John Armstrong on our clueless Minister of Education, Anne Tolley:
“Ask the average person how the concept of “inter-school moderation” will work and you are likely to get a very blank look.
Ask the Minister of Education the same question and you would expect an informative reply, given the moderation of literacy standards is very much part and parcel of the jargon-filled argument over national standards in primary schools.
Anne Tolley may well know exactly how moderation will work. But her seeming reluctance to explain when questioned in Parliament yesterday left the distinct impression she was less than 100 per cent sure.”
It was a bit more than an impression, and it was a bit less than 100%. Tolley clearly had no clue.
“Tolley’s plight was plain to see in the expressionless faces of colleagues sitting around her.
She may as well have been in Timbuktu, such was the silence and seeming indifference of National MPs to the unfolding disaster.
[Lockwood Smith acknowledged] Mallard’s ‘quite clever questioning’.”
A bit more clever than the Minister of Education, that’s for sure.
” After Tolley sat down [having spoken in a later debate], Darren Hughes, Labour’s chief whip and wit, raised a point of order, asking why her speech had not been 15 minutes long – the time allotted to MPs giving their final speech before departing for good.”
One thing’s certain, if John Key had a better choice for minister, a better female choice to be precise, Tolley would be out on her ear. But Key can’t have just one woman on the front bench, so Tolley stays.
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