Schools belong in the OIA

For the past decade, successive governments have been chipping away at the Official Information Act, exempting agencies and passing secrecy clauses, reducing transparency and the accountability of officials. One of the results of this tide of secrecy has been increased demands for it, as agencies see other bodies protected from accountability and demand it for themselves. And now even school principals are demanding to be above the law:

A major education union is seeking legal advice in a bid to exempt state schools from the Official Information Act after an Auckland law student sent an onerous “system-wide” records request to nearly 2500 schools.

The Secondary Principals’ Association of New Zealand (Spanz) says a growing number of OIA requests are burdening stretched principals and tying up time and resources preparing responses that would otherwise go towards educating children.

This of course mischaracterises the Act as an onerous additional burden, rather than a core democratic requirement. Because that it is what it is. Its purposes include enabling people to participate in the administration of laws and policies, and promoting the accountability of public officials. And those purposes apply absolutely to schools. Looking at the criteria for OIA inclusion used by the Law Commission in their 2012 Review of the Official Information Act (p337), they are funded by central government, they are subject to Ministerial direction in various ways, the government controls and oversees their finances, and they serve a public purpose. The decisions they make are fundamentally public in nature, effectively being an exercise of state power. They clearly belong in the OIA regime.

Looking at the sorts of requests they get on FYI, there's broad surveys of policy (for example: do schools support queer kids at their school ball?), basic financial accountability, focused questions about policy and culture (there's a series at the moment asking how various toff schools appoint their prefects). Not seen so much on FYI, but ever-present: requests for the exact rules children are supposed to have broken, or the reasons why they have been punished.

The first sort of request is about participation: collect information, summarise the results, draw conclusions, and say "maybe this needs to change". The second sort is absolutely about accountability, about ensuring that decisions are lawful, reasonable, and justified, and being able to challenge them if they are not. You can understand why school principals would find this irritating. So do Ministers. But we don't let them declare themselves to be above the law, and neither should we allow school principals to.

Finally, as for the supposedly inappropriate request sent to all schools, SPANZ has this to say:

She wrote that Cunliffe’s request was not a simple exercise to establish how a particular school managed its records.

“It is a carefully designed, system-wide exercise intended to map legislative non-compliance across the school sector.

That seems like a clear public purpose, well-aligned with the purposes of the OIA. Exposing wrong-doing is what it is for! And if SPANZ sees that as a threat, the public is entitled to take that as an admission of guilt.

More racism from the regime

Another day, and more racism from the regime:

The government's decision to axe schools' obligation to give effect to the Treaty of Waitangi has shocked groups representing school boards, teachers and principals.

The government had been moving to change the emphasis on the requirement in the Education Act, but on Tuesday announced it would remove it altogether.

Education Minister Erica Stanford said the treaty was the Crown's responsibility, not schools'.

Except schools are agents of the state, and the law is how the state meets that responsibility. So what does repealing it - and all the other similar laws by which the state implements that specific responsibility - tell us about the state's future intentions towards meeting its obligations?

(Hint: look at climate change policy pre-Zero Carbon Act, where we had promises, but no implementation or accountability. Yeah, that...)

Worse: Rimmer says this will be enacted "by the end of the year". Which means no real select committee process or consideration, let alone public consultation. I guess their experience with the Treaty Principles and Regulatory Standards Bill has led them to double down on stomping on our democracy as well...

Which just means that this law is illegitimate, like the regime which passed it. And its just another thing which will have to go into the Treaty Restoration Bill which will have to be passed by the next government under all-stages urgency as its first order of business. Because we have an "undo" button too, and we will need to use it.

ACT means secrecy

Back in April an OIA request exposed the absurd cost of ACT's charter schools - five times more per student than the government spends on public schools. ACT obviously didn't like that, but they have a solution: keep the number of students secret:

The seven charter schools set up at the start of the year have been told to keep their enrolments secret, by The Charter School Agency.

The organisation, which manages charter school contracts and funding, told RNZ it was not appropriate to share information about the rolls of the publicly funded private schools.

"The Charter School Agency does not intend to release the numbers of students currently enrolled at each individual school during the crucial establishment phase as this could undermine their commercial position and their efforts to build their roll and deliver quality education," it said.

...which means no more bad headlines about stupidly high costs per student. Convenient for a minister and an agency wanting to avoid criticism. But terrible for the public wanting to know whether these gold-plated luxury schools work or not, and if the cost is worth it.

(Of course, it's illegal: most of the schools in question are non-profit, and so cannot have a commercial position to protect, and for those that aren't, there's a clear over-riding public interest in transparency and accountability, in that student numbers are essential to determining whether the people of Aotearoa are getting value for money. But that would require a complaint to the Ombudsman, which would take a year or two, so the government wins simply by virtue of shit enforcement...)

There's an obvious parallel here with the government's boot camps - also run by an ACT minister - where after several high-profile failures, all outcomes were declared secret. And that's how this government prevents criticism: not by performing well, but by censorship and secrecy. Transparency? Our right to know? Not under this regime.

Dismantling the state

The New Zealand state has traditionally taken an expansive role in our society, providing health, education, and welfare systems to enrich and enable all our people. But ACT's weirdo radicals want to change that, and are directing the weak National government into enacting their agenda of dismantling the state. There's charter schools, obviously - publicly funded, at inflated rates, but not accountable; as well as funnelling public money into private schools to subsidise the rich. But today they've taken two other significant moves. Firstly, there's directing Te Whatu Ora to outsource all routine operations on ten-year contracts, intended to strip the public health system of capacity while granting windfall profits to the providers. And then there's "reviewing" - meaning cutting - ECE funding, while "making trade-offs between the quality of early learning and its cost" (meaning dumbing it down, deskilling the workforce, and turning it back into a high-profit, low-skill business for their donors in the kiddy-farm industry).

The latter is especially stupid. We've known for literally decades that arly childhood education is one of the best investments we can make in the future of our society, with enormous returns in future education, wellbeing, and earning potential (and savings on crime and welfare). It should be nationalised and incorporated in the state education system, to ensure everyone gets a good start in life. But National simply sees it as babysitting; a cost on the state, rather than a positive benefit. And their cheapness here is going to have long-term consequences for the future.

The good news is that their stovepiped "review" won't report back until this time next year, meaning there will be little time for them to do anything about it before we throw them out on their arses at the next election. As for the health system changes, if the contracts do not allow Te Whatu Ora to set the volume of operations and bring them back in-house, I would expect a future government to simply legislate them away. We should not let this temporary regime steal our health system from us piece by piece, for the profit of its private donors and cronies.

Getting what they paid for

So, having stolen $13 billion from New Zealand women by shitcanning pay equity negotiations, the National government is again attacking women - this time by reversing long-standing pay equity provisions for ECE teachers and allowing ECE providers to go back to paying them minimum wage:

The Associate Education Minister is changing who decides how much new Early Childcare Education (ECE) teachers can be paid, leaving it up to individual centres to determine their starting salary - rather than be set by the government according to the pay parity scheme with primary school teachers.

David Seymour says it will help ECE centres stay "viable" and not pass on costs to parents.

The education union says the change scraps pay parity rates for new teachers, undermining the scheme which took decades to secure. The Greens are concerned it will drive down wages and Labour says it means new ECE teachers will be at the "whim of their employers".

What this actually means is bigger profits for corporate baby-farms. And on that front, its worth noting that the Wright family - who own and profit from the biggest corporate baby-farm, Best Start - donated $32,450 to the National Party in 2016.

I guess they got what they paid for.

Fixing school lunches

The free school lunch program was one of Labour's few actual achievements in government. Decent food, made locally, providing local employment. So naturally, National had to get rid of it. Their replacement - run by Compass, a multinational which had already been thrown out of our hospitals for producing inedible slop - has been a disaster. Inedible food, which does not meet dietry requirements, and which is sometimes contaminated with plastic or causes severe injury. The only thing we haven't seen yet is a mass-poisoning, but that's probably only a matter of time. And now the primary subcontractor has gone bankrupt as a result of lowballing the bid, putting the whole scheme in doubt.

The good news is that the former providers are ready to step up and fix things. It would be a popular move: a Talbot Mills poll released today shows that 60% of people want the old system restored. A sensible government responsive to voters would recognise this, and do it. But for National, it would mean admitting that they made a mistake. And rather than do that, they'll likely just cancel the entire system out of spite, having set it up for failure in the first place. Because when faced with a choice between feeding kids, and admitting they fucked up, they’d rather let kids starve. It’s just the sort of monsters they are.

Finally

When National announced the re-introduction of its corrupt charter schools back in May, Labour "leader" Chris Hipkins impressed nobody by refusing to commit to their immediate abolition. But now, finally, Labour seems to have discovered some principles:

Fixed-term contracts being signed for the schools are 10 years long, but former education minister Jan Tinetti told Q+A that a hypothetical future Labour administration wouldn't back down at scrapping the schools and their contracts.

"Labour has got rid of these before, and we will get rid of them again, because they are bad for young people and bad for their learning," she said.

"We will be looking at legal advice around that, but we will get rid of charter schools.

"We will not have charter schools."

The length of the contract doesn't matter, because parliament trumps contracts and can overturn them by statute. And if this deters corrupt profiteers from signing such contracts with National governments in future, so much the better. Those seeking to steal from us should be uncertain (at the least) over whether they will get to keep their ill-gotten gains. And if they're not, that's another failing of the Labour Party.

The Ombudsman on National's secret schools

National's charter schools bill is curently before select committee. One of the more odious features of the bill is that it makes charter schools secret and unaccountable by exempting them from the Official Information Act. No policy rationale has been provided for this unconstitutional position, but last time round it was pitched as allowing charter schools to avoid "costly and vexatious requests" - which tells us what National really thinks of transparency and accountability.

You'd expect the Ombudsman to have some pretty strong views on this (just as they did last time) - and they do. Their submission points out how this will disadvantage charter school parents and students relative to those in state schools, while removing a key source of information required for them to hold sponsors accountable for the education they're providing and for enforcing their rights in any dispute (for example, when a school makes a questionable disciplinary decision - something which happens all the time). They also point out how unusual it is to have a body subject to the Ombudsmen Act but not the OIA - essentially to be public enough for dispute resolution, but not public enough for transparency. And along the way, they suggest in a couple of comments that this means that charter schools are not going to be able to avoid requests, at least around disputes and the areas sections 22 and 23 would apply to:

If the OIA does not apply, then parents and students would need to seek reasons and relevant information from sponsors in reliance on general principles of reasonable administrative conduct.

And

It may be helpful for me to clarify that if the Bill is passed in its current form I would still expect charter schools to deal with requests for information in a way which is administratively reasonable and consistent with those fundamental rights referred to above.

What does "administratively reasonable and consistent with... fundamental rights" mean? The Ombudsman is on record (in a case regarding an OIA request by an ineligible person) as saying that the administrative reasonableness basically mean "applying the OIA unless there's a really good reason not to". As for fundamental rights, while the submission refers to the section 14 BORA right to receive information, where there is a dispute, the right to justice means a right to be told the reason for a decision and the rule(s) someone is alleged to have broken. So, while National may try and exempt its corrupt charter schools from the OIA, unless it also exempts them from the BORA, the Ombudsmen Act, and any right to natural justice - which is even more unconstitutional and delegitimising - it sounds like the Ombudsman will force them to provide information anyway. It will just be less transparent, more confusing, more time-consuming, and more expensive for everyone involved. Especially the sponsors, who will have to lawyer up to deal with the Ombudsman far more often than they would otherwise. Which just goes to show: clear legal obligations of transparency are easier for everyone.

Some "scrutiny" again

Back in 2022, in its Open Government Partnership National Action Plan, the government promised to strengthen scrutiny of Official Information Act exemption clauses in legislation. Since then they've run a secret "consultation" on how to do that, with their preferred outcome being that agencies will consult the Ministry of Justice more when attempting to introduce new secrecy clauses. So how's that working out for them?

Terribly. The latest example is National's Education and Training Amendment Bill, which legalises over-funded, under-regulated, inherently corrupt "charter schools". As part of their crusade against transparency for these corrupt entities, they will be completely exempted from the Official Information Act - robbing parents, children, and the public of vital oversight. You'd think that exempting a new class of organisation from the OIA is the sort of thing that the Ministry of Justice would be consulted on, given the promise of stronger scrutiny. But of course they weren't. So I guess we can conclude that that promise, like everything else said by this government, is just bullshit and hot air.

As for MoJ's claim that they might not have been consulted because the clause was previously in the Education Act under National's last attempt at this corrupt scam, yeah, nah. The clause wasn't mentioned in the 2012 bill's RIS, so it seems that it wasn't scrutinised back then either. Back then the Ombudsman called it "unconstitutional and dangerous"; hopefully they'll mount a similar defence to the current bullshit.

National's secret schools

The government just introduced its Education and Training Amendment Bill to the House. The name is deliberately obfuscatory, because what the bill actually does is reintroduce charter schools - effectively allowing National to privatise the education system. That's corrupt and it stinks, but to add insult to injury, National's new schools will be secret: the OIA will specifically not apply to them:

[That "Compare" note is to National's repealed charter schools law]

How does this matter? Well, state schools are fully subject to the OIA. That means they can be asked about things like uniform policies, staff pay, maintenance or library spending, health and safety precautions, bullying incidents, or disciplinary decisions - all of which have obvious interest to parents. They are (legally) transparent, and people use that transparency to hold them accountable and ensure their kids get a good education and are safe. But charter schools will not be transparent. Instead, all of that information will be kept secret, rendering them unaccountable. They will be able to profit gouge on their contracts by skimping on maintenance spending or staff wages, treat their students and staff arbitrarily and unfairly, and run an unsafe environment. While some information may still be accessible via the Ministry of Education under the contractor clause, much of the information listed above will not be held in their capacity as a contractor - meaning it will be secret. The implications for the fairness, accountability, and safety of these institutions is obvious.

Why has National done this? They don't say. There's no mention at all of the OIA exemption in the bill's Departmental Disclosure Statement or Regulatory Impact Statement. While some released Cabinet papers note that charter schools will be exempt, there is no justification for it. This I guess is what the Ministry of Justice calls "stronger scrutiny".

the case for the OIA to apply to charter schools is clear: they are performing a public function. We are paying for them. It is essential that they are transparent and accountable to the public. National's preference for secrecy is not only repugnant to our constitution and our democratic values - it will lead to unsafe, unfair, and dangerous schools. It should not be tolerated.

Fucking useless

Yesterday de facto Prime Minister David Seymour announced that his glove puppet government would be re-introducing charter schools, throwing $150 million at his pet quacks, donors and cronies and introducing an entire new government agency to oversee them (the existing Education Review Office, which actually knows how to review schools, being presumably too likely to assess them against the same standards as everyone else, or wonder where all the money is going). Rimmer would also allow his cronies to take over state schools - effectively privatising them. All of this is deeply contrary to everything the Labour Party has told us it stands for, and last time National did this, Labour immediately abolished their bullshit. So what was Chris Hipkins' response? To refuse to commit:

Hipkins wasn't sure what their fate would be should Labour be returned to power in the coming years.

"What we did last time is we integrated them into the state education system - some became integrated schools; some became designated character schools.

"It's too soon to say what we would do next time around because we don't yet know what the contracts are going to be, we don't yet know what the structure is going to be - but we do believe that schools should be part of the public education system," Hipkins said.

And this is why Labour only got 27% last election: because they have no spine, no principles. They're as useless as a proverbial useless thing. And why would anyone vote for that, when there are parties who clearly know what they stand for offering an alternative?

Labour's austerity victimises teachers

Primary, secondary and kindergarten teachers are all on strike today, demanding higher pay and an end to systematic understaffing. While the former is important - wages should at least keep up with inflation - its the latter which is the real issue. As with the health system, teachers have been asked to do more and more with less and less, with the government exploiting their professionalism and sense of duty to their students to keep them in line. And as with the health system, it appears to have reached a breaking point. It takes a lot to get teachers to go on strike; simultaneous strikes across the whole sector is a terrible "achievement" for a Labour government.

Education Minister Jan Tinetti apparently acknowledged that the system was broken. Which is nice performative handwringing, but its not going to solve the problem. To do that, the government actually has to offer more. So far they've simply refused, and Labour's commitment to austerity, to keeping taxes on rich MPs low, doesn't give much cause for hope.

Let's be clear about this: this is not a case of the government being unable to afford to properly resource the education (or health) sector. The government is a government and can have as much money as it wants. The problem is that the government chooses not to resource those sectors. It is running down and starving core functions, gutting our state, because it would rather do that than tax the rich fairly (and again, we need to remember here that all MPs and Ministers are rich). You expect that sort of shit from national and ACT, the traditional parties of rich arseholes. Labour doing it just makes them traitors to their own voters.

Labour on the wrong side of history

Last week, Stuff asked Associate Education Minister Kelvin Davis about compulsory te reo Māori in primary schools. And as usual for Labour, he firmly rejected the idea, citing fears of a public backlash. Today, Stats NZ released data from the 2021 General Social Survey, showing us thatfears of that backlash are imaginary. In addition to a welcome uptick of use of te reo, there was also this:

62 percent (up from 57 percent) of people agreed or strongly agreed that te reo Māori should be a core subject in primary schools

57 percent (up from 53 percent) agreed or strongly agreed that the government should encourage and support the use of te reo Māori in everyday situations

56 percent (up from 51 percent) agreed or strongly agreed that signage should be in both te reo Māori and English

Which makes sense. There's been a significant change in public use and acceptance of te reo in the past few years (which comes on top of significant change over the course of my life). There's a public recognition that te reo is a taonga, one of the things that makes Aotearoa Aotearoa. Its everywhere now - on the street, on TV and radio, in government press conferences. And apart from a few dirty old racists (who are gradually dying off), we like this, because its who we are now.

And in the face of this change - which they helped promote years ago - Labour is resolutely on the wrong side of history. As with capital gains taxes. They need to learn to read the fucking room. But maybe the real problem is that the only room they're interested in is the one full of rich old racists?

Bigot schools are acting unlawfully

Earlier in the month we learned about institutionalised transphobia at Bethlehem College. The school is an "integrated school", meaning that it is state-funded while retaining a "special character". Stuff has now taken a look at several other similar schools, and found another three with institutionalised bigotry:

Three more state-funded Christian schools have been identified as having anti-queer policies, prompting advocates to call for a full-scale education inquiry into discrimination against the LGTBQI community.

[...]

The schools – Maranatha Christian School in Lower Hutt, Cornerstone Christian School in Palmerston North, and Matamata Christian School – say they only recognise marriage between a man and a woman, and only acknowledge two genders.

“Homosexual, lesbian or any other relationships or partnerships are seen as the outworking of mankind’s rebellious nature and therefore are not consistent with the school’s Special Christian Character,” Matamata Christian School says in its public statement of beliefs. “The term ‘gender’ is limited to the two separate and distinct sexes, the masculinity of the male and the femininity of the female.”

The bigotry is in the schools' official "statement of beliefs", which forms part of their integration agreement with the Ministry of Education. The problem is that it seems blatantly unlawful: both sex (which includes gender identity) and sexual orientation are prohibited grounds of discrimination in the Human Rights Act. While the Act allows "educational establishment[s] maintained wholly or principally for students of one sex, race, or religious belief, or for students with a particular disability, or for students in a particular age group" to discriminate on those grounds, there is no exemption for sexual orientation, or for sex or gender identity discrimination in co-ed schools. So, the schools are breaching the Human Rights Act.

Is the discrimination authorised by some other statute? It does not seem so. While the old Education Act 1989 authorised the Minister of Education to negotiate and approve integration agreements, which may "prescrib[e] the religious or philosophical instruction and observances that are to form part of the school programme after integration", no part of it authorises departure from the Human Rights Act (nothing in the new Education and Training Act 2020 seems to authorise it either). And insofar as an integration agreement actually contains clauses inconsistent with the Human Rights Act, they are void, and sections 3 and 19 of the BORA mean that they were beyond the power of the government to make anyway. Contracts must be consistent with the law, and the government cannot simply contract out of its legal obligations or ignore them when exercising its powers.

So what should happen? Pretty obviously, the schools should obey the law, cease discriminating against queer and trans students, and remove the offensive sections from their statements of belief. If they refuse, the Minister should exercise their powers under the Act, cancel the integration agreement, and refer them to the Human Rights Commission. The government should not be funding bigotry.

Decarbonising the schools

The government has announced it will be replacing all coal boilers in schools by 2025:

All remaining coal boilers in New Zealand schools will be replaced with cleaner wood burners or electric heating by 2025, at a cost of $10 million, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has announced.

The coal boiler removal is expected to reduce carbon emissions by 35,400 tonnes over 10 years, the equivalent of removing about 1400 cars from the roads.

It is part of the latest spend from the $220m State Sector Decarbonisation Fund, with a further $12.92m going to other projects.

Good. Its appalling that we're still burning coal for heat in the 21st century, and removing it will help both lower domestic demand for this dirty fuel, and build experience on the best ways to replace old boilers with new, efficient heat sources. And the latter should help with wider decarbonisation and the eventual removal of industrial burners.

And now obviously they need to move into removing gas, and replacing those boilers with heat pumps and solar panels.

Cancel this odious debt

Writing on Newsroom, Laura Walters makes a case for cancelling student debt:

[A]t the moment, loan debt is hurting the economy, holding back everything from small business formation, to new home buying, and even marriage and reproduction.

So rather than offering interest-free borrowing, or expecting people to refinance their loans, the Government could try something more ambitious.

The Levy Institute, a non-partisan think tank in the United States, makes a strong case for student debt cancellation.

It found positive macroeconomic feedback effects from running simulations through two different models for debt cancellation. It saw average households’ net worth and disposable income increase, driving new consumption and investment spending.

In short, the analysis shows debt cancellation would lift GDP, decrease the average unemployment rate, and result in little inflationary pressure, while interest rates increased only modestly.

That's the economic case. Walters also mentions the values-based case about free education, and I'll throw in another: the student loan scheme is odious debt. It violates the government's own lender responsibility principles set by the Credit Contracts and Consumer Finance Act 2003: the government exercises no care or diligence and makes no inquiries as to whether loans can ever be repaid; the sub-minimum wage repayment thresholds make the agreement inherently oppressive; the government exercises its powers as a lender in an oppressive manner, with border arrests and threats; and they induce young people to borrow by oppressive and downright fraudulent means, on a promise of benefits from tertiary education that turn out to be substantially overstated (and an implied threat that without this, you have no hope of a decent job or a future). If they were a normal lender who induced people to borrow in this way, on such terms, we would prosecute them and ban them from lending.

Or we can put it even more simply: the student loan scheme was a massive act of intergenerational theft by Boomers against everyone younger than them, which has burdened successive generations. And rather than perpetuating it any further, we should end it, lift that burden, and cancel the debt.

People who went through the system, were gouged by oppressively high interest rates, and paid off their loans anyway may feel hard done by by this. But their having suffered in the past is no reason to continue to make people suffer in future. The struggle to make a better society inherently means that people in the future are going to have better lives than us if we succeed. We don't begrudge them that. So why begrudge this? If you want to be angry at anyone over your suffering, be angry at Lockwood Smith and Phil Goff, who inflicted this misery on us and are still swanning around as if they didn't do anything wrong, and who haven't even pretended to apologise. Or at the Boomers, on whose behalf they looted the state and gouged us. Or at the entire class of 1980's and 1990's NeoLiberal politicians, who wrecked the country and fucked us over, and whose ideology of greed and selfishness is still governing the state today, despite being completely debunked and officially denied by their political successors. Be angry at the people responsible, not your fellow victims.

And when you're done being angry, use that anger, and make Aotearoa a better place, by cancelling this odious debt.

(Disclosure: Like Walters, I still have my student loan. I do not intend to repay it).

How does the government still not know this?

For the past two years the government has been trying to decarbonise the education sector, funding schools to replace dirty old coal boilers with heat pumps and solar panels. But according to Stuff this morning, they still don't know how many they need to replace:

An estimated 1150 state schools burn fossil fuels to heat classrooms, but the Government doesn’t have an exact figure, or a full list of affected schools.

This suggests the Government’s funding to date – $55 million to convert 90 schools to green fuels – will cover a small fraction of the problem.

[...]

Pressed for the numbers, the Ministry of Education said there are at least 200 boilers in schools burning coal, an estimated 150 burning diesel and roughly another 800 burning LPG or natural gas (the fossil form of methane).

How does the government not know this? They put this policy in place two years ago. It will have been under development for a year before that. You would expect that in that development process someone would have asked how big the problem was, so they would know how much it was going to cost. And unlike Stuff, whose OIA requests just get ignored by incompetant and lawless school boards, the Ministry of Education can demand schools provide information, and these demands get actioned. If they didn't know when they developed the policy, they have absolutely no excuse for not knowing it now.

But I guess that, like school maintenance, knowing means having to pay to fix it, which for an agency under constant budget pressure from a government still dedicated to austerity means a strong incentive to ignore problems and not know things until forced to. Which does not bode well for the effectiveness of this programme, or its durability.

Government of kindness?

Remember John Campbell's "Feed the kids" campaign? Free school lunches are one of the most effective education policy interventions we can make, boosting attendance and improving learning outcomes. Currently the government funds them for the 25% of children living in the poorest areas of New Zealand. But poor kids whose schools aren't in South Auckland or Aranui or Highbury miss out. Newshub is pushing again for the programme to be expanded so that everyone gets fed. Jacinda Ardern's answer? No:

But despite overwhelming evidence free lunches work to keep students in school and learning, the Government won't commit to making it universal.

Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern told The AM Show although she, in principle, supports universal free school lunches, it's "a matter of prioritisation".

"I don't have a problem with unlimited lunches. I think that would be great... But I have to prioritise, and it is quite costly to roll out and I have to ask the question 'is that the next step for us?'"

The Government hasn't costed what it would take to provide free lunches across Aotearoa, but Ardern says the current program costs "hundreds of millions".

The current cost is $220 million to feed 200,000 children. According to Wikipedia there are around 760,000 schoolkids in New Zealand. So, quadruple it, and we're talking around $850 million. This is serious government money, but to put it in context, its less than the cost of a single road in Auckland - or just one of the gold-plated anti-submarine warfare aircraft the government is buying to prop up the American weapons industry.

Decisions on spending at this level are fundamentally about priorities. And Jacinda Ardern, who promised to "bring kindness back", would rather have pollution-boosting roads and war-toys for the generals than well-fed, well-educated kids. I guess she just has a different definition of "kindness" to the rest of us.

The Greens are supposed to be better than this

The Greens have ignored their own policies to funnel public money to a private school in Taranaki:

The Green Party has been caught bending its own party policy after a private school in Taranaki was given $11.7 million to fund an expansion programme.

The money comes from the Government’s $3 billion shovel-ready projects fund, and was announced in a press release from Greens co-leader James Shaw who said the grant to Green School New Zealand would help the school expand its roll from 120 students to 250, creating 200 jobs.

“Securing over 200 jobs will help direct more money into the parts of the economy where most people earn their livelihood. These are the parts of the economy that are sustained when public investment is directed at getting people into work and earning money that they then spend in their local communities,” Shaw said.

“The support we are providing will help Green School to meet growing demand from parents all over New Zealand, and the rest of the world, wanting to enrol their children. This will mean more families can take the opportunity to put down roots in Taranaki and contribute to the future growth of the region,” he said.

The Greens' education policy says that "Public funding for private schools should be phased out and transferred to public schools." This is a private school, providing exclusive education for the rich. Having "green" in the name and an ecological focus doesn't change that. This school should not be funded. Instead, the money should be used where it can do the most good: on public education. There are schools in Taranaki which are overcrowded, leaking and rotting, and they need this money far more than new-build, fancy education pods at a private school whose international market has basicly just disappeared completely.

Meanwhile, its I guess another example of how being in government has changed the Greens, how power has corrupted them. And that's not something we should welcome.

Debt isn't support

Today the government announced a new "support" package for students: more debt! With universities shut, and their part-time jobs locked down, they can borrow more money! Employers get a wage subsidy. Home-owners and landleeches get a mortgage holiday. From the sound of it, businesses are about to get a rent holiday. But students have to borrow to get through this crisis.

This isn't "support". As an easily-implementable quick measure, sure. But real support would be grants and allowances, not more debt. But it makes the government's books look good (it goes on them as a capital asset, not as spending). We're supposed to All Be Socialists Now. Except I guess for students, who still get NeoLiberalism rammed down their throats, same as always.