Metiria Turei AGM Speech: Healthy Kids Ready to Learn
green-party
Sun Jun 02 2013 12:00:00 GMT+1200 (New Zealand Standard Time)
Metiria Turei AGM Speech: Healthy Kids Ready to Learn
Sunday, 2 June 2013, 12:25 pm
Speech: Green Party
Healthy Kids Ready to Learn
Tena koutou katoa.
I can’t think of a better place to be than standing here with you all, than in Christchurch today.
I want to acknowledge the Christchurch community in the rebuilding of this beautiful place, and I also want to acknowledge all the schools, families, communities and children affected by the recent school reorganisation here. Your communities did not deserve this terrible process or the terrible outcome. We will continue to work alongside you.
To my Green whānau, thank you so much for being here. I am so proud to represent people who are actively building a better world, in a city that’s so busy becoming better, safer and stronger and even more beautiful.
The Green Party has made no secret of its mission to win hearts and minds.
Our passions, like the fight against child poverty, and a love of the environment, have affected mainstream thinking. New Zealand is a better place already because of all of you.
And I want to introduce one of those people to you today: Marama Davidson, our Green Party candidate in the Ikaroa-Rawhiti by election.
Marama has spent her life fighting for a better country especially for Māori children and women.
I was proud last week to announce that Marama, a fierce and loving mum of six, had been selected to contest the Ikaroa-Rāwhiti by-election.
Marama has fantastic support in Ikaroa-Rāwhiti. She knows that the Green Party is the loudest voice in support of our people in their fight against oil drilling in their rohe, and she knows that we, more than any other party, have real ideas for sustainable jobs that will pay our people a living wage.
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Marama also knows that it is Māori children who suffer, disproportionately, when governments fail to use the considerable power they’ve been given to make changes for the better.
And that's what I want to talk about today.
Days before this month’s budget, as if to warn NZ kids not to expect too much, Finance Minister Bill English made the profound announcement that there was no solution to poverty.
That’s his excuse for not even bothering to try.
This is the politics of denial.
We’ve seen it from Steven Joyce who figures that if he doesn’t know, about the social harm of gambling at the SkyCity casino, he can just pretend that harm doesn’t exist.
We see it in the Government’s welfare policy, where they pretend that solo parents who can’t find work are just not trying hard enough, denying the fact there just aren't enough jobs.
I believe that if a government spends too long in denial, then it’s abusing the tremendous power it has to make things better.
The thing is, people don't expect the Government to solve all their problems.
But most of us believe that, if we shift our priorities a bit, then every child, not just some, would have the opportunity to grow up to realise their full potential.
And for that we would all be richer.
The truth is we can do better. We can be better than John Key and Bill English would have us be.
The Green Party believes that, critical to a fair society and a productive economy is a strong, free, inclusive and quality public education system.
I am the product of such a system.
I fought it at times, and abandoned it at others. But from the moment I first went to school to the day I graduated from university that public education system helped make me who I am.
It transformed my life.
Education was my route out of poverty.
Unlike Bill English, I do believe there is a solution to poverty.
And a large part of it is education. A strong, free, inclusive and quality public education.
This is a means by which the birth right of every child can be guaranteed: the opportunity for a good life and a fair future.
But education is only inclusive if we make it that way.
It means denying hunger, or sickness, disability, distance, or dysfunction, the ability to get in the way of of a child's learning.
Education can right the wrongs of intergenerational disadvantage.
The Green Party believes that schools can and should be the heart of the community, where the minds and bodies of children are nurtured so they can achieve all they were born capable of achieving.
We envision schools as the hub of their communities, where teachers and principals can focus on their expertise – delivering a great education to our kids – while others assist with community services, such as food in schools, school community gardens, adult education and health services on site.
We believe that we can afford to invest heavily in supporting schools to be that community heart. In fact, with the cost of poverty running to $6 billion a year, we cannot afford not to.
Schools are a place where the cycle of poverty can be snapped.
The Green Party knows that raising family incomes is the key to addressing poverty. We know that improving the quality and affordability of housing, a living wage and a universal child allowance are just a few of the solutions that will help address the root causes of poverty.
But we also believe that alongside a long term strategy for tackling poverty at its source, we need brave measures that will make children’s lives better right now.
Kids, who are sick and hungry and unable to learn, can’t wait for us to get this right.
This is why today, I can tell you about a new addition to our package of solutions to child poverty that will make it much harder for one poverty symptom – ill health – to stand in the way of our children’s potential.
We will put a nurse in every decile one, two and three primary and intermediate school in New Zealand.
Healthy kids are ready to learn.
These nurses are trained public health professionals who the children get to know and trust, and who get to know that child and their whānau.
Dedicated public health nurses working in schools can offer immediate first port of call health care for kids who may never get to see a doctor and they can provide a gateway to more comprehensive health care to those who need a referral.
School nurses can follow up on the excellent B4 School Checks that are carried out on four year olds now, and connect kids with the right kind of help.
Children in poverty need this help, because we know that not all kids are getting the medical attention and basic healthcare they need to be ready to learn.
Some schools already provide this help, as have iwi organisations, and some DHBs. But it’s time that basic health care is guaranteed to all children who need it and where those kids are - at school: trusted, accessible and free.
After all, free doctors’ visits stop on a child’s sixth birthday – when most kids are still in year one at school. At that young age, free prescriptions also stop.
Why are we doing this?
Because poverty, sickness and educational underachievement go hand in hand.
Asthma, on its own, is the leading cause of school absenteeism and preventable hospital admissions in New Zealand children.
Nurses tell us that kids are not being taken to the doctor and not getting the medicines they need because of the cost.
New Zealand children who live in the most deprived areas are three times more likely to be hospitalised for preventable illnesses than children from the least deprived areas.
Most often those hospitalisations are the result of asthma, acute upper respiratory infections, and diarrhoea. And increasingly, children are being hospitalised for rheumatic fever and skin infections.
These are serious illnesses that often start with a simple sore throat or a cut, and which, left untreated can have lifelong implications for a child’s health, their education, and their future.
A simple trip to the school nurse could have made all the difference.
That’s why we’re starting our nurse in every school policy in the schools with the highest level of deprivation: decile 1 to 3.
Some of these schools are already getting the benefit of a one off intervention against rheumatic fever where school based clinics have been set up. In Porirua, for example, where a simple throat swab has led to no new admissions to hospital for rheumatic fever.
These interventions work. Lets turn these temporary interventions into permanent solutions.
Trained public health nurses dedicated to one school, who get to know their community, and are dedicated to working there full time, can implement tailor made solutions that work for that community. For Māori communities, this means having nurses who want to work within their kaupapa.
This proposal builds on the School Based Health Services run by nurses in secondary schools, which have already been linked to improvements in academic results in South Auckland schools.
A nurse in every school was a key recommendation of the Nurses Organisation of New Zealand in their submission on the Government’s Green Paper on Vulnerable Children.
Nurses want to do this work, and they are the best professionals to do it.
We estimate that it will cost up to $30 million a year to provide nurses for each low decile primary school.
When you consider that the rheumatic fever testing programme is costing $5 million a year; hospital treatment for rheumatic fever alone costs $40 million a year; that it costs $1200 a day to treat a child with asthma in hospital, the numbers speak for themselves.
Estimating how much we can save over a child’s lifetime is harder, but international research suggests that for every $1 spent on school based health services, we could get $8 back by preventing illness, saving lives and improving the employment prospects of kids.
With imagination, and inspiration, vision and compassion those with power can make a real difference in the lives of children which ultimately benefits all of us.
To do that they need to admit they can, and then say that they will, and shift their focus from the interests of the few to the needs of a nation.
People power can force that shift, something we saw this week with the Government finally committing to a food in schools programme after such a long hard slog by so many who really care.
Breakfast for some was a start, but there is much, much more to do to share the bounty of this country fairly among its tiniest citizens.
Helping kids is not simply about creating order in a parent’s life, as Bill English has said. Poor parents are not “abdicating their responsibility” as John Key would have us believe.
Poverty is cruel, and complex. Its subjects are victims, not willing participants. None of it is about choice.
It is, quite frankly, pathetic to say there is no solution to poverty.
All the Government had to do was listen.
The Children’s Commissioner’s expert advisory group told them. Income matters. If you earn more, you're less likely to be poor. This is not rocket science. So a universal child payment would have helped. A vision to create sustainable green jobs would have helped.
We would work to implement the recommendations of the Expert Advisory Group on Child Poverty Report – the single most extensive child focused policy document this country has seen in decades.
We agree with their solutions. We need a Warrant of Fitness for rental homes so families who rent them know the homes are warm, dry and safe for their kids. We will ensure every New Zealander has the chance of a Home for Life, with options for affordable housing and improved security of tenure. We will remove the discrimination in the misnamed In Work Tax Credit, a fight valiantly continued by the Child Poverty Action Group, develop a universal child allowance and make sure that there is a Minister for Children, with clear measures of child poverty, targets for reduction and the resources to be effective.
The Green Party believes that schools can and should be the heart of the community, where healthy kids can be ready to learn. We will help develop our schools as the heart and hub of their communities, where the teachers can focus on their education expertise and community services can help to remove the barriers to children’s learning. Healthy kids are ready to learn.
We need to, and can implement solutions to address the causes of poverty and we need to implement programmes to relieve the worst of its effects now. That is what a responsible Government should do.
We believe that in order to inspire and nurture our nation we should aim higher than a convention centre bribe from a casino who wants to make more money off the addictions of unhappy people.
By releasing the potential of all our people, not just some, we unlock our nation's future.
We have a vision for our country that is more aspirational than drilling holes in the whenua.
We know that we have it in us all to make this country work better, and be even better than it is.
We believe that our economy doesn’t work without its environment, and the country will never be as good as it can be unless all its people are the best they can be.
To be the best, our people need more than a few crumbs. We all need to be invited to the table.
Our passions, like the fight against child poverty, and a love of the environment, will create an Aotearoa New Zealand that is a better place for all of us.
ENDS
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