Page 1092 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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an anti-women budget. It is clearly an anti-women budget. It has already been indicated by one of the questions at question time and the failure of the Government to answer that question satisfactorily.
Let me take education to start with. Two of the areas with which I deal are education and health, and in those particular areas the vast majority of workers are women. They are the areas that are going to suffer considerable slashing in terms of employment. It was the Minister for Industry, Employment and Education who said, I believe, on this morning's radio, that, as far as he was concerned, this budget was about employment. That may well be true for many, but it is certainly not true for women in the teaching profession and their assistants.
We are looking to up to perhaps 150 teaching positions being cut, on my reading, and those are particularly being cut from two major areas which are what I believe are our tall poppy syndrome areas - the preschools and the colleges. We have the best preschool system and the best college system, so let us cut them down! Let us make them the same as everywhere else! Let us not be proud! Let us not be leaders! Let us not take into account the fact that we have an incredible retention rate in our colleges and that we should be compensated for the people we keep off the dole!
They are the sorts of factors we should be considering, not how we can find ways of cutting that back or how we can find ways - and I drew attention to some of those ways at question time today - in which we can discourage people from enjoying what they have established as part of the best education system in Australia. That is my value judgment. I have looked at a number of other education systems in the world, and it is a significantly better system than many of those.
The non-teaching positions in particular, in the new proposed method of employing support staff, are just a method of cutting wages but making them do the same work. That is what will be required, of course. It will be demanded that they do the same work as somebody else who is getting more. The Government has proposed it with a shift in terms of hours. But it has always been understood that those members of the Public Service Association - and I am sure that association will draw attention to the particular aspect - are paid much less than their counterparts in other public service positions, and they will be expected to be paid less.
But let me move on to something a little more positive, such as the approach to remove the New South Wales HSC system from the TAFE colleges and to rationalise them in with the ACT education system. I congratulate the Government on that. I also congratulate it on a number of its other moves in education, to which I should draw attention later, but at the moment I think it is more important to deal with the matters of concern.
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