Education Minister Erica Stanford is my politician of the day for announcing that the Government isn't going to be building any more of those terrible open-plan classrooms.

But she’ll be my politician of the year if she goes further than that and finds money to put some walls and doors in the modern learning environment monstrosities that already exist.

In fact, I think the Government is morally obliged to help any state school that wants to get rid of their open-plan classrooms. It’s morally obliged because this disastrous experiment was forced on the schools.

And it will cost a truckload of money but it’s the only option, in my mind.

Unless, of course, there are schools that are perfectly happy teaching kids in barns. They can fill their boots.

But I bet there are a truckload of schools looking at this announcement and thinking “what about us?”

The way Erica Stanford puts it is that she’s had overwhelming feedback that open-plan classrooms aren’t meeting the needs of students.

She says: “While open-plan designs were originally intended to foster collaboration, they have often created challenges for schools, particularly around noise and managing student behaviour.”

Which is a polite way of saying that it was a hair-brained idea that shouldn’t have seen the light of day. And to Erica Stanford and the Government’s credit, they’re not building any more.

Which Rangiora High School principal Bruce Kearney says is great, but he wants to know about all the schools that have already been lumbered with open-plan classrooms.

Some of which have had a gutsful and have spent a lot of their own money turning the barns into old-school classrooms.

Rangiora High School is one of them. They spent $1.5 million. Shirley Boys’ High School in Christchurch spent $800,00. And Avonside Girls' spent $60,000 on screens and acoustic panels because a full fit-out was going to be too expensive for the school to pay for on its own.

Avonside principal Catherine Law says she is “thrilled” to see the move away from open-plan because it’s done nothing for students having a sense of belonging, and it had a really detrimental effect on teaching and learning.

She says year 9 and year 10 kids —the old third formers and fourth formers— are the ones who seem to struggle the most, because they’re the ones getting used to high school.

She says those years especially are the worst times for kids to be expected to try and work in open-plan areas. She says there’s a lot of anxiety with the kids not knowing where they sit and where they belong.

And she thinks that any school that wants to get rid of the open-plan set-up should get funding to do it.

If the experience at Rangiora High is anything to go by, why wouldn't the Government spend some money fixing up this shambles?

Since Rangiora put in the walls and doors, attendance is up by 12%. Which principal Bruce Kearney puts down to “happier teachers, happier kids, and a happier school”.

And he is in no doubt that the Government needs to stump up with the money so all schools that want to benefit from this brilliant move by Erica Stanford, can.

I’m going further than that though.

I think the government is morally obliged to do it. Because even though it wasn't this particular government that forced modern learning environments on schools, it was still the government-of-the-day.

The current administration is now admitting that the experiment has failed. So there is no way it can say that but still expect kids already being taught in these battery farms to put up with it.

And there’s no way it can admit it was a cock-up and expect teachers to keep teaching in these places.

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Associate Energy Minister Shane Jones says we live in uncertain times and, because of that, we need to crank up the Marsden Point oil refinery again.

I agree that we live in uncertain times, but I certainly don’t agree that we should pour time and money into something which has had its day.

Shane Jones isn’t the only person talking about it though. The Prime Minister has said too that the Government is considering reopening Marsden Point as part of its plan to strengthen the country’s fuel and energy security.

Because, since it was closed in April 2022, we’ve been importing all our refined fuel.

We’ve also been importing all the bitumen we need for roads as well since the refinery closed. Before then, 70% of the bitumen used in New Zealand for roads was produced at Marsden Point, with 30% imported. Now 100% is imported.

But let’s not forget some of the nonsense that gets trotted-out about the old refinery. Which, once you cut through and dismiss, shows just how crazy it would be to try and get it up and running again.

First up: it wasn’t the previous Labour government that shut it down – the Associate Energy Minister was trotting out that line again this morning.

It was actually shut down by the private company which owned it back in 2022. The company was known as Refining NZ, these days it’s known as Channel Infrastructure.

I think the Government needs to drop this idea of looking into reopening it. Because if the people who know a thing-or-two about running a refinery think it’s a stupid idea, then who am I going to listen to? The people who know what they’re on about?

Of course I am. We all should, including the Government.

Because all this is, is another one of those desperado elements of the coalition agreement between National and NZ First.

Shane Jones is from the north and he’s just doing what any MP would do for their region.

And, before he continues with all this bluster about geopolitical clouds casting doubt on our future fuel supply, he should listen to what Refinery NZ said a year after shutting down the refinery.

They said it would cost billions to reinstate and take at least a couple of years to do it. So why would you? Especially, when you consider who might run the thing.

Because if the private outfit that used to run it wanted out, I don't see anyone else putting their hand up to take over.

What’s more, generating electricity is the future. Refining oil isn’t.

Even one of the union people who fought against the closure thinks we’d be flogging a dead horse trying to reopen it.

Justin Wallace is First Union’s oil and gas co-ordinator and he’s on record as saying that it would be unrealistic to expect the refinery to be cranked into action again.

He has said that although the footprint of the refinery is still there, the company that shut it down dismantled its key components as soon as they were able, and 80-90% of the staff who had worked at the refinery have left.

He says: “They've gone overseas, taken redundancy, or retired. Unless the Government is willing to tax more people to find more money to rebuild it, I think it's a pipe dream.”

Can someone please pass that on to Shane Jones?

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How about this for an idea?

Instead of the tax people pay on the first $60,000 of their income going to the government, what if it went into a savings account to pay for healthcare and put food on the table when they retire?

It’s an idea being pushed by former finance minister Sir Roger Douglas and University of Auckland economics professor Robert MacCulloch which, they say, is needed because of the ageing population.

They reckon people could save as much as $21,000 a year, with some of the money going into a health account, some going into a superannuation account, and the rest going into a “rainy day” account.

There are some bits about this that really I like, and I’m not so sure about other aspects.

The thing I like most is that —for pretty much the first-time ever— we would have tax money ringfenced for specific things.

Whether we can describe it as tax money I’m not sure, because it would be money not going to the government but going into these individual bank accounts instead. But we’ll call it tax money.

Sir Roger and Professor MacCulloch have done the numbers and they reckon that —if the government didn’t get its hands on the tax money from the first $60,000 of everyone’s income— on average, people would end up with just over $20,000 in their account each year.

Breaking that down, they say we’d have about $9,500 going into the health bucket, just under $7,400 going into the superannuation bucket, and $4,200 going into the “rainy day” bucket. That’s each year – providing you’re working, of course.

So I like it for the ring-fencing and how we would know exactly how much we have up our sleeve.

And if you do the numbers over the course of someone’s total working life —that’s assuming that they start work at 20 and stop working at 65— the average person that Sir Roger is basing his numbers on could have about $950,000 in their account.

That’s without interest being factored in. So they could retire with more than $1 million in the bank to pay for healthcare and to live off.

And if you’re thinking we’ve got KiwiSaver, so why would we need this extra savings account? If you’re thinking that, chances are you’re well-off enough to afford KiwiSaver.

Because Professor MacCulloch is saying today that many low-income earners just can’t afford KiwiSaver and they would benefit big-time if most of their tax actually went into a savings account. Which makes sense to me.

Dig a little deeper though and Sir Roger Douglas’ old ACT Party ideals start to come through, with him saying today that this approach would give people the freedom to choose whether they get medical treatment, for example, in the public sector or the private sector.

But what if every Tom, Dick, and Harry had all this money and decided to get their hips done privately? That would be boom times for the private hospitals, but what would it mean for the public hospitals?

Possibly less government investment.

And what if a model like this was adopted and we had politicians down the track letting people use the money in these dedicated accounts to pay for first-home deposits and all that carry-on? Which has happened with KiwiSaver.

Sir Roger says he’s been banging on for ages about what he and Professor MacCulloch are calling an “economic car crash”.

They say governments over the years have chosen to ignore the looming health and welfare crisis that we’re heading into, if we haven’t reached that point already.

At the root of it is the ageing population. And they’re saying today that we just can’t keep on keeping on the way we have and the way we are.

And I agree with them. Which is why —even though I’ve got some misgivings about the impact this could have on things like government investment in the healthcare system— overall, I think it’s a brilliant idea.

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