Page 1689 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 18 May 1994
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I believe that the present Government needs to accept the responsibility to demonstrate better outcomes for our education dollar than it has done so far. One of the most important ways of doing that is to adopt some system which would ensure that people who use our system, potential users of our system, parents who send children through our system, employers who use the graduates of our system, and people who observe education standards across this country have some means of testing the proposition that we have in the ACT a system which actually delivers some quality outcomes. It is anecdotally accepted that the ACT's education system produces strong outcomes. There is the belief amongst many that the ACT's system is a better system than that applying in the States. We certainly have more freedom in our system to deliver options to students, particularly at college level, than in most of the States; but I do not think that we can say that those facts by themselves prove that we have necessarily a perfect or even very good education system. I would like to see put in place some system of testing which would give us the capacity to say with certainty that we have a good education system which delivers what people want.
I support the contention behind Ms Szuty's MPI that the Labor Government has failed to improve and deliver quality learning outcomes for young people, partly because of the flawed way in which it has delivered cuts in the system. I hasten to add that we are not saying that the Government should not consider cuts to education. What I am saying is that the Government must consider the areas in which education spending is most effective. As we have said many times in the past in this place, buildings and schoolgrounds, bricks and mortar, are not necessarily effective targets of education spending. I also think, Madam Speaker, that the Government must accept some better way of delivering measurable results to the people who use the system. We fail our community if we run our education system on rhetoric only, and to a large extent we have done that in recent years.
Madam Speaker, this is a matter of public importance; it is not a motion, although it could be worded as such. I hope that this in some ways will guide the Government when it produces its budget in a month's time. We would not wish to see the sort of exercise that was engaged in last year when we had to say to the Government, "You have violated your mandate from the people of the ACT by cutting teacher numbers", which, of course, the Government had done, having promised that teacher numbers would be safe under it; but I do think that the Government has to face some hard decisions. It would do well to accept the principles outlined in this matter of public importance as a way in which it could bring down a balanced budget but meet those objectives at the same time.
MADAM SPEAKER: I believe that the discussion has concluded.
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