Page 1498 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 1 June 2022
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This is a government that cut 3.3 per cent of funding to ACT public schools. It is in the Productivity Commission report. If Mr Barr wants to talk about inflicting misery, that misery is playing out now in some of our ACT schools—in decaying school infrastructure and in schools that are not up to the standard that they should be in this wealthy city. There are declining academic results, as we have seen. There are schools that are overcrowded. And this is being led by a minister who has the audacity to call kids who struggle through NAPLAN “dumb”!
If the Chief Minister wants to talk about misery and being miserable, let me tell you who is inflicting misery on the children and the teachers of this jurisdiction: you need to do nothing more than look in the mirror, because we have a teacher crisis here in the ACT, and it has come on your watch.
After 20 years of funding cuts, of cutting schools, we find that this miserable government has caused a dire situation in our school system. We have discussed it at length. There have been numerous damning reports on infrastructure and teacher shortages. There have been pleas for help from the unions. There have been reports of a culture of bullying across our schools. What have we heard from this government? There have been bombastic responses, simply saying that every school is great and that there is nothing to see here. We are told, “We don’t need some sort of review of our school system,” as has been called for by Ms Lee and me.
We, the union, teachers, parents and children are incredibly frustrated by this miserable government that has not done what it needs to do to keep our teachers on the front line and to provide the support that they have needed. It has not provided the assurance, certainly, that the opposition wants in order to know that this government is across its portfolio, that the minister knows what is going on in the schools, how many teachers we need in the longer term and how we are going to get there.
At its heart, that is what this motion is about. It is about ensuring that this government has done the workforce analysis and has developed a plan over the long term. At the start this motion recognises the issue of teacher shortages and the problems that we have seen for years and years—made worse by COVID, of course, but this is not a new phenomenon. We went into this pandemic with a crisis, and now it is the children, the teachers and the parents who are paying the price for the malaise that has occurred under this miserable government.
We are in the middle of a term. During the last term we saw that these problems were present. In 2018 a Canberra Times headline read, “Student violence against ACT teachers doubles”. The article stated:
The teachers’ union will seek assurances from the ACT Education Minister after figures showed a doubling in reported physical violence by … school students against school staff in the past four years.
When the minister, no doubt, as she normally does, tries to blame everything on COVID, I point out that 2018 was a long time before COVID arrived. In 2019 another media report was titled, “Something is wrong: inquiry hears harrowing school
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