that debate on the importance of a national language strategy. But I do have to finalise in my last few seconds by just making sure that I do not recommend this bill to the House. Thank you.

Five minute call, Nicola Grigg.

Madam Speaker, thank you. I rise just to take a short call—I’m apparently sharing it with Ingrid Leary, across the House—on the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill. Sadly, though, we’re not going to be able to get this bill through, and it is really truly unfortunate that the Government has decided to vote it down. As has been acknowledged by a number of speakers prior to my taking this call, we have Nikki Kaye to thank for her tireless efforts in getting this bill up and for the huge amount of background work that has gone into it. Labour did previously support this. Again, I just have to emphasise it is so unfortunate that they’ve now decided to take this stance.

The second language learning bill and its consequent dumping that is about to happen is deeply disappointing. Killing this bill is narrow-minded. It misses a golden opportunity to equip our children with greater language skills and well-established, well-researched cognitive benefits that come with learning a second language. I think members on the other side of the House know in their hearts they’re doing the wrong thing. Many of them have got up and spoken at length to the benefits to children of learning a second language. The National Party, on this side of the House, believes that every child in primary and intermediate school should have the opportunity to learn a second language. We know, through countless studies, that speaking more than one language has enormous cognitive, cultural, social, and economic benefits, so this bill is a big opportunity for our country.

May I put on the record in this House that I am the 1992 winner of the Alliance Française competition in Christchurch.

💬 Erica Stanford: Oh, très bien!

Merci—merci. Unfortunately, I did not continue to study that language.

💬 Erica Stanford: Je suis desolée. That’s all I know!

Thank you. I’ve just momentarily been thrown off my stride. But we do know that speaking multiple languages has enormous cognitive, cultural, social, and economic benefits. New Zealand is a diverse country. We speak over 160 languages here. It’s important that our education system reflects and recognises that.

Just to conclude, this is a missed opportunity, and I have noted a number of speakers on that side of the House have got up and lamented the cost of it. Well, I ask that side of the House: since when has the Government ever worried about throwing hundreds of millions of dollars at something? Thank you.

I love the intention of this bill, as do so many of my colleagues on this side of the House. What I can’t agree with is the execution, and that is because it is not strategic, as has already been traversed. From my perspective, I’d just like to discuss, within that, the place of community when it comes to language and culture.

I love the intention because it does foster social inclusion. We know that the world is shaped by language and that language is a gateway into other people’s perspectives, into their cultures, and into their realities. From that perspective around social cohesion, it is a really important thing to do.

As has already been said, there is a lot of evidence that learning a second language enhances the neuroplasticity of the brain—particularly so for children under the age of 12. I’ve seen graphs showing different parts of the brain being used when language learners learn, under the age of 12 as opposed to over, which gives us some insights into why young children pick up languages so easily and how that enhanced neuroplasticity can stay with them.

I didn’t sit on the Education and Workforce Committee but I do have an interest in this subject because I am actually Dutch. My first language was German; I didn’t speak very much of it, but I was brought up in Germany until a very young age, probably two or three, so my first few words were German. My Dutch mother tried to teach me Dutch, and, unfortunately, we failed miserably as a team, possibly because—

💬 Marja Lubeck: Talk to me, Ingrid!

Ha, ha! Unlike the member sitting behind me, who’s a wonderful Dutch speaker. But it did teach me the importance of language. As I grew older and I had my own Rotuman children, I didn’t want them to go through the same process of not understanding a language that was in their genealogy. So I tried very hard to get my two teenaged children Rotuman language lessons when they were younger, and to the point where, actually, the Ministry of Education offered me funding to be able to set up a language-learning centre, but when I discovered that I had to have certain sized windows and doorways and all sorts of rules, it became too difficult. But it does show that I’m really committed to this.

And because I couldn’t teach them Rotuman, what I did do was I put my children through bilingual education in te reo Māori, and also I got a private tutor—I was very lucky to find somebody who lived nearby who spoke Mandarin. The reason I chose those two languages is because te reo is our first language; I consider it to be very important, and I do think that it is important that our language strategy places te reo right at the centre along with English and also sign language. But, secondly, because Mandarin, as was pointed out by one of the National speakers, is emerging as a main language in New Zealand; there are many Mandarin speakers, it is an important language. I felt that the Māori and Mandarin were at two different ends of the spectrum as far as different cultures, different experiences, and I wanted my children to have the breadth of that experience and understanding through that gateway of language.

So, really, that is to preface my pointing out in the National Party differing view, when the National Party says that the bill doesn’t breach Te Tiriti, it is saying, “Yes, learning another language is important, and New Zealand kids can learn any language they like as long as it is te reo.”—te reo is not mutually exclusive from other languages, and I do find that quite a cynical statement coming from a party that thinks, on balance, colonisation was better for Māori!

In terms of strategy, though, we’ve talked about why the bill is not strategic, and there are other things that have been discussed around capability and around resources. I thought I’d just reference the experience again with the Rotuman language, because Rotuman is now one of the nine Pacific language weeks celebrated in New Zealand. We’ve been celebrating those since 2010, and this year was the second year for Rotuman. We saw people in the House wearing tēfui, and in the Samoa Language Week that’s just been, ula fala. So we really do value that. But the community are the ones that made sure the integrity of the language was preserved, and that was through two incredible women—Rosa Penjuali and Emma Caswell.

So if we don’t have the resourcing in schools and we don’t have the teaching capability, it is the communities who will suffer, because they will not be able to keep the integrity of their language and the cultural integrity that goes with it. Communities must be part of a strategy, and currently there is no strategy—we’ve heard the Minister say, tonight, there will be a strategy; that is a way forward—and that is why we cannot commend this bill to the House.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. Just before I proceed, if anyone doubts the benefit of speaking many languages, I just want to tell them that I speak six languages. English is not even my first language. The benefit of that is what got me, maybe, here and what kept me alive. Leaving a country at a very young age, I didn’t know where I was going and I didn’t know what to expect, but the languages that I spoke along the way got me through. I could communicate with smugglers—they were kind to me. Crossing the border, I could speak to the Sudanese security—they were kind to me. And then I handed myself into a refugee camp. I could speak some English and I could speak other languages, including Arabic, and everyone was kind to me because I could communicate. So that’s one of the benefits of speaking many languages.

I rise to speak on this bill. In doing so, I do have mixed feelings, in the sense that this bill intends well. No one can argue against the intentions of this bill. It intends to strengthen access to second language learning in primary and intermediate schools, covering all school students in year 1 to 8, including junior and middle school. So this is a noble idea. No one can argue against it. That’s why the Government doesn’t really disagree with the principles and objectives of this bill.

However, this bill has its own issues, its flaws, limitations, and shortcomings. It does not, for instance, take due regard of the place of te reo Māori Act 2016, for example—the Māori Language Act—to work in partnership with iwi and Māori to actively protect te reo Māori as taonga for future generations. That’s a big issue now.

It also does not provide a language learning pathway throughout students’ schooling life. Imagine being a student all your life—throughout intermediate school—and learning a language and then to get to secondary school and for that language not to exist. Imagine the frustration after you spent all this time and all this energy and effort and that language no longer exists. I wouldn’t want to be that student.

This bill also doesn’t recognise the huge resource that could be required to upskill the teaching workforce in 10 or more languages and the impact that would have on the delivery of the rest of the curriculum. The bill as introduced presents some implementation challenges and issues that have been noted in the departmental report to the select committee. We know and we acknowledge that for some schools it’s already difficult to find a teacher to cover even core subjects, and finding even more additional language teachers would be even more difficult. This is not to mention the cost of implementation that I just mentioned above.

Throughout the select committee, myself and my colleagues engaged with open minds and with open spirit, thinking that things might work and something might change, but it didn’t. Unfortunately, we have to oppose. After hearing from education experts and many others—a lot of them stakeholders that will be impacted by the decision on this bill—we have decided to oppose it. Instead, the national languages strategy will be passed because it’s more sensible, it’s cost effective, and it’s something that will work in the future.

We heard from many, many people, and what we heard was that the legislation is not the best answer to second language learning. In saying so, my message to many, many ethnic people out there who are probably listening—and many of them submitted with enthusiasm—is we are not abandoning this. While we are not supporting this bill at this stage, we are committed in progressing its recommendations to develop a national languages policy. That’s been recommended to us because that’s the best way forward to strengthen access to language learning in schools. I’m very proud of the work that this Government intends to do, because we’re not just walking away from this; we just want to do it in a right way.

We have carefully considered all the ministry support and we have decided to adopt a national languages strategy. This would be developed in consultation with parents, teachers, schools, and communities. Now, this is something that the bill has lacked. There was nothing about consultation in the bill.

In my opening remarks, I said I had mixed feelings because I know how many migrants, how many people—many of them who I know—submitted during the select committee process. During the submissions, we heard that it’s important to keep the connection to your mother tongue when you move to a new country. Migrant families often struggle with passing on their language to their children in a host country. This is supported and shown by evidence. We understand the social and cultural costs that migrant communities face due to language loss in communities, because, when you move to a new country, one of the things that you carry with you is your language—your identity; your culture. Losing that, you lose yourself. Your kids losing that, they lose a big part of them. We know the importance of maintaining the original language, the heritable language, the language that your forefathers and your parents and your grandparents spoke. But it has to be done in the right way.

At the end, I want to acknowledge the Hon Nikki Kaye, who introduced this. I think she did that with a pure intention. As someone who speaks many languages, as a refugee and a migrant, I really want to thank her, because I can see her intention is quite pure and is well. I also want to acknowledge the Hon Paul Goldsmith, who took over and who worked hard to make sure that this works out. But, sadly, because of the shortcomings, we don’t see how the bill can work, because it’s just too expensive. It clashes and it collides with so many things. Because of that, we have adapted a different way. For now, though, we are not going to support this bill at this stage. Kia ora.

Thank you, Madam Speaker. I rise to speak in favour of the Education (Strengthening Second Language Learning in Primary and Intermediate Schools) Amendment Bill, second reading, and I acknowledge that it is a member’s bill in the name of the Hon Paul Goldsmith, but also, like other speakers, I acknowledge the enthusiastic work that has been done by Nikki Kaye on this.

As we’ve all noted, Labour previously supported National’s second language learning bill, and it’s extremely disappointing that they won’t continue to support the bill despite everyone talking about the research showing the benefits of learning a second language, and, actually, the earlier learnt the better. I am intrigued and inspired by the number of our colleagues on the other side of the House that have said how many languages they speak. As a country, we languish so far behind other countries in terms of the number of languages that many of us can speak. When I was learning German at high school, I had a German teacher who spoke six languages fluently, and he would impress upon us that this was not unusual at all; in fact, most of his classmates spoke eight languages fluently and he was considered something of a slow learner! As someone who tried and struggled to pick up both German and Latin at high school and then te reo Māori at tertiary level, I wish I had had the opportunity to learn languages much earlier.

As I speak about learning te reo Māori at tertiary level, I can’t help but mention the wonderful staff of Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, especially the wānanga staff at Southern Institute of Technology (SIT) who, over the last 20-odd years, in conjunction with SIT, have taught te reo Māori classes to thousands of people in Southland. I acknowledge the wonderful work that my very good friend Arana Collett did leading that group for many years. As a very average achiever—in fact, if I was honest, probably a very poor achiever—at languages, I really do wish that I had had that opportunity to learn languages at an earlier age. I watch two of my young grandchildren going to baby Chinese classes and singing nursery rhymes in Mandarin with ease and enthusiasm, and I look forward to my third mokopuna learning to speak te reo Māori as he grows up with his Pākehā mum and Māori dad, and both of them took Te Ara Reo Māori classes with the wānanga in Queenstown. That wānanga, they’re just absolutely anywhere if you want to take a Māori language class.

Our third daughter, who is non-verbal, learnt sign language for some time, and of course sign language is one of our three official languages of New Zealand. Again, that was a challenge for our family, needing to learn the basics of sign language. And I offer a belated talofa lava to our Samoan colleagues, remembering that we celebrated Samoan Language Week just last week. So what I’m trying to illustrate, really, is that this is happening everywhere but in our schools. It’s common all over the place for people to be learning a second, or third, or fourth language out in the community, at Plunket, in the church hall. I talked to my colleague Melissa Lee, who spoke about Korean language being taught by Korean mothers out in the community, and so that issue of there being insufficient teachers—I think we would only need to look to our community to be able to find those teachers. And this bill would have enabled, and encouraged, and supported our intermediate and primary schools to offer that second language.

Now, a couple of other barriers have been put up by the other side of the House. One was, first, that there wasn’t sufficient consultation within the bill. Well, in fact, the bill required the schools to consult with their community to land on what second language they wanted the school to offer, and so that consultation in itself would have enhanced the cultural cohesion in a community through leadership from the school. But the biggest barrier that I’ve heard from the other side of the House has been the hundreds of millions of dollars that it would have taken to resource a second language being taught in the schools. Now, I’m a great believer that you shouldn’t come with problems without also coming with solutions; so, in the spirit of collegiality, I have a solution for the Minister on this. I suggest that he perhaps diverts the $780 million that he intends having spent on a cycling and walking bridge in Auckland for around 3,000 people into resourcing a second language in the primary and intermediate schools that would benefit hundreds of thousands of young people.

So, having solved the three issues that the other side of the House clearly saw—consultation and teachers and resourcing—I’m sure now they will want to leap to their feet and rescind their previous determination on the bill. The bill not passing really is an opportunity lost, and it isn’t too late for them to change their mind on this, because on the other side of the House I have heard speakers talk enthusiastically about the hope that a national languages strategy that the Government will put in place instead being the solution to this. But my great concern is that the national languages strategy that the Government will pursue will become just another plan, or idea, or conversation, or—perish the thought—working group which doesn’t implement anything, in the way that so many of this Government’s good intentions have gone. So I somewhat forlornly commend this bill to the House, thinking that the other side may probably not change their mind. Thank you, Madam Speaker.

As the final speaker on this bill, I acknowledge the arguments from Penny Simmonds, the previous speaker. However, we will not be persuaded on this side of the House, but I do acknowledge the effort there.

We have an incredibly diverse country here in New Zealand—culturally diverse—and we are becoming more diverse with every passing day, and that’s a good thing. We are connected to the world in a global context and across the world there are many, many languages, and I think it’s really good that we’re having this debate in the House.

I do wonder if I walked out the door and looked at some of the Hansards from maybe 80 years ago or 100 years ago, I’m not sure we would be having the same debate in terms of acknowledging the diverse cultural aspects of Aotearoa New Zealand. So it is very positive that we are having this debate, and I’d like to acknowledge the Hon Nikki Kaye for bringing this bill to the House and initiating this debate.

I remember back in I think it was 2018, when she brought this bill to Parliament, there were a number of conversations had. Obviously, Nikki Kaye had a conversation with Minister Hipkins, I personally had a conversation with Nikki Kaye just out in the corridor about this bill, and I acknowledge her passion both for languages but also, in general, her passion for education, because she understands the importance of education for people to have opportunity and for people, in this case, to have an aspect of the various forms of connection.

We do have a large migrant population, and I’ll get on to some of the submissions. Many of them came from our migrant New Zealanders, and they talked about the importance of language to them, in the same way that Ibrahim Omer has spoken about that.

I’d also like to acknowledge the Hon Paul Goldsmith, who picked up the bill as National’s education spokesperson, and he’s brought it to this point. Look, I think that Nikki Kaye, in effect, should really see this as some form of a win, really, because even though the bill is not continuing in its current form—and this side of the House have clearly outlined some of those issues that we have with the bill there that, unfortunately, weren’t able to be resolved—the work that’s begun on the national languages strategy may not have begun at this time without the work that the Hon Nikki Kaye did in bringing this to the House. So it’s something, I believe, of a legacy for her, and, hopefully, she is watching tonight, although she might have other things she’s doing—who knows? I don’t know how many people are watching Parliament TV in Auckland, but we’ll see if she is or not. So—

💬 Hon Scott Simpson: They turned off three minutes ago.

I thought I was doing pretty well.

The objections to this bill have been outlined and I will just highlight a few of them, but before I do that, I’d like to share a little bit of a personal story, which I think is always good for speeches. Hopefully, it will spark the interest of the member opposite.

So as a former music teacher—as a former teacher in the area of music—I want to acknowledge the importance of having a diverse curriculum. Now, when the previous Government were in power, they tended to have a bit of a move towards narrowing the curriculum. Literacy and numeracy are obviously very important, and I felt they were a little bit too obsessed with those two. However, this Government are very much strong believers in having a diverse curriculum, and I look at the aspect of music as it relates to this bill, because this bill is encouraging a diversity of curriculum, as is the national languages strategy. When I was teaching music as an intermediate-age teacher, yes, I was teaching some of the skills, whether it be guitar, drums, band—other forms of music. Singing, I sort of tried to teach but not so well. But what I was developing—and it links to the languages aspect because there’s a link to it, and the link is confidence, cooperation, working with others, creativity, and often these aspects are seen as what we call soft skills within an education system. But sometimes those words tend to demean the benefits of those aspects. Look, if I was to talk to any employer in New Zealand, I think that the majority of them would say the importance of people skills, being able to relate to a diverse range of people—the benefits of that would be acknowledged.

The benefits of learning a second language are not being argued here in the House. There is agreement on both sides around the importance of a broad curriculum and learning languages. We have heard a number of those benefits and I’d like to touch on a couple of others that I haven’t heard—just add to my contribution to the debate. I know the member opposite is watching with interest. There’s an aspect around engagement with the rest of the world. I mentioned at the start of my speech the fact that we are a small country in a global context. We are very dependent on trade. As the Rt Hon Helen Clark once said, “Trade is the lifeblood of our economy.” Now, someone who can speak many languages—it obviously has a benefit in the economic sense around trade. Our connection with Asia—obviously growing markets in the Asian region—is of particular importance. So there’s no argument, I don’t believe; I believe there’s consensus around the importance of languages. And I do wonder about the economic cost of our underperformance in a linguistic area in terms of lost trade and investment. So I was particularly pleased to see the Minister tonight talk about the work that has already started on this national language strategy.

In my final three minutes, I’d just like to touch on a couple of the submissions. We heard from the New Zealand Sikh Youth around the importance of Punjabi. And I would like to acknowledge our close relationship with India and, as I mentioned in terms of trade, it is absolutely a growing market, and there are discussions around various free-trade agreements and aspects progressing. So the aspect around Punjabi is absolutely important. We had quite a few submitters—I’m not part of the select committee, but I had the privilege of sitting in on a number of the submissions.

💬 Penny Simmonds: We were so lucky to have you, Jamie.

Oh well, thank you. Thank you. The member opposite said that they were very lucky to have me—very kind. Look, I certainly appreciate the submissions and we had a number of submissions from various ethnic groups who were stating the argument as to why their language should be included in the 10. Now, we acknowledge those submissions and we acknowledge the importance of all languages here in New Zealand. We also heard from the North Asia Centre of Asia-Pacific Excellence. They outlined some of the benefits of learning some of the Asian languages. They actually raised the same point that I was talking about before in terms of New Zealand’s context with the wider world and the work that we do there. We heard from the New Zealand Chinese Language Week Trust. Now China is certainly one of our largest trading partners and we have a close relationship with the Chinese country. Actually New Zealand, back in 1972, was the first country to acknowledge China as a country under the Rt Hon Norman Kirk and we signed the first free-trade agreement. But, actually, it was interesting, the New Zealand Chinese Language Week Trust, they obviously advocated for the importance of the Chinese language, which I’m sure we’d all agree on here in this House, but they said, “In New Zealand Te Reo Māori holds a special place which must be acknowledged and strengthened.” This sort of links into what we heard from the New Zealand Educational Institute (NZEI), who said we are doing good work around the Māori language—

💬 Chris Bishop: Oh, NZEI!

One of Mr Bishop’s favourite organisations. So what we heard from NZEI was that while we are doing good work in learning te reo, let’s do that well, rather than, you know, sort of stop that and then move on to these other 10 languages that—you know, how do we pick these 10?

But, look, the reality is that through the national languages strategy there is work being done in this area, both in terms of te reo and many other languages that I’ve outlined. And so I am very pleased to see that the work that the Hon Nikki Kaye did bringing this to the House is continuing. One of my colleagues is talking in my ear to acknowledge the select committee. I would like to acknowledge the select committee and all of the officials who did hard work on this bill in terms of bringing it to this place. And it looks like my time is up, Madam Speaker. Thank you.