This is a strange day to talk to you, coming so soon after the election result.
The result on Saturday night means that I’ve got a bit of freedom to talk to you frankly, because it was a message for me and for my colleagues in Labour that we need to change.
We didn’t emerge as the party voicing the dreams and aspirations of New Zealanders.
We need to become that party, and all of us who have been given leadership positions as members of parliament need to accept our responsibility for becoming the party that New Zealanders expect to see.
For me, that party is going to put education, training, development and opportunity at the centre of its meaning to people.
We need to re-think the connections between education, science and training, and re-think what they mean to the economy and to people.
This can’t be about ideology, and it can’t just be about parts of the education and science system in isolation.
We have to think about what works, and how they can be made to work together better.
In my view we need to re-think our economy.
This requires us to rethink the way we harness our science and innovation, and the way we unleash for people new opportunities in education and training.
A couple of experiences in my life taught me how important these issues are.
It began a few years ago when I was something of a hippy, travelling around the world like many Kiwis take the time to do.
A friend and I decided to follow the Nile River to its source in Uganda.
I think we had this romantic notion of following in the footsteps of those great explorers.
I remember we were reading a couple of wonderful books by Alan Moorehead, who wrote about those who had passed through these same places 100 years earlier. They were called called ‘White Nile’ and the ‘Blue Nile’.
In South Sudan we hitched a ride on a Somali truck that seemed the only way to cross the wild terrain of the Turkana tribe. It was about a five day trip.
We were sitting in the back of the truck peeling a mango and throwing the skins over the side.
I heard noises below and looking down I saw children fighting over the skins – simply because they were hungry. It was a real shock. Here I was, a tourist, travelling through a land where people were so hungry they fought over mango skins.
Over the next few days we saw many people sitting or walking – who knows where – who were just skin and bones, their lives devastated by a drought and conflict in the area, many were close to dying.
For me it was one of those turning points – it hit me that perhaps I should be doing something more to make a difference in the world.
I returned to NZ but the idea of doing something never left me. I pushed and prodded various agencies and was eventually hired by Save the Children to work in Sri Lanka where a war was being fought between the government in the south and the Tamil Tiger guerrillas in the north. I was given a job of taking exam papers across the front line from the government side to the Tiger side.
It meant leaving a row of sandbags on one side, travelling down a single road – that was mined on either side to the Tiger sandbags marking their positions on the other.
Eventually we got the exam papers around the various schools and I stopped to talk at one place to community leaders about why exam papers - of all things - were so important to them.
Why, was my question, hadn’t we brought them medicine, or food, that were critically in short supply.
Their answer was profound – all those other supplies help with the needs of today, but only an education offered opportunity to those children, only an education offered a chance to break out of the cycle of deprivation those kids were in.
And just as that is true of kids in Sri Lanka, or Sudan, it is true of children and families in New Zealand.
And that’s at the centre of why I made a decision to come back to New Zealand and try to make a difference here, too.
Because education is the best plan that exists anywhere in the world to break children out of a cycle of failure and unleash opportunities for them.
So we have three major problems to solve:
Creating an education system that offers as much opportunity to the son of tradesman and the daughter of a labourer as it offers to the children of a lawyer or banker.
I am the sick of hearing parents believe that their children could get a better education if only they could afford to pay for it, because there is no excuse for failing any child in New Zealand whether their parents have the means to pay or not.
Mostly that starts early.
The Dunedin Longitudinal study tells us that interventions at an early age have powerful flow on effects later.
James Heckman, a Nobel Laureate, who used the Longitudinal study estimates that one dollar invested in those early years returns $11 later when these young people become teenagers.
We don’t need slogans like national standards. We need interventions in the areas where we know kids are failing. That means reading recovery, resources and incentives for teachers to be working in those schools that consistently lose out.
And quick interventions in those schools that are not performing.
Fifty percent of our prison inmates are functionally illiterate. If that one statistic doesn’t spur us into action, what will?
Second, we need to revolutionise the connections between school leaving and further learning.
Too many who leave school without the skills they will need to thrive and prosper in work.
It’s too easy for a school leaver to drift out of school and then they are lost. 24% Pākehā, 40% Māori and 45% Pasifika leave school with no qualifications.
The hard edges between schools and tertiary courses works against a seamless transition from one place to another.
Stuart Middleton, a world leader in education in my view , says that it’s critical that young people transition to some form of tertiary qualification, even if it’s not what they eventually end up doing.
Picking a 16 year old up who has fallen through that gaps is both extraordinarily time consuming and difficult.
That means rethinking our education system towards more flexible and multiple pathways – re-examining the route between the conventional curriculum of the school and the opportunities in the post-school sector.
And third, we need to do better at unleashing innovation and development in our universities, so that we produce world class science and technology embedded in our exports, because that is the only way we are going to develop the high value economy we need.
We have no alternative. We know we can’t multiply our dairy industry five times or more to catch Australia’s economy. Nor can we multiply our tourist industry substantially.
Yet we know our economy is slowly declining in relation to others. Just over 40 years ago meat exports paid our pharmaceutical bill 18 times over – today, it pays for them just four times over.
The government’s current ‘strategy’ goes something like this: as China and Asia grows richer they will demand a higher protein diet. We grow protein, therefore we’re ideally positioned.
That’s a hope, not a strategy. We hope that it changes out there, so we won’t have to change here – so we can continue doing more or less the same thing as we’ve done the 1960s.
We need to shape our own future, not simply rely on the prosperity of others. We are an inventive people but we have relied on a number 8 wire mentality to see us through.
Great ideas, but too often we fail to commercialise them.
For the money our universities are some of the best in the world. Are they open and linked to our companies to foster innovations being taken to the market? Not from what I hear from the private sector? Mostly they’re seen as providers of graduates, not trading in ideas.
We will be travelling through some difficult economic times in the coming months.
It will require some bold thinking.
Others have done it. One notable case is the former Finnish Prime Minister, Esko Aho who, largely untested, came into office in 1992.
At the time Finland was suffering 20% unemployment, 10% inflation and its stock market was tanking.
Its future was hugely doubtful.
Aho’s message to the Finnish people was they had problems. But that only they could fix it. And that only their brains and talent was going to take them forward.
Collectively they took that message on board. They moved forward. They transformed their economy through innovation and talent. They are now at the top of the OECD.
Aho made bold decisions, but most important was increasing funding to research and to education. He is a politician I admire in recent times. He was, I need to say, voted out at the next election. He might have wanted to say, but he thought it was more important to make a difference than to get re-elected. Because he had a vision for why he was in politics – not for his own sake.
We could all take a lesson in that.
New Zealand faces a more glacial decline than Finland, but a decline nevertheless. But the same lessons, in my view, apply.
So as we go forward, two days after an election defeat, the Labour Party needs to be articulating a vision and narrative that inspires New Zealanders.
The party, as I said before, should be the voice of the dreams and aspirations of New Zealanders.
We need seriously think how we do that.
But that’s exciting, not depressing. Clark did it. Lange did it.
We have the talent amongst us to do it too.
And it starts today.