Chris
HIPKINS
Acting Education Spokesperson

11 January 2013 MEDIA STATEMENT

Charter Schools Another Mess Waiting To Happen

The Government should be focused on getting the basics in education right, rather than inflicting an ideologically driven charter schools experiment on Kiwi kids, Labour's acting Education spokesperson Chris Hipkins says.
“It is particularly ironic that the National-Act Government should send out a reminder to interested parties to work on their submissions on its charter school proposal during their summer holidays, while Hekia Parata and Craig Foss refuse to cut short their extended breaks to fix the Novopay fiasco.

"We don't need charter schools, plain and simple.

“The Government should be focused on making the schools we already have the very best they can be. Instead, it is diverting attention towards slick marketing campaigns as part of some ideological experiment in educational 'competition'.

"Even Treasury doesn’t buy in to charter schools. It argues that increased competition between schools hasn't improved outcomes anywhere it's been tried, and in many cases leads to worse results.

"National was working on its charter school plan well before the last election, yet mysteriously it didn't appear anywhere in its manifesto. The dodgy relationship it has with ‘coalition partner’ John Banks is being used as a convenient excuse to implement something that had been planned all along.

"The reality is we already have enough schools, and in some areas, we may even have too many. Siphoning kids off into charter schools will only lead to more public school closures, more money going into building new school buildings rather than educating kids, and more money being wasted on PR hype.

“The National Government should be cleaning up the messes it has already made - Novopay, the Christchurch schools shambles, and the budget hole created with the class size fiasco - before it starts making new ones elsewhere.

labour.org.nz

ENDS

© Scoop Media

Arguably Reassuring: Inspector-General Finds GCSB "Arguably" Legal

Of the 88 individuals:

• 15 cases involving 22 individuals did not have any information intercepted by GCSB.

• another four cases involving five individuals were the subjects of a New Zealand Security Intelligence Service warrant and the GCSB assisted in the execution of the warrants. The Inspector-General is of the view that there were arguably no breaches and the law is unclear.

• the Bureau only provided technical assistance which did not involve interception of communications, involving three of the individuals, so no breach occurred.

• the remaining cases involved the collection of metadata, and the Inspector-General formed the view that there had arguably been no breach, noting once again that the law is unclear.
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