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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 4 Hansard (18 April) . . Page.. 1063 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

One of the other and absolutely worrying responses, perhaps the most important one, was the Government's complete refusal to have a look at the definition of a disadvantaged school. The Commonwealth has a definition of disadvantaged schools, and we are the beneficiaries of about $55,000 under that definition. Of course, in the past - I do not know what the new Government will do; one can always hold out hope - the definition was necessarily a very stringent one, because it was based on a national need to provide equity across Australia. Quite clearly, you do not have to be a genius to work out that within the ACT that is not likely to benefit a large number of schools. We are privileged to live in a high-income community.

What this report was asking the Government to do was to ignore the Federal definition and start some better, more detailed, more focused analysis of what life experiences are really like in the ACT. How many schools have more than 50 per cent of parents who are single-income parents? They may well be earning $30,000 or $40,000, or more than the national average, as single-income parents. They may well be working. But the situation is that the vast majority of ACT households are two-income households. If you have a large proportion of students from single-income households attending one school, that is obviously going to diminish the capacity of that school to gather extra money. This is the sort of question that this report demands be asked and is the sort of question that the Government refused to look at seriously and say, "Yes; perhaps this new evidence does show up something that needs some work on it". Nobody was asking that work to be done instantly; nobody was asking for a revolution to happen.

The PAC report put out a clear challenge which said, in this first review, "After such a long time of self-government we have found that all is not well. We are asking you to examine the evidence before you". What do we have? A knee-jerk political response. All we hear is, "What did you do?". We did not have this report in front of us three years ago.

Mr De Domenico: Oh, dear! Who believes you? No-one believes you.

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MS McRAE: Just carry on; that is fine. This is a report that is now in the public domain; the evidence is in the public domain. The facts are now in front of us. You can carry on as much as you like. There is no evading that.

Yet another issue that the PAC report uncovered - I am sure that there are more, but I will end on this one - was the differentiation between schools as to what P and C committees actually do with their money. It pointed out quite clearly the need for a charter of rights for parents to know how their voluntary contributions are used. The Government ducked this and fell behind the veil of saying, "They are incorporated organisations; there are individual rights"; and blah, blah, blah about how P and Cs operate. The PAC report showed quite clearly how some schools accrue a lot of money, keep it in bank accounts, use the interest and then do or do not use it for educational purposes. It also showed that in many cases the policies on how P and C money is

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