Page 6000 - Week 18 - Thursday, 12 December 1991
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when children cannot be handled in private schools they are sent to a state school. The state school ends up with all the problems. The point is that you do not really find out what goes on in private schools because they do not tell you. That is why we have the problem. I think that this all comes back on the government and the fact that government schools then have to tackle this problem. I think that young people are wonderful. I feel that we are faulty because we do not teach parenting, as I said in the report. We do not do enough to teach young people to be parents.
One of the things that really upset me tremendously during the inquiry was to meet some very beautiful young people at Hawker public school who had tried to take their life. This really upset me because I considered them the most beautiful young people I had met and I felt that they had a lot to live for. I would like to say that the two people I found incredible were Mike Owner and Wendy Pearse, who not only spent a lot of their time at school dealing with these children but also spent many hours afterwards dealing with the children and the parents.
I would also like to say that we need to put a little more time into teaching children whose ethnic culture background is not the same as that in many schools. We need to spend some time to this effect. When a child has to live in two cultures, a culture at home and a different culture at school, it has a great effect. This must be a tremendous stress for the child and I think we should be looking into this. Maybe we should be looking into teachers in that area that could handle this.
Mr Speaker, I thank my fellow committee members. I think they did a great job. I think it was one of the most interesting committees I have spent time on, but in many ways a very sad committee because of some of the things that were brought to us. If things are not handled now we may have, as I said, a very sad generation coming on. I would like to think that this ACT Government - this is why there was a need for this Government - will be able to combat any of those problems that will happen in the future.
MR STEVENSON (11.40): I dissent from the report because I do not believe that it will achieve the job that we set out to do. At the beginning of the inquiry, in our terms of reference, we made No. 1 "measures to reduce or prevent behavioural disturbance". I was particularly concerned about preventing behavioural disturbance. There is certainly ample evidence, as we have heard today, as we heard during the course of the inquiry, and as reported in this report, that there are serious problems with our youth of today. There is an ever increasing suicide rate, and there are more and more people who are unemployed. I think that there are many more people who to some degree are unemployable. There are huge numbers of functionally illiterate children, and indeed, as we understand, all these things can result in behavioural disturbances.
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