Page 2933 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 October 2022
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I think the Growing and Renewing Public Housing Strategy, which Minister Berry also has carriage of, is a great example. Throughout the housing portfolio, the ACT government does own a certain number of assets that are beyond their useful life, and in order to ensure that good people have good homes, difficult decisions have needed to be made about where to redevelop and what that redevelopment looks like.
I think in future budgets, and as we make future decisions for planning school infrastructure, we may need to consider some equally difficult but not at all unimportant conversations about some of our school campuses, particularly concentrated in the inner north and the inner south.
In the budget, there are two relatively smaller but very, very important investments that I am keen to support and that I do want to highlight in my remaining minutes. The first is of course the Teacher Shortage Taskforce, and I acknowledge that we hope that some of its recommendations are funded in future budgets. I will take this opportunity to really highlight that work and give a lot of credit to the minister and to her directorate.
I think the value of that work has been missed by a lot of Canberrans, not just in that it acknowledges the problem of recruiting and retaining a high quality teaching workforce which, alone, is bigger than any other state or territory government across the country. We are surrounded by governments keen to ignore the problem. The fact that we have even acknowledged it is a step in the right direction. It is a really wonderful example and, I hope, the first of many, many more examples of the government, as the employer, and the union, as the employee representative, collaborating and forming consensus on a shared pathway forward for challenges.
I think it would be wonderful for other ministers to take Minster Berry’s lead in the areas of charge—to look at the way that the Teacher Shortage Taskforce has established, worked and subsequently reported back to government and consider other ways of using that same sort of collaboration with workers and unions to identify problems and work through some solutions as well.
I am also very interested to see the $1.14 million, I believe it is, appropriated for the Safe@School Taskforce. I think that is a very important taskforce and I very much look forward to those recommendations. I appreciate that we will not be debating the next budget for a year to come, but I want to put on record now that the Teacher Shortage Taskforce and the Safe@School Taskforce are both very important bodies of work.
The Teacher Shortage Taskforce, to start, and the Safe@School Taskforce that will come later will no doubt have recommendations that will require government investment. I do think that the way that we can actually give value to this work and value to these reports and honour the hard work of representatives of the Education Directorate and of the AEU and teachers who have participated in these two taskforces is to ensure that they are funded in subsequent budgets.
In summary, the Greens are pleased to support the education appropriations in this budget.
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