Labour’s work to rebuild school property saw 4,500 school upgrades completed and over 2000 new classrooms, with more in the pipeline.

We increased the Budget for school property every single year, and it wasn’t just for schools in city centres with big rolls, but schools across Auckland as well. That’s because Labour saw classrooms for our kids as an important investment.

The National Coalition Government is trying to rewrite history and come up with an excuse to cut Government funding for property again.

We all remember what happened between 2011 and 2016 when the school property budget was slashed and then never increased enough to catch up. Kids were learning in damp, mouldy classrooms. Overflow rooms became permanent classrooms in hallways and gyms because the Government wasn’t funding or building enough of them.

School property projects today are not in crisis. There’s no need for an expensive government review to tell them that. What they need is continued investment over time.

Some of these long-term projects were commitments made by the previous National Government but barely any funding was assigned. Labour committed to them because schools and classrooms are too important to play politics with. All of the school upgrades announced by Labour were made on Ministry of Education advice and were based on condition assessments.

There is a choice National is making here, and that’s their tax cuts over our kids’ classrooms.

Over the past six years, Labour oversaw the upgrades to new outdoor learning areas, playgrounds and classrooms, so students could have great and modern spaces to learn in. All of these improvements helped to make our local schools – such as Mt Roskill Primary and Intermediate School, where many of our ethnic children reside – places where young people want to be, do well and don’t get sick.

Labour believes that the next generation deserves warm, dry and fit-for-purpose classrooms, play spaces and decent sports facilities. We won’t compromise on that.

The new Education Minister is scratching around looking for someone to blame, but cost escalations in the building sector have been a fact of life. National was told before the election that it hadn’t allowed enough for cost escalations in its fiscal plan and chose to ignore that and claim tax cuts were affordable.

They aren’t and now it looks like Kiwi kids will be the latest to pay the price.