Page 4185 - Week 13 - Thursday, 25 November 1993
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
We would invite any amendments to make this clearer, because it is abundantly clear at the moment that it makes very little sense. What does "the number of teaching hours" mean? Is a teaching hour an hour of a teacher's time, or is it the hour for which a student is exposed to a teacher?
Mr Cornwell: Oh, come on! Stop being pedantic.
MR CONNOLLY: No; they are extremely important issues. You neither care nor understand. Mr Stevenson has made it a point of principle since he has been in here to object to laws that cannot be clearly understood, and to object to laws that are rushed through. What you are doing here is rushing through a law which seems to make no sense.
What does "teaching hours" mean? It is a totally vague term. It may mean, on one extreme, the - - -
Mr Humphries: I think teachers know what it means.
MR CONNOLLY: Teachers normally understand it as the exposure of a student to a teacher, so one teacher speaking to two students would be two hours, two students speaking to one - - -
Mr De Domenico: The bow is getting longer all the time.
MR CONNOLLY: No, no. This is very important because, when we are talking about small classes - - -
Members interjected.
MADAM SPEAKER: Order!
MR CONNOLLY: Again, as I said at the outset, if we were seriously debating an amendment, these issues that I am raising would be important. If you are making a puerile political stunt - that clearly is what members of the Opposition are doing - you may well laugh while I am speaking, and continue laughing to your heart's content. Are 10 hour-long classes for which there are only two students the equivalent of one class in which there are 20 students for an hour? What do you mean by "teaching hours"? What do you mean by "persons employed"? Again, as the Chief Minister indicated, is one person who is employed for 40 hours a week the same as one person who is employed for one hour a week? Is that the same thing? Is a one-hour teacher the same as a 40-hour teacher? When does this start from?
I cannot speak for Mr Wood; but I can speak for the Department of Urban Services or, indeed, for the Australian Federal Police, to take an even more sensitive area, about numbers. On any given day, how many police do we have? I have just received a piece of advice from my Chief Police Officer confirming that we are again, for the next financial year, maintaining the staffing number, the 695, which is the number of operational police officers that are required to be made available under the police agreement. But at some times of the year we will have over 700 and at other times of the year we will have under the 695. On any given day the number of police employed in the ACT will vary, and on any given day the number employed in Urban Services will vary.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .