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Speaker 1: The Ministry of Education will soon have some of its

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Speaker 1: decision making powers taken away from it. The Education Minister

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Speaker 1: eric Is Stanford announcing today that a new school Property

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Speaker 1: Agency will be stood up and it's going to take

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Speaker 1: over the government's school property portfolio. They will commission, they

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Speaker 1: will administer all that stuff. Erica Stanford with me now home, Minister.

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Speaker 2: Good afternoon. It's been a while.

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Speaker 1: It's been a hot minute since I last spoke to you.

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Speaker 1: We spoke to each other this morning, of course, So

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Speaker 1: why do you because you're taking this property away from

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Speaker 1: the Ministry of Education, What are you going to get

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Speaker 1: out of a new agency that they couldn't give you?

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Speaker 2: Well, of course, you remember that we launched a school

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Speaker 2: property inquiry and a key part and a key finding

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Speaker 2: of that requiring inquiry that McCully and Bins did was

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Speaker 2: around the inflexibility of the system which was leading to

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Speaker 2: poor outcomes, poor communication, lack of accountability and not very

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Speaker 2: good value for money, and schools were getting pretty frustrated.

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Speaker 2: What we need is an entity that is run by

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Speaker 2: a commercially minded board who are captains of industry, who

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Speaker 2: can help deliver really good value for money and are

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Speaker 2: able to deliver property solutions in a different way to

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Speaker 2: drive better value for money. Because schools have a range

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Speaker 2: of different problems, they have a range of different abilities

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Speaker 2: on their boards, they all need different things. But the

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Speaker 2: Ministry has always had a one size fits all approach

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Speaker 2: and we have not had the commercial acumen. They're very

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Speaker 2: good people at the Ministry, but we want to drive

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Speaker 2: for much better results. This was a key recommendation out

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Speaker 2: of the property inquiry, and.

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Speaker 1: You're setting up in the meantime a ministerial advisory group

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Speaker 1: to get us to this. How will the staff members

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Speaker 1: who you take on board with the new Crown agency?

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Speaker 1: Will it be less or will it be more? Will

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Speaker 1: the cost of it be less or more than what

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Speaker 1: the Ministry is currently doing it for?

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Speaker 2: Look, that's yet to be worked through. But one thing

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Speaker 2: I can tell you is that the savings that this

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Speaker 2: will generate by driving far greater efficiencies will well outweigh

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Speaker 2: the costs of this entity, and so much so that

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Speaker 2: we are not going to be doing a budget bid

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Speaker 2: for this. We are going to be We'll just be

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Speaker 2: coming out of the savings that we create by driving

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Speaker 2: those efficiencies. We've already done a huge amount of heavy

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Speaker 2: lifting I was able to announce one hundred million dollars

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Speaker 2: of school property before the budget because of the savings

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Speaker 2: we've already been driving and look, sometimes we find savings

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Speaker 2: out of one or two property school properties that we

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Speaker 2: are underway that would generate enough savings for the entity

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Speaker 2: to cover the for a couple of years. So it

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Speaker 2: will certainly pay for itself.

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Speaker 1: No doubt. You've won the argument on the big barnyard classrooms.

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Speaker 1: Are you going to fund schools un barnyarding.

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Speaker 2: One of the things that we will do with the

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Speaker 2: new entity is get them to start looking at that.

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Speaker 2: What we have to do is draw a line in

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Speaker 2: the sand and say we're not doing it from here

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Speaker 2: on in. We will also work with schools with their

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Speaker 2: current budgets that they have. We also have and we

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Speaker 2: will be announcing some top up funding for those school

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Speaker 2: budgets to be able to do certain things with their property.

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Speaker 2: They do maintenance and health and safety, but they also

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Speaker 2: have funding in their budgets to be able to reconfigure classrooms.

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Speaker 2: We will to see what we can do to help.

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Speaker 2: We've already had a couple of projects that are going

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Speaker 2: through the pipeline where we've just said yep. Put the

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Speaker 2: walls back in so will work as flexibly as we

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Speaker 2: possibly can with schools. But this has happened for decades.

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Speaker 2: There are still open planned classrooms from the early nineteen

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Speaker 2: eighties that still exist. I know that because they're at

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Speaker 2: my local schools. So it is going to take some time,

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Speaker 2: but we're committed to working through that.

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Speaker 1: All right, Minister, I appreciate your time tonight, Erica Stanford,

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Speaker 1: Education Minister. For more from Heather Duplessy Allen Drive, listen

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