JOHN TAMIHERE, LABOUR MP, & BILL ENGLISH, NATIONAL'S EDUCATION SPOKESMAN
Interviewed by SIMON DALLOW
SIMON
Tomorrow morning Labour's list moderating committee meets to rank its candidates for the election will be in where it places all its sitting Maori MPs and new rising star Shane Jones. Labour's Maori MPs face a real challenge for the Maori Party this election campaign. One Maori Labour MP John Tamihere has previously trusted his electorate to sent him to parliament but will be need the back up of a high list placing this time and even if he gets back into parliament the next question will be whether he regains the cabinet seat he resigned from after allegations of financial improprieties at the Waiperere Trust last year. Just this week the Serious Fraud Office reported on those allegations clearing Mr Tamihere, he's with me now.
You weren't on the list in 2002 but you've got some serious competition this time around, will you take a list position?
JOHN
No, I wasn’t on the list in 99, 2002 and I won't be in 2005, and the reason for that is that I am strongly of the view that it's a matter of principle that my constituency will send me to parliament and that that mandate is a very powerful mandate.
SIMON
Where should the Maori MPs be ranked in this on the list, the ones who are going to be on the list though?
JOHN
Oh I think the Maori MPs will do very well in regard to the symbolism that has to be sent by the party to where they will be positioned and so for instance Parekura Horomia who is our lead minister he’ll be up there reasonably high and the way we work in the Labour Party is we try to reflect the face of the changing face of New Zealand, it quite dynamic. You'll see a lot of faces at a number of reasonable places that evidence that.
SIMON
So you expect the Maori MPs to be reasonably high on the list, where then would you expect Shane Jones to be vis a vis then, say vis a vis Dover Samuels?
JOHN
Well as soon as you number off our sitting MPs they’ll take the top numbers, the next ones in are our high flyers and they're the likes of the Shane Jones's of this world, so you always have – our party has always granted us the right to at least have one in the top five – a high flyer – and that'll be Shane and his reputation speaks for itself.
SIMON
Do you feel one hundred percent vindicated by the SFO report?
JOHN
Oh look um, I'm back in the ring and the reality is that I've been the most turned over member of parliament I think in the history of politics of the place, probably for good reason, but putting that to one side I'm through all that you know and I'm just getting on with the job.
SIMON
Do you have any regrets over that period, if you had the chance to do it again would you still take the golden handshake?
JOHN
Oh yeah, and I say that not in an arrogant fashion. The White Report which – see there were 20 allegations – don’t worry about – the golden handshake was at the end of the tunnel, there were 20 allegations of theft of corruption, of all sorts of heinous things and so you had to ….
SIMON
No we've accepted they’ve been dismissed but would you still accept the golden handshake with all things being equal.
JOHN
Oh if it was offered again to me and I was in the same family position I would without doubt.
SIMON
Okay so all that with SFO has been put to one side does that mean you now expect to be reinstated to cabinet?
JOHN
Well that’s a gift that I don’t grant and so…
SIMON
Yes but what are your expectations?
JOHN
Well it's a privilege that you've gotta earn okay.
SIMON
Do you think you've earned it?
JOHN
Well I've gotta get back in the ring and demonstrate that.
SIMON
So when do you think that would happen if you were to be reinstated when do you expect that you should get back?
JOHN
Well because it's a gift that I don’t have.
SIMON
If you prove yourself in the lead up to this election would you expect to be reinstated after it?
JOHN
Oh look it goes like this our caucus chooses our cabinet so it's a number of our colleagues notwithstanding the preferences that the boss might put on that, so that’s an issue for my colleagues to determine.
SIMON
Are you committed to Labour for the long haul would you stick around if you were left in the cold for a long time?
JOHN
Oh look my grandfather was committed to the party, my father was, I am, it's stood by us through thick and thin, and like all parties churches all organisations it's had its ups and downs but it's been there more for us in our ups and so I'm absolutely committed to the Labour Party.
SIMON
Let me bring in our guest panellists now and welcome them to a crossfire.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
JOHN ROUGHAN – Columnist NZ Herald
On the golden handshake you said that if it was offered again in the same circumstances you'd accept it. Helen Clark in 99 was absolutely against golden handshakes to the public sector, campaigned strongly against it said there'll be no more, we're gonna be a government of probity and this sort of thing is a thing of the past now, so how do you square your view with hers?
JOHN T
Oh it wasn’t a public sector handout, okay. My view squares with this that over a course of eight to nine years we took an organisation from insolvency and broke out into a range of private practices in business, and in business when you grow organisations from 12 employees and insolvency to over 240, eight different business centres operating with over eight to ten million dollars in cashflow coming through the organisation posting very good results in your property development companies and the like, that’s an issue for that board to determine as to whether you should get any form of emolument for payment for those services, that’s a private sector business award as opposed to a public sector. I was not a public servant, I was a private individual in a private trust.
SIMON
But you took it while you were wanting to be a public servant, while you were campaigning.
JOHN
Oh yeah, but I accept that, I was offered it I accepted it, it became a political beat up as I was leading into the election, I then declined it, it was re-offered, I accepted.
JOHN R
But many of the golden handshakes at that time were to SOE CEOs who were in a similar position to you where they had built up an organisation made it commercial and deserved I think what they got when they departed.
JOHN T
No there's no comparison with the Waiperere Trust and SOE, SOEs have had a historical monopoly in a whole range of areas. You name me one SOE that did not have the advent of a publicly hugely funded cashflow regime without having to earn it, it just got it, and had to build it up. I don’t accept that analogy.
JENNI McMANUS, Managing Director NZ Independent
John you have been cleared by the Serious Fraud Office of wrong doing so legally presumably you’re back in the position you were before the whole inquiry started, so why has the Prime Minister decided not to put you back in cabinet immediately, what's she told you are her reasons?
JOHN T
No no I'm not prepared to engage in that with what my private conversations are with my leader, I have the utmost respect for the integrity of that leadership.
JENNI
No no that wasn’t what I was asking though, I mean the public I think would want to know why you haven't been immediately reinstated having been cleared of any wrongdoing why you haven't been immediately reinstated.
SIMON
They’ve said you haven't done any wrong so why can you have what you had before?
JENNI
I mean you haven't been done for drunk driving like Ruth Dyson haven't stuffed up in the way that Leanne Dalzeil stuffed up so why should you serve penance when you've been cleared of any wrongdoing?
JOHN T
Oh because I'm a failed Catholic. No. Look that’s an issue we're working on, I'm part of a team and I'll do best by my team in the lead up into the election and we've got a real arm wrestle in the Maori seats and I'll do my best there to …
JENNI
But has the Prime Minister given you an explanation that you’re satisfied with for not immediately reinstating you?
JOHN T
I'm satisfied with the integrity and credibility of my leadership.
JENNI
But has she given you an explanation?
JOHN T
Well that’s the explanation I'm giving you that I have the utmost faith.
JENNI
But has she without telling me what the explanation was if you don’t wish to, has she given you an explanation that you’re satisfied with?
JOHN T
I'm satisfied with….
SIMON
We're gonna have to leave it there, and we're gonna find out more.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
BILL ENGLISH
MP, NATIONAL
Interviewed by SIMON DALLOW
SIMON
After being dumped as National Party leader in October 2003 Bill English could have thrown in the political towel, but unlike some of his predecessors he decided to fight another day building himself something of a reputation as an education scam buster in the process. Earlier this morning I spoke with National's education spokesman about his comeback and where he'd like to go from here.
There seems to be a never ending litany of problems emerging for NCEA Mr English what more can you tell us?
BILL
Well I don’t think there's too many more new problems in fact one of the issues here is that the problems in NCEA have been well known for quite a long time and they really boil down to this, in a standards based system students have to suffer the consequences of what is a messy sloppy measurement system and the real injustice in it is when the students don’t get the results that they should get. The literature around the world, the experience in other countries has been over this territory for many years there's nothing new, what's happened in New Zealand is we have pushed one theory that’s standard based assessment to its limit as we sometimes do, and now we have an establishment an NZQA and the politicians who are ideologically wedded to the pure model, it's having bad consequences for students, it's undermining the confidence of teachers and what standard they need to teach to and that’s why it has to be changed.
SIMON
But you still have faith in the standards based system over a ranking system such as norm referencing?
BILL
Well this is typical in education is that they create a mutually exclusive category so they can have a big argument, in fact around the world many countries run an integrated system with some standards base because that is useful at telling you what students know but you need the norm referencing which you called ranking, you need that to stabilise the system and create fairness and credibility for students, you see when you have ten thousand more students passing a particular subject last year than this year you know you've got a problem because all the research tells us that the one group of sixth formers is pretty much like any other group of sixth formers, they should get fairly similar results and norm referencing helps protect the student from the consequences of a sloppy measuring system. So we need to bring the two together.
SIMON
You've drip fed these scandals over a period of months are you saying there is not more to come?
BILL
Well look there's a lot more analysis of the 2004 results which show that our students are not getting a fair deal, the analysis shows that all the internal standards, all the internal assessment results have been going up, they’ve been rising, the pass rates have been rising, all the external assessment results, the pass rates have been falling. Now that’s very complex for a teacher because the teacher's teaching along and it looks like their students are doing better and better and then they get to the external exam at the end of the year and suddenly they fail. So that creates real confusion for them. So it needs a lot more analysis.
SIMON
So you've got real problems there with NCEA haven't you. Well which is in worse shape NCEA or the tertiary funding system that’s throwing up these dubious sub degree courses, which is in worse shape?
BILL
Well the tertiary system is wasting a lot more public money, no doubt about that, but the NCEA is an area where the government looks least likely to change they’ve got doggedly ideological about NCEA and the tertiary, the stories of rot in the system are now – have built up to the extent that the government's had to admit that its own policy's failed and Trevor Mallard's starting to threaten cuts all over the place to fix that. We've yet to see whether he can follow through, but both of them are in bad shape, there's 700,000 young New Zealanders caught up in those systems.
SIMON
Seventy percent of student on those sub degree courses don’t complete them, and that’s cost 1.75 billion dollars, one thousand seven hundred and fifty million dollars of taxpayer money gone for no purpose. How bad is this EFTS system?
BILL
Well look the EFTS system is okay as long as you recognise its limitations. The big problem has been that the government has allowed the financial incentives in the EFT system to run wild so polytechs has decided that the best way to be financially viable is to enrol you know 46,000 people in Gisborne in a Maori language radio sing along course, well the system has to have enough protections to stop that happening, you want student choice and the EFT system has given students of all ranges of ages and backgrounds the choice but you have to have some fiscal constraints and what I can't understand is how the current cabinet's sat around budget after budget and doled out hundreds of millions to a system they knew was running out of control and that’s the bit that’s hardest to understand.
SIMON
A system that was previously capped but National took the cap off.
BILL
Yes but – we took the cap off but we imagined growth rates of something like 2% per year, what we've actually got is growth rates of about 15% per year.
SIMON
So I would say you got your projections wrong basically.
BILL
No no our projections were right because you've always got the fiscal control, you can always say we're not going to put more money in, the difference was Labour came along and said well whatever demand you've generated we will fund it, that’s what happened to the Wananga the most spectacular example of growth.
SIMON
This is a classic bums on seats policy isn't it, you’re gonna fund as many people who are willing to enrol, how does that make New Zealanders better educated? This is a system devised by National.
BILL
Well look it's a system devised to give the public some choice and the current government spent the 1999 campaign saying they were going to change it, five years later they’ve spent 200 million dollars changing it and the results are worse than ever, what needs to happen is that you get some fiscal constraint on it again, you simply stop throwing taxpayers' money at courses you know aren’t working, and the government's free to do that any day of the week.
SIMON
But a system you set up again, you devised the system and you took the cap off when you were in government.
BILL
Look it's ridiculous to say that after five years of the most competent popular government the earth has ever seen that somehow all this is our fault, the fact is Helen Clark and Trevor Mallard and Steve Mahary sat round a cabinet table and made decisions to go to parliament and get hundreds of millions of dollars to give to these courses knowing – knowing that it wasn’t working, so we have to change the priorities because the priorities are wrong and we have to limit the amount of money that’s being thrown at them, those changes are quite easily made, the government might make them, certainly if the government changes we will make them.
SIMON
So you’re not blaming the system you’re blaming the way it's been implemented?
BILL
Oh absolutely. There was no need for it to grow in the weird way that it's grown. There's no need for a public agency to give accreditation to courses like the art of health where you learn about the effect of colour on the human soul, that course had to be accredited by a public agency, then another public agency had to agree to fund it so there's plenty of control if you just use it.
SIMON
You've also said that Labour's poured money into and I quote here "dodgy courses while starving trade and skills training".
BILL
Yeah well look this is the real scandal of tertiary funding. The trades and skills area represents right now the best opportunity in a generation to train our young people, because there are plenty of jobs, employers want to take them on, and those jobs are increasingly well paid. What's happened is that through the last four or five years while there's been some growth that growth has been capped and the soft dodgy courses have been uncapped, so at the moment you've got apprentices being laid off for lack of public funding for the apprenticeship while you've still got these soft courses running wild hundreds of millions going into it and if you compare the growth rates the soft courses have about doubled in size and the trades and apprenticeships have only gone up about 15% over the last four or five years.
SIMON
How confident are you that what you’re telling us here and elsewhere in the media will be policy coming up to the election?
BILL
I'm quite confident because you’re seeing signs that the government realises it will have to adopt our policy as is happening increasingly in education and this simply has to change, we cannot afford the odd priorities in education spending, you know we've got parents with children with special needs who are having their support cut.
SIMON
This is well and good but how confident are you, Catherine Rich was confident I believe on social welfare and she found out that it didn’t matter in the end. How confident can you be that Bill English's policies will make it to the election?
BILL
Oh well what will make it to the election are National's policies and I'll have a big influence over those, I've spent a good deal of time in getting the caucus to understand the problems now they do, and they’ll be keen to run with the policy I put forward.
SIMON
Are you driving education policy, is it you, Don Brash, or Alan Peachy?
BILL
Oh well I'm certainly driving the policy, Don will – he’ll be making a speech in the next couple of months and that will be National's policy, in the end it's National's policy and I'm the spokesman for it.
SIMON
Mr Brash has mooted tax rebates for those who pay for their children's education is that policy?
BILL
Ah no it's not policy because we haven't finalised our policy in the caucus on that matter yet.
SIMON
Well what role after the election for Alan Peachy then you brought in this high profile school principal who's got very strong views on education what role will he have?
BILL
Well that’s up to the leader really but we would want to make sure that we use the full benefit of his long experience in education and his strong emphasis on the quality of teaching in the classroom that’s really Alan's bit mission, that’s what he's done as a principal and we want to see that carried through in policy and he’ll have – he's got some very well thought through ideas in that respect.
SIMON
In a wider sense is the National Party in better shape than it was say six months before the last election?
BILL
Oh miles better shape, we've got stability round the leadership, the organisation is in much better shape than it was, and I expect it's going to run a campaign this time which is actually an MMP campaign. That didn’t happen last time so it's a huge step forward to be campaigning for the party vote.
SIMON
You said miles better shape than when you were leader so you take responsibility for that?
BILL
Oh I think political parties go through phases, I became leader at a time when it was reasonably dysfunctional as an organisation, the public could see that, the commentators could see it, I made a number of changes on my watch which I am pleased have come to fruition since so yep I have to take responsibility for the last campaign I've never dodged it, I know this one is going to be much more effective.
SIMON
Reports in the Independent over the last couple of weeks have suggested a division over the amount of influence wielded by Murray McCully how unified is caucus.
BILL
Oh caucus is unified, I didn’t quite understand where the stories in Independent came from, but no the caucus is more unified than it has been probably since about 96/97 and that’s a huge benefit for National and I think it's starting to show in the public support that has been consistently growing.
SIMON
Were you satisfied with Murray McCully's performance as Campaign Manager in the last election?
BILL
Well look no one was satisfied with anyone's performance in the last election and I've been held accountable for mine, it's going to be a lot better this time.
SIMON
You’re an anomaly really, a deposed leader whose come back to play quite a prominent role, why have you decided to stay?
BILL
Well I like politics, I've still been a relatively young politician for a deposed leader, I'm not sure if I was younger than Jim McLay or slightly older, but and I felt that there are some issues like education which I asked for when I lost the leadership where I had something to contribute and I've really enjoyed that.
SIMON
Do you aspire to lead the party again, where do your aspirations lie now?
BILL
Well in the short term to become the Minister of Education that’s for sure, I'd really like the opportunity to sort out some of these messes and I've got the experience now to be able to do that, but look National's got strong stable leadership, everyone in the National Party's happy about that.
SIMON
Further down the track though would you like to lead?
BILL
I haven't really considered that, as I said we've got strong stable leadership it's going to be in place for quite some time I would think.
SIMON
How has not being leader in the last couple of years changed your life?
BILL
Oh well quite dramatically I'd have to say, being leader of a struggling political party is about as hard a job as you could get, because your own supporters are probably your biggest critics and you’re irrelevant to the public, so that pressure comes off you when you stop being the leader. I've had the opportunity to spend a very enjoyable 18 months much more with my family, I've been able to narrow down my focus just to one portfolio and get into it in some depth and I have to say I've enjoyed it.
SIMON
Okay so you’re not committing to wanting to be leader in the future but what role do you see yourself in next year say?
BILL
Well I hope that we're going to be in government, I find myself oddly enough as one of the longest serving most experienced people on the front bench of the National Party and I'd like – really enjoy the opportunity to be part of the running a government in its engine room with plenty of things to do.
SIMON
National education spokesperson Bill English thank you very much for joining Agenda today.
BILL
Thank you.
Transcripts are copyright to Front Page Ltd and may contain errors. They should be checked against a copy of the programme to ensure accuracy.
Copyright to Front Page Ltd but may be used PROVIDED attribution is made to TVOne and Agenda
