The rockstar prime minister

It was the Te Tai Tonga electorate’s privilege to host the annual Labour Party conference and its headline act, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern, last weekend in Dunedin. Tickets went fast, and the line for the prime minister’s conference speech stretched out the door and around the block.

Wherever our prime minister goes, whether it’s the marae at Waitangi or a conference hall in Dunedin, people turn out to hear her.

Last weekend was no different with Labour members, media, and even rubberneckers arriving from throughout the country to catch the prime minister.

For me, as the MP for Te Tai Tonga, it was a particular pleasure to help play host, and to stand together with our government as the prime minister announced an extra 600 learning support co-ordinators for Kiwi schools.

The co-ordinators will arrive in schools in 2020 and work with children with learning difficulties.

The policy really is classically Jacinda, focusing on what Kiwi kids need to thrive.

It’s the prime minister’s vision that this country becomes the best in which to be a child.

And that means the best for every child – whether they’re accelerate learners or learners with other needs, whether they’re Ma¯ ori or

Pa¯ keha¯ , and whether they’re born to a wealthy family or a not so wealthy family.

The government’s learning support coordinators are another step closer to that vision.

‘‘It’s the

So, too, for Kiwibuild, the housing programme ensuring

prime

more New Zealanders – and thus more Kiwi kids – have a

minister’s

house to call their own.

The first Kiwibuild homes

vision that

in the South Island are going up in the Queenstown-Lakes

this

District to help ease the housing crisis for working

country

people in one of the country’s fastest growing regions.

becomes

The more affordable homes there are, the better off Kiwi

the best in

kids and their families will be.

It’s a significant change

which to be

from the last government where housing was left to ‘‘the

a child.’’

market’’.

For the last government ideology came first.

The market was the best solution.

Tax cuts were the best policy in an election year. That sort of thing.

But this government puts wellbeing first. Our next budget will be a wellbeing budget where people’s needs come first.

Finance Minister Grant Robertson not only balanced the books this year, he posted a significant surplus.

That puts us in a position to help meet some of the needs that went unmet under the last government.

Many of the initiatives in the next wellbeing budget will be universal – like the government’s families package was – and some will be targeted like He Poutama Rangatahi, the pilot programme helping put people who aren’t in employment, education or training in work.

So far, the results have been promising.

The thing with wellbeing initiatives like the families package and He Poutama Rangatahi is that they not only help enrich people’s lives and improve their wellbeing, they help increase the country’s productivity and grow its economy too.

It’s win-win.

Wouldn’t it be great if we had an education system that encouraged students to learn . . . not regurgitate quotes.

Forecasters say it’s going to be a piping hot month, which is great news for daydrinkers and beach-goers. But please spare a thought for the students. As The Simpsons’ Helen Lovejoy once said: ‘‘Won’t somebody please think of the children?’’

Because, yesterday, our annual tradition of making students sit NCEA exams started. While the rest of us slow down for summer, the next month will be packed with stress for students sitting their exams.

Exam season is as predictable as can be. For those in the thick of it, every second conversation will start with: ‘‘I’m really stuffed for this exam’’. There’ll be the predictable moans about how miserable it all is. As the weeks wear on, the few unlucky enough to have late exams will become increasingly jealous. By the end of it, all they’ll be thinking is: ‘‘This sucks.’’

Anyone who’s ever sat exams knows they really do suck. It isn’t just the gruelling conditions that make exams bad. Exams also have a habit of systematically dismantling any genuine interest you once had in the subject.

To get through the season, students are fed some ridiculous ideas that their futures, their education, their whole damned lives, hang in the balance.

After a few years free of exams, I got back into them this year. I am sad to inform you it only gets worse. Universities, the in-and-out, fast-food equivalents of the education system, thrive off exams.

They’re the cheapest, easiest, way to measure a student’s performance.

There is, in reality, little other value in an exam. They are quick and cheap assessments, that is it.

So, when I jumped into university this year, I was quite frankly disturbed to see that the stories we read so often about undergraduates buckling under exam stress are true.

I’ve talked to people, mostly students of ‘‘competitive courses’’, who I am hugely concerned for. They turn into obsessive, unhealthy, anxious creatures as rumours swirl about the minimum mark required to continue with their course.

My uncharitable self often laughed at students like them, geeks who chose to study boring

1. What New Zealand broadcaster and political commentator is known by the initials HDPA?

2. Where in the body are the sebaceous glands?

3. Her first names were Phyllis Dorothy and she wrote crime novels. What name did she write under?

4. What

Australian city is home to an

A-League football team called the Roar?

5. Hoagland Howard Carmichael was famous for doing what?

6. What multiple Academy Awardwinning crime movie of 1967 was set in the racially segregated town of Sparta, Mississippi?

7. Cusco, historic capital of the Inca Empire, is in what country?

8. A palomino is a type of what?

9. What is the term for a cooking technique in which alcohol is added to a hot pan and ignited?

10. What word can precede map, safety and rage? Now may the Lord of peace himself give you peace at all times and in every way. The Lord be with all of you. 2 Thessalonians 3:16 Anyone wishing to make a complaint to the New Zealand Media Council should first put it in writing to the editor. If not satisfied with the reply, complainants should then write to The Secretary, New Zealand Media Council, Box 10 879, Wellington, including a clipping of the disputed article and copies of the correspondence. Letters are welcome, but writers must provide their name, address and telephone number as a sign of good faith – pseudonyms are not acceptable. So that as many letters as possible can be published, each letter should be no more than 250 words. We reserve the right to edit letters for length, sense, legal reasons and on grounds of good taste. Please send your letters to: The Editor, The Southland Times, PO Box 805, Invercargill; fax on (03) 214 9905; or email to letters@stl.co.nz

1. Heather Du Plessis-Allan; 2. In the skin; 3. P D James; 4. Brisbane; 5. Writing songs; 6. In The Heat Of The Night; 7. Peru; 8. Horse;

9. Flambe´; 10. Road.