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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1996 Week 10 Hansard (5 September) . . Page.. 3133 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The purpose of this motion is not to call on the Government to redo the whole Government response, which was the tactic that Mr Moore used last time. This motion just pulls out a few Government responses which I am not at all happy with, and I think it is important that we make that quite clear. That is why I am proposing this motion. I will not speak at length on all the issues because I have already done that; I will just briefly cover what the motion says.

We are asking that the Government present to the Assembly a thorough assessment of the equity implications of school-based management, for reasons which I think I pretty well covered before. I keep talking about what has happened in the United Kingdom and New Zealand. Basically, with a devolved system, with resourcing formulas similar to what the Government is proposing in their document released last week, equity often stops at the school door. The three trends of school-based management from other places are loss of heterogeneity in student populations, increasing differentiation in quality and resources available to schools, and loss of diversity of options and effective curriculum choices. This is what has happened in other countries. We wait to be reassured that it will not happen here. That is all that that recommendation was about. That is the first point of my motion.

The second point is that we ask for more details about the proposed program for primary age students with severe behaviour or emotional problems who require more intensive programs, and how this will meet the needs of the Belconnen and Gungahlin areas. The third point is that we ask for a more detailed justification for the response to the recommendation calling on the Government to develop intervention programs for students on suspension. I have covered that already this morning. It is very important. It is of concern. It is a community issue as well as a school issue, so we are asking that you reconsider that response.

The fourth point of the motion asks the Government to prepare a report which will include information about how and when further development of family counselling and other family services will occur, which is what you stated at the beginning of your response but contradicted later on. The fifth point seeks an explanation of why the Government does not agree that greater publicity needs to be given to services provided by the Government and community-based agencies supporting parents and families at risk. These do not necessarily have huge resource implications. A lot of it is about information. I heard Mr Moore say that he would like to have a discussion about it first and adjourn the debate accordingly. Really, we are not doing anything like throwing the whole report back. We are asking for fairly clear responses here. We do not need a round table discussion. I will not support Mr Moore's motion for adjournment because I think it is quite clear that these things need to be addressed. I ask members to support this motion.

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