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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 9 Hansard (4 September) . . Page.. 2901 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Indeed, I offer to you and other members of the Assembly who might be interested the opportunity to inspect the operation of the program should you so wish. I am advised that over 40 students are now enrolled in the alternative education program, or AEP, and students are successfully involved in both their own and mainstream college programs, including maths, science, music, art, photography and auto technology.

As I mentioned earlier, it is clear that there is a need for alternative education programs within the ACT school system, and the Government has delivered in this area. I am most pleased to advise that plans are well under way now for the establishment of a southside alternative education program at the Canberra College Weston campus and recruitment of staff is under way. The southside AEP will open in 1998, thus fulfilling the commitment made by this Government during the SWOW review. In closing, I emphasise that the relocation of SWOW was in the best interests of the students. I can categorically state that all former SWOW students still in the ACT school system now have access to quality programs and to facilities within the orbit of an alternative education philosophy.

MS TUCKER (12.01), in reply: Mr Stefaniak says that this is history and he does not want to go over the details. I am not surprised that he does not want to go over the details. It would be an absolute comedy of errors if it did not have some quite serious consequences, in my opinion. I was interested to hear Mr Stefaniak say how well the Dickson facility is working and that it is a good thing. I have not heard otherwise, except that I certainly have not heard that previous students of the School Without Walls are there. A few of them are. I have had no satisfactory response from the Minister to my correspondence asking exactly where the other students are. The Government claimed that they were tracking ex-SWOW students, but I have correspondence from Open Family which shows quite clearly that quite a few of them have gone missing from the education system altogether. I have not had any satisfactory answer from the Minister's office on what they are doing about that, except letters which make comments like, "We are monitoring ex-SWOW students and are happy with the progress of them". Why is it that Open Family have such concerns?

When I look at the Government response to this inquiry and the report from the committee, it brings to my mind the debate that happened in this house yesterday, when Mrs Carnell was absolutely appalled - possibly rightly so - at some statements made by Mr Berry as chair of the select committee looking at the private hospital. Mrs Carnell's outrage was directed at the politicisation of the committee process. When you look at the Government response to our report, consistently throughout it is reference to the minority report which, as members will know, was written by Mr Hird, who attended very few of the hearings of the School Without Walls inquiry. He refused to attend because he made untested allegations against Ms Reilly because she was perceived to have a conflict of interest. We then saw this unsubstantiated minority report from a member who was not in attendance at a large number of the hearings being referred to as argument. That was the argument against a lot of the recommendations of the committee.

The Government agreed in principle to the first recommendation - the recommendation about developing a policy on community consultation relating to school reviews outside the normal SPRAD cycle - but supported the minority report, which said that reviews needed to be done in a flexible and responsive manner. Considering the damning report by the Ombudsman, who found that the consultation process was deceptive because the

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