Page 2725 - Week 09 - Thursday, 9 August 1990
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figures will be shown, I have no doubt, to be ammunition in the hands of those people wanting to save these schools, and that is the reason that you refuse to give them; that is the reason that you have repudiated your earlier statement, which was made so often, that when the schools are known you would give them to us. You want to hide these figures.
DR KINLOCH (4.03): I thank Mr Moore for the comments that he made early in the piece. I agree with him about the excellence of our education system. I would not necessarily want to get into a debate about the excellence of the government vis-a-vis the non-government systems. Mr Moore and I have, in a sense, voted with our feet by having our children in the government system. There is a non-government education office in the Ministry for Health, Education and the Arts which has a concern for the non-government as well as the government schools. Non-government schools are built into the program of schools visits for the Minister and me. Tomorrow, for example, I will be going to a non-government school, the week after to a government school, and so on.
I very much agree with Mr Moore about preschools being a centre of the community. I applaud his recognition of Anne Murray's expertise in the area of preschool education. It is a great pleasure to have her in the highest ranks of our educational administrators.
Let us now come to the MPI, "The threat of the Alliance Government to the government education system in the ACT". I want to take up, firstly, the preschool task force report. I was chairing the consultative committee when James Dexter personally brought in the report and went through, with the committee, the glitchy errors that had been made in the report. The report was withdrawn but will be issued with those errors changed. I want to make clear and endorse the Minister's point that Dr John Thompson, James Dexter and the Canberra Pre-School Society have endorsed the essential recommendations of the report. I thought it was a tribute to the department and those involved and also to the community involved. It was not only "administrators", but there were about 15 people, as I recall, who worked on that report. I understand the point about the minority report, Mr Moore.
I would like to come to the question of the senior echelons of the division of education. I do not propose to deal with individuals, person by person or in terms of any one person, although I have been glad to acknowledge Mr Moore's recognition of Anne Murray. I want to say in general - and I join the Minister - that I admire and respect the work of those who administer education in this Territory over a very wide range of a huge number of schools.
Why should we be grateful to them and why should we therefore want to make this point in connection with this MPI? Firstly, there is flexibility. They were operating
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