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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 292 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

When they complain to me, the story is that it has all been put off because there is not enough money. That was over the last year. Schools know very well that they are being landed with maintenance problems that should not be paid for by them. They have had the support that they used to get for the purchase of major items like photocopiers removed. Their facilities have not been guaranteed. None of their ovals have been maintained to the quality to which we maintained them. You have now been in office for a year, and they are realising that this handover of school-based management is a false chimera of management which has nothing to do with the good management of the school but has to do with the offloading of a series of problems that the Minister is unable to confront and unable to deal with in a way that was promised during the election campaign.

What was made clear during the Public Accounts Committee inquiry, which took a whole year, was something that we had been saying for a long time. There is an uneven capacity for schools to gather money, and to hand over to school-based management guarantees that the rich will get richer and the poor will get poorer. This Minister has failed in any attempt to come to terms with that and to deal with the uneven economic needs of our schools. We have not yet seen a response to the PAC report. When I asked about it, I was told that it would be available in three months' time. That is absolutely outrageous! That report made recommendations that should have been put into place at the beginning of the school year. The Minister could not even differentiate between the recommendations that he could have dealt with immediately and the recommendations that could be dealt with later. He shows, by his whole approach to education, that he has absolutely no idea of what the needs of the system are.

As well, the Minister seems to show no indication - as I wrote in May and it still holds true - that he will not repeat the mistakes made in other systems. We know what your Liberal colleagues - - -

Mr Stefaniak: Or by previous governments.

MS McRAE: I really like this line. Here we go! The Liberals keep telling us everything that we did wrong - the way that we did things in the house; the way that we did not answer questions; the way that we did not do this, that or the other. What do you do when you get into government? Do you do anything differently? No. You carry on doing exactly the same things, saying, "Because you did it". I have never heard anything as stupid in all my life. That is what children do. You say, "I hit him because he hit me", instead of saying, "Let us find a better way". No; you say, "That is what Labor did, so we will do the same". It wears a bit thin and becomes a bit childish, particularly a year down the track. It is not as if it were the second day, when you were all saying, "The coffers are empty; Labor has ruined the Territory". You have now had a year. Things are worse, not better, particularly in the education sphere. We know what the Victorians did. They cut the funds and walked away from the problem. We are very concerned that this is exactly what this Minister is planning. No wonder the schools put off their report and said, "We want more time". They will want a hell of a lot more time. I guarantee that it will probably be two years; until they can get rid of you, Mr Stefaniak.

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