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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 2 Hansard (27 February) . . Page.. 296 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

for boys or about anything of educational substance in terms of proper, fully developed outcomes for children? No. All he is concerned about is how many times they run around an oval every morning. "Support programs that counter sexual harassment, bullying and stereotyping of women". Have we seen anything like that? Not one word. It is all too embarrassing, of course. But our schools were promised these things. These were part of an election package that included free school buses, let me remind you, and adequate and proper education funding, which everyone believed would be maintained in real terms.

The Minister has said nothing about improving working conditions for our teachers or about dealing with variable enrolment patterns. He has set up a new advisory committee to look at "invariable", because he has suddenly realised that this is an area of extreme concern to the ACT. What does he do? He sets up an advisory council and almost eliminates the parental involvement in it. It has one parent instead of three on it. The parental involvement is going to be somewhere down the track, when they have to do what they are told. On the one council where parents' voices could really be heard on this absolutely crucial issue, he has made sure that they are not there.

What about making schools places that develop tolerance and genuine concern about citizenship? What about the integration programs for school students with disabilities? We saw what his concerns for students with disabilities were. Whack in a new summer program without any warning; do a comprehensive review that comes to no substantive outcome; and make no promises about adequate funding. Children with disabilities do not need to be patronised and do not need to be told, "We want you in our schools"; they need proper resources and proper support. Have we heard anything about this? No; especially not since we increased education funding so blatantly!

I am afraid, Minister, that you have impressed no-one over the last year. Your commitment to physical education and fitness may be a good one, but it is a misguided intervention in education programs that were already functioning extremely well. You have given people false hope in terms of IT and its development; you have given parents false hope in terms of free transport to and from school; and, most of all, you have broken a clear commitment to maintain education funding in real terms. Do not tell me all about this fine print. You are the only one who ever saw that fine print. Everyone in the community believed that education funding was going to be maintained in real terms. If that is the case, you cannot tell me that $1.5m had to be taken out of our colleges and a perfectly good system ruined. If you had funded the education budget properly, there is no reason at all why that money had to be taken out. No-one in the community is convinced of it.

Worst of all, you have put the teachers into a totally antagonistic situation; you have made parents very unhappy about your intervention into the school curriculum; you have raised false hopes about the sorts of changes that people wanted. I hope that it will be sooner than two years before people have a chance to tell you exactly how they feel about what you have done to the education system.

An incident having occurred in the gallery -

MR SPEAKER: Order!

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