RODNEY HIDE (Leader—ACT) : I move, That the House take note of miscellaneous business. It is Gifted Awareness Week, and what I would like to cover today is the misinformation and prejudice we often have, and that I certainly had, about the gifted. I was sad to hear that the Minister of Education himself has this misinformation and prejudice about the difficulties and the facts of gifted education in New Zealand.

Let me just explain that gifted children occur across all races in New Zealand and across all socio-economic groups. Typically, siblings are gifted, so if a parent has a gifted child, he or she often has two or three gifted children. Sadly, these children are not catered for in mainstream education as the Minister says. I heard of one child who will be expelled from preschool this week. These kids are not adequately looked after within our mainstream education. We feel a prejudice against them because we wonder why those parents should be bothered or worried that their child is gifted; we worry about those who are not. Well, I can tell the House that it is heartbreaking to see the parents of gifted children struggling to keep them at school and manage them at home. Oftentimes gifted children also have disabilities, like Asperger’s syndrome, autism, dysgraphia, or dyslexia, so they have that added complication.

Gifted education centres operate within schools in New Zealand, and the Minister said that that was a great thing because we value giftedness. But members should picture this: we make parents pay for the teachers in those centres. Parents who have paid through their taxes for their children’s education cannot get their gifted kids looked after; they themselves have to pay the teachers’ salaries. And the House should get this: the parents have to pay the rental on the classrooms back to the Ministry of Education. Those parents have to pay twice over. The Minister of Education got up in the House yesterday and said “Oh yes, but we gave the centre at the Owairaka District School $78,000.” But that sum was given over 3 years. And, by the way, a good third of that sum was paid for in fees, because the teachers took the trouble to teach other teachers about having a gifted child in the class. So the subsidy was only $26,000.

It is Gifted Awareness Week. It is a challenge for parents, for teachers, and, indeed, for this country to make the most of gifted children. These are our leaders of tomorrow but, sadly, those in mainstream education often run off the rails, are neglected, and, indeed, end up in our borstals—or what we used to call borstals—and jails. They are the future leaders of New Zealand. Here is what we should be doing. We should be fully funding these students, and if parents find that their children are best helped at a gifted education centre, that is where the money should go. We should think of how much it harms the education of these children that their parents, who pay taxes, have to struggle—often they are just working, average parents—to pay to send them to a gifted education centre. Yet the schools that are not providing for such children still get money for them as though they were educating them fully. It is well past the time that we funded students to go to the schools of their parents’ choice, and stopped making parents pay twice. That is particularly devastating to the parents of gifted children.

When I saw the parents of these gifted children, I was amazed. Again, it was a prejudice that I had, because I imagined those parents would be like parents in Epsom, who drive up in their BMWs and their Audis, and are lawyers, etc. But, no, they were hard-working Kiwis who had the challenge of having children who were gifted—the challenge of managing them at home and managing them at school—and who often had a disability. We should do better for these children for their sake, but more particularly for our country’s sake. Thank you.