The Government will reinstate the 100 per cent funding band for teacher-led ECE services after it was scrapped by the previous Government in 2010, PM Jacinda Ardern said.
New Zealand Customs is undertaking an investigation into the Ruby Princess cruise ship to establish whether any offences have been committed, Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern has revealed.
Ardern made the announcement alongside Education Minister Chris Hipkins at today's post-Cabinet press conference.
There was no timeline on the investigation, Ardern said.
The Ruby Princess visited New Zealand and Australian ports mid-March, and allowed passengers off in Sydney when many were feeling ill.
The virus tore through the ship and sparked cases in Australia and New Zealand. Sixteen cases in Hawke's Bay have been linked back to the ship which docked in Napier on 14 March.
Since disembarking in Sydney, 18 passengers from the ship have died and hundreds of confirmed cases have been linked to the vessel.
Ardern also announced that on Wednesday the Government will launch a digital diary app to aid physical contact tracing methods.
The app, developed by the Ministry of Health, would help people log their movements and allows people to keep the data to themselves, rather than share it with other businesses.
Ardern said it was simply a way of recording where you've been and didn't need significant sign-up to be effective.
The Government is still looking at other digital contact-tracing apps, Ardern said.
More money for early childhood education
The Government will reinstate the 100 per cent funding band for teacher-led ECE services after it was scrapped by the previous Government in 2010, Ardern said.
It will cost $278.2 million to restore.
At a time when there might be lower demand, for early learning services, this funding would encourage centres to keep fully-trained teachers on staff, Ardern said.
A survey of some schools found 209,750 students attended today - which translated to 80 per cent of those schools' rolls.
And 36,780 students attended early learning services - which was 53 per cent of students.
Hipkins said they expected participation to grow over the coming week and has asked schools to support families in getting the confidence to send their children back to school.
Reinstating the funding band would help centres keep hold of qualified staff as New Zealand went into the Covid-19 crisis with a shortage of ECE teachers so didn't want to lose any more, he said.
Hipkins said high quality early childhood education played a "enormous role" in children's development. Studies showed "if we get it right" for early learning, there were flow-on benefits for a child.
Asked whether the funding might see some unqualified teachers lose their jobs, Hipkins said the funding was an incentive, not a compulsionm and he expected services to work with staff to get them qualified.
But there would be some shifts in participation patterns which could impact some services.
The Government would be "playing an active role" in ensuring services didn't fall over, he said.
Last week, the Government said newly trained early childhood teachers would get pay increases of up to 9.6 per cent in July as a first step towards putting all qualified teachers on the same pay scales.
More than $151 million over four years was allocated in last week's Budget to lift the minimum pay rate for qualified teachers in private and community-owned education and care centres from July 1 to the same as the starting rate for kindergarten teachers - $49,862 a year.
When asked about the independent review by the World Health Organisation into Covid-19, Ardern said she didn't think supporting the review would damage New Zealand's relationship with China.
She said the review seeks to "answer the right questions" which were how do we ensure this never happens again and what can we learn from it.
Ardern said she didn't think there was "anything unusual" about Dr Ashley Bloomfield leading the briefing instead of health minister David Clark.
On Simeon Brown's Facebook post stating there wasn't a legislative basis for religious services to be included in gathering restrictions, Ardern said Crown Law advice was that religious gatherings were included.
On supporting medium-size businesses, Ardern wouldn't say whether the Government was considering more support but they were doing more work on commercial leases.
The Government knew that issue was time-sensitive, Ardern said.
On transtasman travel, Ardern said New Zealand would only open our border to Australia when the Government was comfortable we would neither import nor export cases.
New Zealand reached five million today and Ardern said it was a "milestone" and we'd gotten there a "little more quickly than in the past".
Ardern was also expected to speak about Auckland's water shortage and said this morning she was expecting a report from Environment Minister David Parker on the issues.
But said ultimately the solution for Auckland was finding alternative sources of water.
After the driest four months of a year in Auckland's history, dam levels are sitting at 43.9 per cent - compared with a historical average for this time of year of 76.7 per cent.
Restrictions which came into effect on Saturday for the first time since 1994, ban residents from washing cars or watering gardens with outdoor hoses.
