Q+A’s Panel Discussions with Paul Holmes, Dr Therese Arseneau, Wyatt Creech and Kate Gainsford.

The full length video interviews and panel discussions from this morning’s Q+A can be seen on tvnz.co.nz at, http://tvnz.co.nz/q-and-a-news

PANEL DISCUSSIONS led by PAUL HOLMES

PAUL: What was the big story for you this week?

WYATT: Well it wasn’t the letter H. If you looked at the things that really mattered in New Zealand the scheme was - the ETS Scheme - was one of them, but to my mind the thing I think that troubles New Zealanders is the real violent crimes we’re seeing in this country, that go on and on, and then to cap it off with really, really strange and unruly student behaviour in Dunedin. I think people are troubled by this sort of thing in our society.

PAUL: And what do you think Therese?

THERESE: Politically I think the ETS deal was a significant thing that happened this week, and also of course the Supercity legislation passing through the House. Now there’s a common theme I think between those two for me, and that is that is actually extremely difficult when you’re watching Parliament from the outside, to be able to separate the smoke from the fire, the noise from what’s really going on, and in both those cases I think a lot of us were wrong-footed about what was actually going on. I mean the focus tended to be on Rodney Hide versus Peter Sharples when probably on the Supercity the real fight took place within the National caucus, and in terms of the ETS of course much talk about this grand co-relation between Labour and the National party, and I think actually what we saw there was a classic political set piece – I’m not sure that that deal between Labour and National was ever a goer.

PAUL: No but it was amazing the deal between the Nationals and the Maori party. Kate for you.

KATE: I think there are three issues really at three different levels that have got currency at the moment. On an international level I think we’ve heard, teachers have heard, the OECD results that say that teachers aren’t paid well compared to other countries within the OECD, but on a national level we’ve heard from ERO that New Zealand schools are not ready yet to implement the New Zealand curriculum and this is no surprise to us, and the third one – at a community level, and still we would be seeing that community education is a very, very big issue.

PAUL: You’re talking there about the night school issue which we’re going to be debating, I guess, with Anne Tolley.

PAUL: Well for me it was Wanganui – the spectacle of this fight. Turiana Turia being moved –moved – by this European letter going into the European spelling of Wanganui. Michael Laws’attitude, his anger, as if his very culture’s being assaulted by the insertion of the H. What a spectacle. A very parochial, provincial spectacle.

Anne Tolley Discussion

PAUL: Well politically what do you think of that performance Therese? I thought it was very impressive.

THERESE: Yes, she speaks very well and she comes across very well and it sounds very reasonable, this idea that we should be putting money more into younger people rather than older people. I do think though that you need to step back and ask the important question which is what is the strategic vision for Education? And I don’t think you can under estimate the importance actually of putting money into those evening night time courses for adults because lifelong learners is what we’re aiming for and the other thing is we’ve found that in order for children to succeed, their parents need to be literate and numerate as well.

PAUL: Yes, and there might be a social component to some of those night classes but again that’s also important in terms of society I suppose. What do you make of the politics of the night class decision, the reduction by 80% in funding, Wyatt?

WYATT: I take a sort of former minister’s view I suppose of it – whatever you cut, when you get to the point of making cuts, you’ll have a controversy. I listened to her explanation, and it seemed to me that she was stressing what I would have thought was the vision, which was to make sure everyone gets their basic education, standards are set, things like that, as the key ingredients she’s trying to achieve. She’s not against night classes, I got the impression she was quite in favour of them, it’s just where the priority of the public money was, was in literacy and numeracy and in times of recession when money’s tight those decisions are always hard.

PAUL: There are one or two principals I think who’ve told us during the week well we don’t think she’s on top of her portfolio, but she sounded like when she said she’s been surrounded by teachers all her life, that resonated well. That had good credibility. She seems to like teachers. Here’s a clip on what she was saying about teachers:

SOUNDBITE: Well I’ve been a parent of three children and I’m a grandmother of two. So I’ve had three children go through the education system and I’ve also got a family of teachers so I’ve lived with education all my life.

PAUL: Now, that answer had credibility Kate?

KATE: There were some vital bits missing I believe – a passion for education and a deep knowledge of education. I believe the minister, politically…

PAUL: She’s a mother and a grandmother – she’s put three kids through school, what more does she need to know about education?

KATE: Well, it’s a highly technical area isn’t it Mr Creech – you’d be able to agree with that…

PAUL: Do only teachers know about education?

KATE: Not at all, not all and we’ve had that argument way back in the 80s and 90s that
provide and capture thing. But I would just like to comment on what you were asking before about the political nature of what we were listening to. I believe this Minister is frequently consistent and on message, we have met those sound bites consistently since her appointment about the fiscal environment, about priorities….

PAUL: We’ve all heard the same things for 20 years from politicians…

KATE: But there is a layer underneath that isn’t there? There’s a layer underneath that is of critical importance and it’s that detailed, technical, educational knowledge that’s important to get right.

PAUL: I don’t necessarily want to be Anne Tolley’s champion but I like what she said about attracting the best people into teaching, retention of teachers.

KATE: If she had trained and qualified as a teacher then she’d be fitting in with our policy perfectly. She could be a member.

PAUL: Very good – now there was another thing she said about the importance of numeracy and literacy in this national standards thing in relation for example getting an apprentice mechanic:

SOUNDBITE: The average car today has 12 computers so the numeracy and literacy requirements for those newer apprenticeships is much higher than it used to be so we have an obligation to make sure we’ve prepared our children to have those qualifications they need to have the options to get a good job.

PAUL: Therese did that ring your bell?

THERESE: Nobody would disagree that numeracy and literacy are absolutely fundamental skills – they’re the scaffolding on which everything else is built. My problem however, is how National is approaching it. To me it’s the classic example of focusing on weighing the pig instead of feeding the pig. It’s about testing for literacy and numeracy when I would think the approach really needs to focus on what are we going to do to encourage lifting numeracy and literacy. Focusing on testing is only a means to an end. What I haven’t heard yet from the government, is what they plan to do to make numeracy and literacy levels rise.

WYATT: I read the complete opposite actually. How could anyone not agree with that – the complications of the world are getting bigger so your children have got to be educated so they can cope with them. I think that’s 100% right, but this argument that you’re focusing wrong…what did you say, kill a pig instead of skinning it…

THERESE: Weighing the pig…

WYATT: I take the point that it can look like that but you’re not going to be able to tell how the big the pig, or how well the pig is doing, until you measure how well the pig is growing.

THERESE: Absolutely right, but what are you going to do when you find the levels are low – what are you going to do to raise them?

WYATT: You have to go on lifting standards, that’s going to happen for the next 50 or 100 years..

KATE: Again, we’re talking about Mum and apple pie aren’t we. We’re talking about standards –who disagrees with standards, nobody disagrees with standards, there’s nothing to disagree with there. So the detail is in the technical stuff underneath, in the how you do it and the priorities.

WYATT: And the controversy Paul….

THERESE: Has there been anything about how they’re going to do it?

KATE: No..

WYATT: The controversy has often been about them being used to create league tables and I thought she’d addressed that – I mean league tables are really irrelevant, getting good quality education is a key factor.

PAUL: Let’s move on from this and talk again about the night school business. Kate, what do you think of this $13 million off the night school budget and for public schools an increase, Mr Creech, of $35 million. So we’re in a recession, we’ve got to make cuts, so we throw away the…

KATE: …hard decisions to be made..

PAUL: … hard decisions to be made, yes yes, standards to be lifted so we’re going to take the 13 million off the night school spending, leave it only 3.2 million and we have 35 million nevertheless we can find for the private schools. What’s the politics of that Mr Creech?

WYATT: Well the way you’re presenting it, it doesn’t look particularly politically attractive. But the way she was presenting it was as two completely separate issues. One, I gather, and I think this is correct, is that it will actually save the public money by using this approach. The other was a question of priority.

PAUL: Kate, what about that?

KATE: It is about priorities, and we are receiving mixed messages so It was very interesting to hear the minister talk about how important the community consultation was around standards, and it was interesting to hear the minister on television earlier in the year say that she wouldn’t go against what a community wanted in terms of keeping a school open, but when it’s about communities wanting to keep night classes open it appears this is not up for any debate. So when there are any issues raised about the ethicacy or the propriety of belly dancing…

PAUL: What about the 35 million for private schools…

KATE: Yes, that’s what I’m talking about, I’m talking about the priorities that have been signalled here. So consultation is important here, but not there. Cuts are important here, but investing – and of course the word “cut” is not used by politicians, they use savings – so savings in community education we read as cuts.

PAUL: Very, very quick word Therese on the politics of the night school thing – is it going to become a difficult one for her?

THERESE: I think there’s still a lot of political heat in this issue. Can I just step back and say another thing though….

PAUL: No, we’ll save that for later, I’m getting the wind up.

Jacinda Ardern & Nikki Kaye discussion

PAUL: You’re very impressed with those two, you believe it’s very important, Therese, to have young people in parliament.

THERESE: I do. As a political scientist one of my main concerns at the moment is how much young people are disengaging from politics. In fact what we’ve seen is that young people under the age of 25 are 20% - 30% less likely to vote than their parents were at the same age. And the problem is that when you don’t vote in your first election it creates what we call a footprint and there’s a real chance that if you skip those early elections you will never come into the system. So it’s important that we pull young people in – and it’s a house of representatives, it’s important that we represent a variety of views.

PAUL: How hard is it to learn parliament, to learn politics when you go in there?

WYATT: If you don’t, you won’t last very long and I think people learn it pretty quickly and pretty easily how to deal with people and the ones that succeed in the system are the ones that catch on. I think it is a house of representative - I agree with Therese on that – but if I look at anything their seems to be less and less of people In the 50s and 60s in there, it seems to be coming more of a young persons game.

PAUL: Well John Key is keen to point out isn’t he, that it’s a young cabinet, it really is quite young.

WYATT: It is a young cabinet. And they’ll probably be out of it by their 50s and keen to look at something else. I think he’s alright, but there are lots of people I know who have to go out and establish a new commercial career which is fine.

PAUL: The ones who get ahead in parliament though, in politics, are they the vicious, nasty, bully people? Can a nice person succeed?

WYATT: I got to number two and I don’t think I’m a nasty bullying person – but it is a house of representatives, you’ve got every type of person there, there are loud people, quiet people, people who are smart , people who are stupid. It is a house of representatives. Those two I think are bright young ones.

PAUL: Let’s bring Kate in, your opinion of what you saw.

KATE: Well I think it’s really interesting because these fine people here who are going into the house of representatives have been through a New Zealand education system so that’s credit where credit’s due. But I think also that there is that issue about disengagement, that is something that we certainly see in schools and that we’re seeing it in a wider context is all the more worrying. I found out the other day that we have thousands of children in New Zealand who are not registered in a school, some of them are not registered at birth. So when we look at trying to make a whole system to be inclusive, to get those aims of life-long learning going we’ve got some really fundamental stuff that needs doing way outside the school gates.

PAUL: And those two seem committed to doing it. I was very impressed with the way Nikki said she didn’t think about parliament, when I asked her about the experience, immediately she started talking about meeting the constituents, solving problems and helping them and Jacinda said the same thing about working with Harry Duynhoven and the old man that came in.

THERESE: The other thing is, we’ve done lots of studies about people’s values and they are changing, and particularly in terms of their political values and this is across the western world basically. There’s a really interesting book, it’s called “The Decline of Deference”. And the argument is that this generation approaches authority and hierarchy quite differently from their parents generation. They are very suspicious of hierarchical organisations, so parliament is some ways is really at odds with that –it’s still very much an adversarial house, that it is quite hierarchical which I think partly explains why we’re finding people disengaging from traditional politics. So it’s important – you talked to Nikki and Jacinda about this – whether they reach out across the house, whether there is more consensus building and I think MMP has achieved that and it explains why young people in the polling are highly in favour of keeping MMP.

WYATT: I was taken by a comment of Nikki Kaye’s which was when she came back to Auckland, the moment she started to give this constituent the political spiel, he turned right off. They want to know the effect of the decisions on themselves. I think we’re going through a very managerial phase, it’s not a time of great revolution or of great change, these are very unideological and they both came across to me as unideological people.

PAUL: You’re dead right it’s keeping real, being able to talk the real person’s talk and remembering policy only matters where it touches people I suppose. Right the week ahead – big stories coming up this week. What do you pick Kate?

KATE: Well I think we’re due to see some action actually, which was a long time coming, on the Behaviour Summit - we were talking about the behaviour of students at universities beforehand. There was a Behaviour Summit held way back in March – there was an action plan that was due to the Minister at the end of May and we haven’t seen it yet, so that’s coming up very soon.

PAUL: Behaviour summit for the behaviour of kids in schools?

KATE: Yes, yes – so an action plan on how to deal with it, that’ll be interesting.

PAUL: I see assaults by eight year olds on teachers in the classroom have gone up something like 80% since 2000.

KATE: A huge proportion.

THERESE: I think there’ll be a lot of attention on John Key and his overseas trip, in particular his speech to the UN - and I suppose whether or not he gets on to Letterman!

PAUL: Barak Obama’s doing Letterman - the only guest on Letterman tomorrow night, Tuesday our time. Wyatt, what do you think?

WYATT: I’m with Therese – I think it’s going to be the international issues that are the focus of the media. I also think there’s going to be a lot of washing down, there were some big issues last week, the ETS was passing, Fonterra’s restructuring - these sort of things - as people come to grips with what it means there’ll be a lot of media on that.

PAUL: I do not expect to be inundated by news on Wanganui however!

ENDS

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