Page 4143 - Week 13 - Thursday, 25 November 1993
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This Government - not just in this budget, but in at least one previous budget, and perhaps two - has adopted the process of saying, "We will make some broad budgetary decisions about the way in which we should make a 2 per cent across-the-board cut, and we will then leave it to line managers, leave it to schools, leave it to heads of units in our hospital system, leave it to heads of workshops in ACTION, leave it to all sorts of relatively junior public servants, to decide what impact our Government's decisions will have on the provision of services to the people of this Territory. That is a cop-out approach. It is the coward's approach to dealing with hard budgetary decisions.
If Mr Wood, as Minister for Education, wished to cut a number of positions from the teaching service, he should have identified those positions. He should have said, "This is how many teachers will have to go, and you implement the decision that our Government has made". Do not leave it to the principals of schools, to the boards of schools, to try to struggle with the terrible question of having to rationalise resources within their schools. When my Government made decisions we did not say to the school community, "You decide which schools you would like to close, but you have to close five". We made the decisions as the government of the day elected to make those decisions. It is a pity that this Government does not have the gumption to follow that kind of principle.
Madam Speaker, education resourcing and education issues remain of critical importance to this Territory. The Grants Commission has identified a serious problem with overfunding, and that overfunding problem is particularly pronounced in the area of education. We are some $30m overfunded in education, according to the relativities put forward by the Grants Commission. As I have said before, we can debate in this place whether we as a community wish to continue to fund education at a higher level than that at which it is funded by the States and the Northern Territory. We could have a debate about whether $30m overfunding is actually a good thing. I am not saying that it is not in certain circumstances. Perhaps if we had a better finance situation, a better revenue base, than the States we might well be saying to ourselves, "We have more money to spend and we will spend it in education, because that is where we think we are going to get the most bang from our buck, the most value for money, the most impact on the future well-being of this Territory". That is a reasonable argument to pose, and it is a reasonable debate for us to have in this place and elsewhere.
But the issue here is not just whether we want to spend more money in education but how well we are spending our present dollars in education and, if we decide to spend more than the State average or the national average, how we go about raising the extra money to make that happen. Those are issues which, with respect, the Government has not exactly dealt with forthrightly. The Government has avoided those issues because they are too difficult. The Government is talking about how we raise extra money, what extra taxes we can talk about or what value for money we get from our present structure. I submit, Madam Speaker, that it is impossible for this Government to deal with the question of the structure of education services, the infrastructure of education, in this Territory without looking at the question of the outlays on schools and the way in which the school structure is presently put together.
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