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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 7 Hansard (19 June) . . Page.. 1942 ..

MR TEMPORARY DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Wood): Order! It being 5.00 pm, I propose the question:

That the Assembly do now adjourn.

Mrs Carnell: I require the question to be put forthwith without debate.

Question resolved in the negative.

MS TUCKER: I am not saying that Labor did a brilliant job. We have talked about that. What I am saying is that you are now in government. You have a responsibility to show that you do care about students now and in the long term. Do not shake your heads about the ban; shake your heads about students now and in the future and appropriately fund education.

To conclude, this is a budget decision by this Government. It shows where their priorities are. Their priorities are in saying, "Are we not great financial managers?". But the costs of that - the long-term economic costs and the immediate and long-term social costs - are all too obvious to those who are dealing with people in this community now who are struggling. Forget user pays. The well-off are fine at the moment; but the problems are there and the problems are building up. We do not want to end up with a society like that in the United States, where you have more and more knee-jerk reactions from people like you, who say, "The solution is law and order. The solution is controlling these people who are disturbing our society". Why do we not start looking at these things with some compassion?

MRS CARNELL (Chief Minister) (5.03): Mr Speaker, it was very interesting listening to this debate. I think it is important just to clarify a few issues that obviously have been misunderstood by a number of people. Ms McRae laughs; but I think these things are very important, particularly for Ms Tucker and to some extent for Mr Moore, although I think he knew exactly what he was talking about in this area and he knew that he was, shall we say, skipping over a few of the facts. Let me deal with the details of productivity components that have been offered to the teachers at this stage. Some of them have been accepted, I agree. Ms Tucker has indicated that somehow these are going to cause bigger class sizes. Mr Moore said that too, and I think those opposite did as well. It is important to go through them just to determine what is actually on paper.

Ms McRae: We did not say that.

MRS CARNELL: I am sorry; Ms Tucker did, and so on.

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