Page 3416 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 13 October 1993
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After having those discussions and after talking to teachers, to my department, to parents and to people involved in administration in our schools, I came to the conclusion that what was important in our system was teacher numbers. I came to the view that maintaining class sizes, indeed reducing class sizes, was an important goal that ought to be worked to. Every decision I made as Minister for Education reflected that goal. In not one of the school closures that were announced by the ACT Alliance Government was a single teaching position to be lost. Every teaching position in a school that was to be closed was to be transferred to somewhere else in the system. Every principal or other administrative position that was to be abolished, to the extent that it carried any teaching hours, was to be transferred to another part of the school system. I gave an absolute guarantee that no teaching positions would be lost as a result of that process, and I stand by that commitment. I took the view that classroom teaching was more important than bricks and mortar. I took the view that education infrastructure was less important than what was actually happening in our school classrooms.
The present Government rode into office on the back of the public education lobby. It promised people that it would be a champion of the public education system. The people were duped. People, fairly rightly, interpreted the commitment of the Labor Party as a commitment to public education as a whole. They thought that by supporting the ALP on the question of school closures they would preserve levels of public education spending as they were. That was never sustainable; that was never the intention of the Australian Labor Party in the ACT. You always knew that you would have to cut the education budget. You knew what the Grants Commission had said. You knew what the priorities in education would have to deliver, and you lied to the people of the ACT.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order! It being 12.30 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 77 as amended by temporary order.
Sitting suspended from 12.30 to 2.30 pm
QUESTIONS WITHOUT NOTICE
Hospital Bed Numbers
MRS CARNELL: My question is to the Minister for Health, Mr Berry. Minister, the ACT has fewer public hospital beds per head of population than any other State or Territory. This morning on radio Dr Mark Hurwitz stated that nine out of the 14 beds in the short-stay area of Woden Valley Hospital are to close. Could this possibly be true?
MR BERRY: It possibly could be true.
Mrs Carnell: But is it?
MR BERRY: Here we go again. Lesson No. 23 today. The facts are that Health this year has been funded to provide the same rate of admissions as last year, and that is 50,500. Over the past several years we have steadily used fewer beds to provide steadily more services, and we do not expect that trend to change.
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