My pleasure to speak in this debate—unfortunately COVID has ravaged our education spokesman and -woman line up, and so I've been asked to step into the breach, and it is a great pleasure to do that because there is no more important topic facing this country long term than the education of our children. We're familiar with the concerns that have been raised many times about New Zealand's slide down the international rankings in terms of literacy and numeracy, and there's been a lot of debate had as to whether that's important or not, or relevant or not. In my time as education spokesperson, I was surprised by the number of principals of schools who didn't think that was an issue. 