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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 9 Hansard (23 November) . . Page.. 2512 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

we are told, not a decrease; but the increase in education results in all those job losses that I have discussed, including those quite dramatic changes to our college system. I have heard a lot of doubletalk in this Assembly, but today's stories are going to have to be pretty good before anybody can make any sense of what on earth is going on here.

On top of all of that, the policy changes we heard discussed, in the Estimates Committee and all year, are ill founded, unfinanced and badly thought out. We have a school-based management paper which says nothing, which gives only three weeks for schools to respond, and which again shows how this Government has absolutely no concern for equity issues. There is nothing in the school-based management paper that protects the interests of schools that, no matter what they do, cannot raise any income above that provided by the Government. There are schools like that across the system, although not many, and they are probably not the ones that are enthusiastic about school-based management. I know full well that there are many schools that are very happy about school-based management. I have no problem with that, but that is not my point. My point is that the Government has walked away from the equity issues.

Of course the rich and well-resourced schools are going to have no problem with school-based management. They do not care about the equity issues. It is not their problem; it is the Government's problem. So not only are we seeing these non-cuts; we are seeing the poor getting poorer and the rich getting richer out of these policies. The Government is offering nothing to the schools that either are situated in low socioeconomic areas or for other reasons are not in a position to raise any extra funds from their school community, no matter how hard they compete in the marketplace, to use the jargon, no matter how hard they go out and sell themselves. This Government has not taken that into account and then has promulgated a paper that walks away from basic responsibilities to ensure that no child is disadvantaged in our system because of where they live or where they happen to go to school. At a later date, Mr Stefaniak, I am happy to go through those figures with you and talk about which particular schools I mean and why you have done these schools such a major disservice. A policy that has come out cold has to be responded to in three weeks. Of course some schools are going to be enthusiastic, but the majority should not rule here until the Government has made it clear that the schools that are caught in a place and a time and a situation where extra income is impossible to gather are protected by the system.

The other policy we have seen promulgated this year with no intelligent backup whatsoever is the IT policy. I have said this often in places where I have spoken and it is nothing new, but I will repeat it: We are now at the same phase with information technology as we were with that major shift from when there were enough books for people to buy every book that was ever written to libraries. There has been a quantum leap, an extraordinary change, in the amount of information that is now available on computers, and therefore there is an absolute need for every schoolchild not only to have contact with a computer but also to learn how to access data and how to use that data and learn all the associated writing and research skills that go with that.

The Government has put out a policy, an overview document, which is not backed by any funding, by any practical planning, by any forward thinking about how all this is going to be networked, by any planning about how it is going to be maintained, and again, back to the equity issue, with no protection for the schools which, for whatever reasons,

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