Minister wants to close down unregistered Sunday Schools
updated
Well, it's official. Education Minister Chris Carter wants Sunday School treated like all other licenced creches - because "they need to have safe facilities and they need to have adequately qualified police-checked staff to supervise children".
Marvellous. Whats the point of registering Sunday Schools and creches when their parents are just down the corridor in Church? I can just see it now, the unemployment rate is lowered by each Sunday School having to employ another 120 people to administer the new-licensed Sunday Schools, but they won't be allowed to advertise specifically for Christians because of anti-discrimination provisions. Anyone with a criminal conviction who is currently teaching Sunday School will be booted out after a police check. Churches will employ 8 “roving” Managers to ensure that the Pastor isn’t looking lasciviously at the youngins, form a committee to over see the “roving” managers and their whopping expense accounts, travel etc, made up of various consultants (with little or no experience other than they once went to Sunday School) on massive contracts to provide a quality learning educational Sunday School environment to the nation - as long as we start all Sun School Sessions with a reading from Aunty Helens little red pledge book (paid for by taxpayers money of course after another dose of retrospective legislation) then put forward tenders calling for more parties to come up with a new Sunday School curriculum (”the old King James was obviously wrong, said the Prime Minister in a statement”) awarding yet another large contract to the successful tenderer (who also went to Sunday School once), all the while negotiating a large increase in wages to the new Sunday School Teachers Union so that these unpaid workers can be paid for half an hour a week, and parents can apply for a childcare subsidy through WINZ so each teacher can at least get a couple of bucks extra per kid each week on top of that because the Education Ministry certainly wont be paying Sunday Schools as part of 20 hours free, you can bet on that!
Phew,that was a long sentence. Time for communion methinks.
Ah well, it will be the only time Education Ministry officials get to go to a church service as they start gatecrashing churches interrupting sermons to ask the pastor whether his creche is licenced to run Sunday Schools where nobody is even paid.
They can go to hell.