Page 2027 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 5 June 1990
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We want to build on the quality system that we have. We want to be looking at and debating in this chamber ways to educate our children better, to make them more inquisitive, to continue making them more and more enthusiastic about their schools and about learning. We ought to be debating the ways to make them more knowledgeable. In this age it is very important that our children be more adaptable as society changes so rapidly. I suppose, on that last factor, the Government is achieving something, because it will certainly make our children adapt to changes as they move from school to school.
The community is saying to this Government, "You are making fundamental, unacceptable and destructive changes to our education system. You are making changes to the fabric of our society that the community will not accept". I can assure the Government that the community will see that it does not achieve those negative aims.
MR DUBY (Minister for Finance and Urban Services) (4.27): Mr Speaker, today is an unusual day. The Opposition has sought to raise as a matter of public importance "the continued attack by the Kaine Alliance Government on the fabric of ACT society". I guess an indication of just how much public importance Labor members place on it is underlined by the fact that throughout this debate the Leader of the Opposition has been continually absent and Mr Berry, the Deputy Leader of the Opposition, has skulked away after his outrageous claims in opening this debate.
Mr Humphries: It is his motion.
MR DUBY: It is his motion, indeed. Mrs Grassby obviously does not find anything worth laughing at in this debate, so she is not here. The only persons who have been present throughout this debate in its entirety from the Opposition have been Mr Connolly and Mr Wood. It gives an indication of just how much importance they place on this supposedly important issue and of how much waste of time they are prepared to inflict upon the people of the ACT in their unjustified attacks upon this Government, based almost invariably not on fact or on substance but on ideology.
One of the things we have to do in this debate, if we are going to try to answer this complaint that there is an attack on the fabric of ACT society by this Government, is simply to look at what this Government has been achieving in the time it has been in power since last December. Mr Deputy Speaker, one can look through the list of things that fall within my area of responsibility - frankly, I have had only a short time today because I did not put much importance on this matter myself - and jot down a few of the items that we have been able to address.
It is amazing to look at this list and see how many things were simply too hard, too difficult, required decision making, and therefore naturally were unable to be fulfilled by that motley crew opposite. The first, I suppose, would
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