Mike Hosking: Chris Hipkins’ truancy announcement has come too late

OPINION

The simplest question to Chris Hipkins that he couldn’t answer for me on Monday exposes just how duplicitous the Labour Party leadership change has been.

The policy bonfire of last week in some ways is politically astute.

The danger is that some of the policies are still live, like the jobs tax, and may well be brought back another day.

Which, to be fair to the Government, is their right and if they want to debate things like that during the election campaign that’s what democracy and the contest of ideas is all about.

But soon we are due an announcement on truancy (the planned announcement today has been postponed due to Cyclone Gabrielle).

The irony is, it is to be made by the new Prime Minister in another of those set-piece moves where he wanders back to his old school, gets a few cute pics and then tells us truancy officers are coming back.

Truancy officers are coming back because not enough of our kids are turning up.

The trouble with the announcement is that our kids not going to school didn’t suddenly happen since Hipkins has been Prime Minister.

It happened and indeed worsened dramatically while he was Education Minister.

So the question I asked that he couldn’t - or more accurately refused to answer - was: “Why didn’t you make the announcement when you were minister?”

He blamed Covid.

Is Covid the lazy excuse for the next decade?

When in doubt blame Covid.

Students' school attendance was a problem when Chris Hipkins was Minister for Education. Photo / Alex Burton

Blaming Covid to a point is fair.

But the day Hipkins refused to answer my question as to why he hadn’t acted when he was in charge of the specific problem, as opposed to waiting until now, came on the same day schools in Auckland got closed yet again, this time for weather. The second time so far this year, and the year for school has barely begun.

A small shout out at this point to Tim O’Connor at Auckland Grammar, who kept his school open on both Monday and Tuesday and did so, as he explained, based on “the facts”, and as it turned out, his facts were right.

The boys went to and from school on both days without incident, because the simple truth was, as bad as the storm has been for some, in the vast majority of Auckland it was little more than a turbulent day of wind and rain and life could, if you wanted it to, carry on perfectly normally.

So what O’Connor gets, but Hipkins didn’t, is that you can’t afford to keep sending messages to parents which are then interpreted by their kids that school is a tap to be opened or closed at will.

If you do that, you will find more and more don’t go - and the next thing you know you are the PM making announcements about trying to fix the very problem you created in the first place.

The real crime here, though, is the cynicism of the announcement.

Hipkins, as well as overseeing an education system that is badly wanting if not embarrassingly poor, especially when you read the testing around numeracy and literacy, has overseen the growth of truancy.

The major problem with being in government for two terms is you have a record, a record in this case of abject failure.

At any point in his tenure he could have acted on truancy - what he is announcing soon isn’t revolutionary, it’s a revisiting of past policies.

The same way they have allowed 100,000 to rot on the Jobseeker benefit for years, allegedly job-ready, as the job market boomed. They have let Lord knows how many students not turn up, and in some cases completely disappear from the system.

Now all of a sudden in election year, with the polls pointing the wrong way, he has an answer.

An answer he didn’t have when he was specifically in charge of the problem.

Was he prevented from acting as minister?

Was he shouted down at Cabinet when he tried valiantly to introduce a truancy policy?

Or, as minister, did he oversee this unfolding disaster, ignore it and bat you away if you ever asked why so many kids weren’t turning up anymore?

So is the coming announcement about getting young people back into learning, or the Labour Party back into office?

That’s another question that I suspect he will be looking to not answer.