Who would trust the PPTA to police students’ opinions?

The PPTA is paying someone $10,000 to write guidelines telling teachers which political views count as "extremism" and parents deserve to know what's in them, ACT Education spokesperson Laura McClure says.

"Schools should take genuine extremism seriously. Racism, antisemitism, and content that encourages self-harm have no place in society.

"But the PPTA's terms of reference for their new guidelines show their focus goes well beyond genuine harm. They flag 'opposition to feminism' and 'trad-wife' views as extremism. In their conference report on extremism, they've described certain views on co-governance as 'anti-Māori racism.'

"The PPTA’s biases go further. In its Treaty Principles Bill submission, the PPTA described the phrase 'regardless of race' as a dog whistle. In its Regulatory Standards Bill submission, it argued that ACT-backed reforms would undermine Māori rights and put teachers and students at risk.

"This is a union with a clear ideological posture, now recruiting someone to write the rulebook on which political opinions get treated as a threat in New Zealand classrooms.

"The PPTA exists to represent teachers. Their pay, their workload, their working conditions. Instead, it's spending its members' money to draw a line between acceptable and unacceptable opinion, where scepticism of co-governance, traditional views on family, and disagreement with feminism all end up on the wrong side.

"If ordinary political disagreement gets treated as extremism, the classroom stops being a place where students learn to think and becomes a place where they learn to stay quiet.

"Parents should be taking a keen interest in how the PPTA puts these guidelines into practice. They can start by seeking assurance from their school board that students won’t be marginalised for expressing contrary opinions.

“Every week, I receive emails concerned about the ideas that unionist teachers are pushing onto their kids. This is why ACT champions school choice – we’re scaling up charter schools so that families have options outside of the union-dominated mainstream system.”