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Thursday, May 9, 2024

Alwyn Poole: Hipkins would rather no one remember that he was Minister of Education


After being elected to Parliament in 2008 the maiden speech of Hipkins was substantially around education policy.

He was Labour’s spokesperson for education 2011 – 2017.

He was Minister for Education from 2017 until February 2023. This is approximately 88% of the time Labour were in power.

Tinetti took over in February until the election. Together, I believe, they oversaw the worst education oversight by government in living memory.

Whenever the recent six years of Labour government are referred to Labour avoid discussion of two personnel situations.

1. Ardern as Prime Minister (also 88% of the time).

2. Hipkins as Minister of Education.

Up until the books were opened he had only two legacies. They are; killing a Charter School model that was helping struggling children to succeed and the ditching of National Standards, although they were supported by parents, with no replacement.

He has two new legacies.

1. The appalling and deceitful oversight of the proposal to combine Marlborough Girls and Boys Colleges. This BALOONED to $450 million and he not only hid it from Cabinet but instructed the Ministry how to increment the amounts to disguise the extent of cost increases.

2. Grant Robertson made it apparent the whenever Hipkins did not get his way in a budget process he would threaten to throw his toys.

“Former Finance Minister Grant Robertson in his recent valedictory speech also revealed facetiously that Labour leader and former Education Minister Chris Hipkins threatened to resign each year.
“I also want to thank Chippy for not following through on his annual threat to resign during the education budget process,” said Robertson.

With the decline in all education measures during the Labour party it would have been better if Hipkins had resigned. The nation should be always reminded of his role and the effect on NZ young people and their families.

Alwyn Poole, a well-known figure in the New Zealand education system, he founded and was the head of Mt Hobson Middle School in Auckland for 18 years. This article was sourced HERE

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

Under his mother's (in)expert guidance?

Anonymous said...

Truly an appalling record, indeed. Yet almost every night our MSM TV News (run by Labour's cheerleaders at the taxpayers expense) cuts to Hipkins for some glib soundbite - responding to the latest Govt policy that seeks to correct the unholy mess his incompetent Govt left behind.

Gaynor said...

Hipkin's extreme socialism injected into education was just continuing on the decades long gradual progressive agenda of creating a socialist utopia. The Colleges of Education brainwashes teachers into helping build this, in cooperation with the Teacher Unions, Ministry of Education and NZCER.

What has disrupted their plans is that they believed they had science on their side but genuine science has proved their academic methods and lack of content completely wrong as revealed by our appalling drop in achievement standards.

Progressive education never has been concerned with academic achievement but this is what the majority of society including parents desire from an education system. Also there is still a proportion of society who have been taught with more traditional methods and can see through the shocking inadequacies of what goes for so called education dominated by child -centered, constructionist (do it yourself learning), ideological nonsense we now have in our schools.

Anonymous said...

Hipkins got his crazy ideas from his demented, mother, Rosemary Hipkins who insisted that her crazy ideas about Maori "science" should be indoctrinated throughout the education system.

Reality check, Maori discovered no science, and our fundamental science was discovered from 3,000 years ago in Europe.
No metals, no physics, maths, chemistry - everything that the world runs on was brought here by (mostly) Europeans.

Sticks and stones were never going to make a proper civilization.