Education and Training (Early Childhood Education Reform) Amendment Bill

Thank you, Madam Chair. I just want to thank my colleagues over here for defending Māori education, and in this case our kids. I want to stress the point, the relevance, and the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi in education legislation and endeavour over the last 50 years. This is not just a case of “Can you put pop the Treaty in?”, and this speaks more broadly to the broad attack on Te Tiriti o Waitangi and the removal of it in education, from preschool all the way through to university.

Now, it’s been the adherence to Te Tiriti o Waitangi, the requirement of adherence to Te Tiriti o Waitangi in education legislation over the last 50 years that has taken Māori from a place of being almost boxed out of education, be it in preschool or university, in the 1950s and 1960s that has been hard fought through the 1970s, the 1980s, the 1990s, and the 2000s, all the way up to today to us producing the highest results in education—the highest in the country. Have a look at NCEA, have a look around, and have a look at the participation rates of today versus 1980. Have a look at it all. It all tells us that the inclusion of Te Tiriti o Waitangi is part of the success.

The Māori education model has been tried, tested through fire and through everything, and has come out still going strong, OK? It’s the best educational model for Māori. It’s the same in preschool. It’s the same in puna reo, in kōhanga reo. It’s the same in kura kaupapa and wharekura. It’s not lost on me that we have a Minister here who’s actually using the kura kaupapa model to promote his other endeavours in education. It’s just beyond me.

OK, so it has been the adherence to Te Tiriti o Waitangi that has enabled all of that development. So why, oh why, in 2025, are we taking it out, getting rid of it, stripping it back? We’re making it, oh, just, you know, no longer a commitment. It’s completely beyond me—it’s completely beyond me.

There has been generation after generation of Māori academics who have stood up and proposed these things—educational hypotheses, completed doctorates—and who became professors, led universities, and started their own to prove all of these things. All of it is proven beyond a shadow of a doubt—that’s what the evidence tells us—and yet here we are, having to defend the Māori science of learning—the Māori science of learning.

OK, these things have been done already and they’ve been proven. The link between language and knowledge system is a known thing. In te iwi Māori, we call that

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and what’s known is that it is connection, and the earlier you can get it in, the more powerful those young people become along their educational journey. Proven fact—proven fact—time and time and time again. Then here we are, with someone not so schooled in educational endeavour, leading the bandwagon of getting rid of the Treaty. It is absurd—it is absurd and obscene. It’s obscene, because as I think about the 30 percent of young Māori who are going to form the labour workforce of this country into the future, you are talking about undermining their educational experience. I just cannot fathom what the reasonable answer is, and I cannot fathom it because there is not one there.

So as I think about these things—these are all in Part 1, by the way—and as I read through it, there’s no requirement for anyone in this piece of legislation to give any thought to anything a young Māori learner or their whānau might need. How can that possibly be a community, family, or a representative model where one culture is just completely sidelined?

If we want to talk about the relevance and the place of Te Tiriti o Waitangi, you’re talking about the constitutional founding document, the document that gives constitutional validity to Māori and constitutional validity to every other person in the country, and the Minister thinks, “Huh, well, there are a lot of us in this country. Why would we put that one in?” We’d put it in because it represents every single person in the country—that’s why. So I’d love to hear any response this Minister has to any of the things I’ve put forward. Kia ora tātou.