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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1300 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

start at $35 per child and go up to $180, with the full spread. We do not even have a clump of any great number of schools, as we have in the case of the primary schools. In the colleges, we have five that asked for $140, one that asked for $150, one that asked for $180, one that asked for $160 and one that asked for either $110 or $150, depending on what you wanted to pay.

How can we have before us a recommendation that clearly demands that something be done, a Minister who takes his hands off the steering wheel and a department that ignores it? The Minister has a responsibility to the Assembly and the community to follow through in this work so that we do not have an inconsistent system. The whole point of this inquiry was to try to put some equity back into the system and to come to some understanding of what the variations were in terms of educational experiences in the ACT.

The report also asked for the discriminatory nature of exclusion to be highlighted and stopped. I must say that, for primary schools, the letters were generally terrific; but the Minister really paid no attention to the letters going out from secondary schools and colleges. There is no letter that I can point the finger at, except perhaps one, where I think there is direct discrimination; but the pressure is very strong in our high schools and our colleges for those subject levies to be paid before students are admitted. The Minister has not paid attention to this issue. The department is not following through. The Minister must take control of this issue again. There are inconsistent and unfair practices happening within our schools.

Finally, I will just mention recommendation 15. The committee recommended that the ownership of all funds raised by schools and their school boards and by P and C associations through voluntary contributions or other means be vested in the relevant schools and be banked upon collection in school accounts. I would very much like to see whether the Minister has followed up with that. What we also found was that, despite this very lengthy and detailed inquiry, there is a very high level of inconsistency in the information that is given back to parents. A few schools - and only a few - show the full budget of what the school is spending and what the parental contribution is going to. The others simply make vague statements. The Minister has had a year, and I think it is a matter of grave public importance that he is not paying attention to what is happening to our children, to our parents and to our schools in terms of the management of voluntary school contributions.

This leads me to my third issue, which I was thinking about before the Ombudsman's report on SWOW came out. This MPI was not driven by that report. It was driven more by voluntary school contributions and my very deep concerns at the mismanagement of our colleges and the changes to the two particular colleges. The third issue, I think, highlights the fact that the Minister is simply not paying enough attention to what is happening to disadvantaged students in our system. If the leadership from the Government is there, how is it that the two off-line programs that were being offered, at Calwell and Ginninderra, were allowed to be closed? How is it that the department did not follow through on those and re-establish them in some way? How is it that the department was allowed to negotiate with SWOW when the Minister knew that from 25 June we have had on the notice paper the following motion:

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