Page 3508 - Week 11 - Thursday, 14 October 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
This question the Dodo could not answer without a great deal of thought, and it sat for a long time ..., while the rest waited in silence. At last the Dodo said "Everybody has won, and all must have prizes".
I suggest to you that that is a very good extract from Alice in Wonderland in relation to this Government's approach to the voluntary separation scheme. It is, in fact, total confusion.
Let me give you some examples of this. Initially, when the Government was deciding that some 80 teaching positions would go, we had the Chief Minister advise that they would be at the college level. When it became obvious that that would mean something like nine teachers in each college, suddenly we discovered that no, they were not to be restricted to the colleges; they were to go from the high schools and the primary schools as well. As we debated yesterday, 37 per cent of the cuts will be in colleges, 37 per cent in the high schools and the balance of 26 per cent at the primary school level.
When, however, we endeavoured to find out details of this at the Estimates Committee hearing there was some conflicting advice. First of all, Mr De Domenico asked Ms Cheryl Vardon, "What would happen if you had 127 people wanting redundancies?". She said:
It is easy, it is fine. It may be more than 80. Can I just say that the 80 positions in terms of reductions is not related to the voluntary separation packages in any way.
That is the first item of confusion. Ms Vardon went on:
We have to make sense of that jigsaw and we will and this is how we will do it. We will know - we have to meet an 80 reduction, that is one issue, but we will know in November just how many teachers and principals and people in central office will put up their hands for a package and will want to go and that will happen. They will get their packages and they will go. That will leave us with - and this, I think, is a very positive thing - the ability to, if that number is more than 80 and I am sure it will be - to recruit.
That is fine. We have established that at page 224. However, at page 291 we have Mr Wood commenting that, in fact, it was not just across the board; that they could not seek this in the supplementary area; that in other words they could not target supplementary teaching positions. Mr Moore put it this way:
They are not free in the way you indicated to the committee to make their own decisions ...
On the one hand we have a very clear indication from Ms Vardon of how it is going to happen and then we have a contra view put forward by the Minister, saying that the supplementary teacher positions cannot be affected. Where do we stand on this?
We have another example in the Auditor-General's report. This gentleman has made a recommendation that redundancies could be considered as a means of altering the current age and length of service teacher profile which has resulted in the majority of level 1 teachers being paid more. Never mind about awards; never mind about the experienced and well-qualified teachers being put out.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .