Week in Politics: Education, agriculture and MPs behaving badly

Analysis - Teachers are underwhelmed by the government's plan to cut class sizes while farmers give National's agriculture policy a cautious tick; an election candidate quits after a "disgusting" social media post and the extent of the Green Party's problem with one of its MPs is revealed for the first time.

This week's announcement that class sizes would be reduced in primary and intermediate schools, supported by hiring 320 more teachers at a cost of $106 million over five years, wasn't greeted with much enthusiasm.

Classes would shift from 29 students per teacher to 28 by 2025, Education Minister Jan Tinetti announced with Prime Minister Chris Hipkins alongside her.

He said it was the first significant change in ratios since the last Labour government.

Teachers generally welcomed it as a move in the right direction but didn't think it was all that significant.

The primary teachers union, NZEI Te Riu Roa, said 1:29 ratios had been in place since 1996 and a review in 2000 recommended reducing it to 1:25.

"Our members have been campaigning for a reduction in class sizes and improved staffing for many years, it was the key reason for our most recent strike on 16 March," president Mark Potter said in a statement welcoming the funding.

Others were less generous.

"I just think it's ludicrous," Finlayson Park School principal Shirley Maihi told Checkpoint.

She said the ratio should have been reduced by five, not one.

"I think it's a slap in the face. And it certainly won't entice people to come into the teaching profession."

Stuff asked the question: Can one less student make a difference? and reported: "Teachers and education experts say the government's plan to reduce the funded teacher to student ratio for years 4 to 8 by one will have little impact."

Former Auckland principal and education consultant Alwyn Poole said knocking it down by one student wasn't going to make a great difference.

The Herald felt strongly enough about it to publish an editorial.

"Of course, changing the teacher-student ratio will gladden some parents but guarantees little," it said.

"The World Bank points out 'the pupil-teacher ratio is often used to compare the quality of schooling across countries but it is often weakly related to student learning and quality of education."

The editorial quoted National's education spokeswoman Erica Stanford, who wasn't confident the change would make a discernible difference and said many parents would fail to see how a promise to reduce some classes by one student in two years' time would turn around plummeting levels of achievement.

Tinetti also announced major NCEA changes were being deferred so schools could concentrate on maths, reading and writing.

That was better news, and Post Primary Teachers Association acting president Chris Abercrombie said the government had been listening to teachers.

The announcement followed publicity over falling achievement levels in core subjects and National's policy to focus on numeracy and literacy which would mean children spending an hour a day on reading, writing and maths.

National made a new pitch for the rural vote this week, announcing a set of farmer-friendly policies.

It's called Getting Back to Farming and includes 19 changes aimed at cutting red tape, RNZ reported.

Among the proposals are banning foreign investment in farms being converted to forestry for carbon farming, doubling the RSE worker cap from 19,000 to 38,000 workers a year, restarting live exports with 'gold standard' animal welfare, and scrapping two regulations for every one that was introduced.

Federated Farmers national president Andrew Hoggard said overall the policy list looked good but the promise to ban overseas investment in forestry, if it was simply there as a carbon sink, was confusing.

"My understanding is that's kind of already the rule," he said.

Despite endorsing the policy package, Hoggard didn't believe it would ensure a National vote from farmers.

"The rural vote isn't just on policy, there's a lot of other things," he said.

He would be most concerned about which party would do the best for the economy.

"Right now, inflationary pressure is having a huge impact on the margins on farms," he said.

Agriculture Minister Damien O'Connor, environmental activists and the Greens said it would be a major setback for environmental and water protections.

O'Connor said the two-for-one regulations exchange was ridiculous but he wasn't surprised.

"They're representing the views of some farmers," he said.

"We can't afford to have animals wallowing around in mud, we've got to have clean, fresh water, so we've got to make sure that the standards that are being imposed are realistic and protect our waterways. We've got to focus on reducing our carbon emissions because that's what the world is expecting."

O'Connor said National wasn't showing any leadership in those areas.

The Green Party's Eugenie Sage said binning two old regulations for every new one suggested National was going to roll back a lot of environmental regulations.

"All of those regulations are about ensuring that nature survives, thrives, and is not just exploited to maximise farm production."

That's where the sensible politics ended this week.

National's newly-minted election candidate Stephen Jack resigned after an uproar over a sexist Facebook post which deputy leader Nicola Willis said was "disgusting" and another which compared Jacinda Ardern to Adolf Hitler.

Jack had been chosen to contest the Taieri electorate, formerly Dunedin South, a safe Labour seat.

Stuff was the first to reveal the joke, if it could be called that: "I like my Covid like I like my women. 19. And easy to spread."

It was removed after Stuff questioned the party about it.

The Ardern/Hitler verse was written by Balclutha farmer Ross Agnew and re-posted by Jack, RNZ reported. It contained the lines: "Just as Hitler had the SS, our prime minister's on the job. She's given up on the police and bought the Mongrel Mob."

National's leader Christopher Luxon said the joke was "a pretty crass comment" which was about right. Crass means showing no intelligence or sensitivity.

Jack thought he was the victim, and had a lot to say about that.

In a statement issued to RNZ he described media coverage as "character assassination" which would dissuade "good strong hard-working people" from entering Parliament.

"These attacks have been careless, orchestrated, out of context and demonstrably inaccurate," Jack said in his statement.

"Comprehension of satire has been traded for woke stupidity."

After the party confirmed Jack's resignation, Luxon said he had never met the man and it was a good thing he was gone.

Luxon defended the party's selection process, which was found wanting after the Jake Bezzant scandal in 2021 and the revelation last year that Sam Uffindell had beaten a younger student in high school.

"We're doing a good job," Luxon said. "I am proud of the process I have put in place since becoming the leader, working with the president to make sure we've got a very good vetting process."

It just doesn't seem to work all the time.

The Greens have their own problem MP with Elizabeth Kerekere, whose tweet about Chloe Swarbrick was reported last week.

The party launched an inquiry into that, and this week RNZ revealed the extent of the problem it has to deal with.

Craig McCulloch's report said Kerekere had been accused of ongoing poor behaviour including badmouthing and undermining her caucus colleagues and staff.

Five individuals, including current and former staffers, spoke under condition of anonymity about the MP's behaviour since she arrived in Parliament in 2020.

"Many were unhappy with Kerekere putting her own interests ahead of the party and wanted the inquiry widened to cover her broader behaviour and for it to report back before the party list was finalised," the report said.

Among the claims were that Kerekere was a bully and had a tendency to call people racist if they disagreed with her. People were said to "walk on eggshells" around her.

"She has been awful to Chloe… she makes people feel like s**t," one source said.

All this is so un-Green, it's the party with MPs who generally avoid being nasty to anyone, even their political opponents.

Party members will soon vote on the final list, which will determine which MPs are best placed to get back into Parliament in October.

A draft list, distributed in early April, ranked Swarbrick third and Kerekere fourth. The Greens have 10 sitting MPs.

At last, inflation has started to fall.

The latest figures, released on Thursday, showed it had fallen to 6.7 percent after stubbornly remaining at 7.2 percent for months.

The drop was larger than economists had forecast, and Stuff said it could raise questions about whether the Reserve Bank might have "engaged in overkill" when it raised the official cash rate by 50 basis points to 5.25 earlier this month.

The Reserve Bank had been expecting annual inflation to rise to 7.3 percent when it made that decision, the report said.

Westpac was the closest with its prediction of 6.9 percent. Other banks had been expecting it to come in at 7.1 percent or 7.2 percent.

It must have been a relief for Finance Minister Grant Robertson. For months he has had to listen to National complaining about our inflation rate being higher than Australia's - now it's lower, Australia is at 6.8 percent.

However, the latest figures showed the drop was due to a fall in imported, or tradeable, inflation.

Domestic inflation remained high with food prices the main contributor.

Robertson said Cyclone Gabrielle would have contributed to that.

National continued to be gloomy. "It's a sad day when New Zealanders are being told to believe that annual price rises of 6.7 percent are somehow good news," said shadow finance minister Nicola Willis.

ACT leader David Seymour stuck with the tried and trusted opposition line that it was the government's fault, saying tradeable inflation was now lower than non-tradeable inflation and that showed it was "a New Zealand problem" caused by "wasteful government spending".

The important thing for most people was what effect the drop would have on interest rates.

Stuff quoted Brad Olsen, chief executive at Infometrics, who said retail rates were at or very close to their peak position and there would be less pressure on them in future.

Chris Tennent-Brown, senior economist at ASB, said there could be more upward pressure on floating and short-term home loan rates but long-term rates were now as high as they would go.

*Peter Wilson is a life member of Parliament's press gallery, 22 years as NZPA's political editor and seven as parliamentary bureau chief for NZ Newswire