Dear Editor
On 2nd September the Taranaki Daily News devoted its whole front page to the story about the millions of dollars being allotted to the Green School. Nothing special there, you might say, as just about every newspaper in the country did the same.
Neither is the fact that TDN took such an interest surprising given that the Green School is smack bang in the middle of Taranaki.
What makes the coverage a bit more interesting to Taranaki residents is that the story explained how New Plymouth’s mayor, Neil Holdom had not only introduced the school’s owners to the Hon. James Shaw, but he also wrote a letter of support (presumably to Shaw).
He is quoted as saying that he supports anything that brings money to Taranaki, explaining the proportion of his time that he spends advocating to get money to the region.
As is his wont he sees Wellington as a source of funds, not seeming to understand that there is but one pot and that is the ever called upon taxpayer.
Over the last few years Holdom has also pushed for changes to parking and road layouts to accommodate cycleways and walkways. The fact that most of this is simply a waste appears to be lost on him as he explains that, because there’s a 50% subsidy, it is an opportunity too good to miss. Unfortunately though, the ratepayers do have to pay for the other 50% and also fund any extra staff and consultants required.
Perhaps the subsidy will disappear when the Greens (who are more Marxist than Green) fail to make it back into parliament.
And maybe too, if that happens, we as a country might stop paying hugely to the Paris Accord. Perhaps we will even get to use for our own benefit the exorbitant amount of money we pay to the UN. That would go a long way to bringing our public education system up to a decent standard so that schools like the Green school can still be there for those that want them and can afford them but as private enterprise concerns they should not be funded from the public purse. A small per-pupil payment should be paid to compensate for what is saved from the public purse and ensure that a suitable curriculum is maintained.
Hopefully we are about to see the end of the Greens and with it the end of a lot of wasteful expense. Of course, there are cases where walkways and cycleways are appropriate and useful but we simply cannot afford to keep building things that just remain virtually unused.
It is still a truism that there is no such thing as a free lunch. Maybe one day we may return to a situation where we can have a few extras again but that time is not now. We must cut our coat to suit our cloth.
This Thursday the TDN had an opinion piece by one Malcolm Bell entitled “Green School should be celebrated and supported’. Bell completely misses the point that these things can be good but need to be self-sufficient. The paper introduces Bell as “having spent 48 years in education, including secondary teaching, union activism, teacher recruitment and industrial relations. He spent 15 years in the Beehive as private-secretary/senior advisor for seven consecutive ministers of education.”
Given that background, he surely must take a large piece of the blame for the sorry state of our education system today.
He states, in reference to the Green School, “It should be a State School”. That too admits the failure of the present education system, and he seems to be admitting defeat and is happy for others to do what he couldn’t.
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