Page 2467 - Week 09 - Thursday, 17 September 1992
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from this relatively lacklustre budget will be insignificant compared with the bitter disappointment the community can look forward to in future years because, despite the rhetoric, your Government, Chief Minister, has made only minor savings in education. These savings might impact later this financial year to a greater degree than we now realise. I am not in a position to judge this because I am referring to the proposed, but unidentified, adjustments which you mentioned in "the department's central office structures and in realising economies in administrative overheads".
Irrespective of these impacts, the real crunch - namely, the cutback, realistically, in education finance, sought repeatedly by the Grants Commission - has been fobbed off once more. This is despite Mr Wood's solemn warning in the Canberra Times that I read on Wednesday morning that the present levels of expenditure in education could not be sustained. I believe that this is indeed an opportunity lost, and lost despite an awareness of the problem, at least by your Education Minister. Perhaps he was conscious of the $4m blow-out in the 1991-92 budget.
Mr Wood: There was no blow-out. Come on!
MR CORNWELL: No blow-out? The figure originally quoted was $184m and the actual figure, I think, was $188m. So it throws into doubt whether we are going to have a 1.8 per cent or even 2.5 per cent reduction in education this year, given that $4m blow-out last year.
I believe, however, that in addition to creating this problem in the government sector, the Government has also allowed this failure to seriously address education funding to extend to the non-government sector. Here you have compounded the mistake, with more serious consequences, I believe, for non-government schools. I say that not because I am referring to the relatively small cuts to the textbook allowance, or the bus usage subsidy of $56,000 that has been dropped, or even the $33,000 that is taken from Canberra Grammar School's higher school certificate special purpose grant. In fact, the total, I think, is about $225,000. Mr Wood nods. Thank you. These are important. I would not argue that. I have no doubt that they will hurt the non-government sector, but I submit that they will be sustainable.
The Government's real offence, Madam Speaker, to the non-government sector concerning the real expenditure cuts is its delay in addressing the issue. I am referring, of course, to its failure to address the issue by putting off the longer-term funding arrangements for non-government schools until consideration of the Berkeley report. The non-government schools' forward planning will be seriously delayed and, I believe, unreasonably interrupted. The Government has had the Berkeley report since July. One would have thought that they could have addressed it properly in this budget. They have not done so. The forward planning of the non-government schools, I repeat, will therefore be seriously delayed and unreasonably interrupted. Therefore, I believe that the Government has done a significant disservice to both sectors of ACT education by its abject failure to face the long-term financial realities of this portfolio. Interestingly, in doing so, you have ended up pleasing nobody, if criticism from the Australian Teachers Union and the P and C Council is anything to go by. All you have done, I suggest, is postponed the day of financial reckoning.
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