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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 294 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

What Mr Stefaniak is saying is that every school board in the ACT is wrong and that the staff of every school do not know what they are doing. They determine those priorities within schools; they determine how the eight key learning areas are done. This is the very basis of our system. Mr Stefaniak's criticism of this system flies directly in the face of the ethos of our system of school-based curriculum management.

What Mr Stefaniak wants to do is bring back a centralised, centrally controlled curriculum. I am sure that he would love to see that at 8 o'clock in the morning they do spelling; at 9 o'clock in the morning they do arithmetic; at 10 o'clock in the morning they all run around the oval. This is the good old days. What absolute nonsense! It has nothing to do with the way that schools in the ACT are run and managed and is an absolute insult to the parents and teachers who have worked together to determine the priorities for their schools, to plan the curriculum for their schools and then to implement it.

Later in the year, Mr Stefaniak made much of the fact that this was not compulsory sport and was not competitive sport; but that did not last for very long. That was only in the face of concerted criticism of his original plan, which did involve compulsory, competitive inter- and intra-school sport. The Minister displayed total ignorance of the system, persisted until he met resistance and then had to back off in the face of the fact that our schools have school-based curriculum, that they move according to the needs of their community and that his blundering into the area simply insulted the intelligence, the time and the commitment of parents and staff to develop school-based curriculum. It flies in the face of our whole system and is done on the basis of no analysis or proof.

Mr Stefaniak seems entirely ignorant of the fact that, after the national report on sport in schools, the system did respond; the school boards and school staffs did review their programs and, in many cases, changed them. One of the things that the Minister paid no attention to was that the national report was very concerned, extremely concerned, about Years 11 and 12. What did Mr Stefaniak do during the year to Years 11 and 12? He cut $1.5m from our colleges. What happened to our sport programs, the very sport programs that were criticised soundly in the national report? These are the very years that the national inquiry had the greatest concerns about, because this is the transition out of compulsory years into the workplace; the very years where people were most concerned about the lack of commitment to physical fitness. What did this Minister do? He took out $1.5m and, as a consequence, has ruined the sporting programs.

Mr Stefaniak: We have a union ban on now; we have a union ban on interschool and intercollege sport.

MS McRAE: That raises another question: Why are there union bans? Because the Minister has proved his competence? Never. This Minister knew not what he was getting into. As the year progressed, life got more and more complicated. Union bans are on because this Minister made promises that he could not keep. There are only seven people in the world who believe that maintaining education funding meant the level of cuts that this Government has imposed. Everyone else in the community knew exactly what the Liberal promise was, namely, that education funding would be maintained. "Would be maintained" does not mean taking millions out of the system. (Extension of time granted)

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