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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3310 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Further to that, I offered them the services of the general manager of the Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing, Mr Mark Owens, in assisting them to pursue other avenues for funding. Unfortunately, in terms of a direct grant from the Bureau of Sport, Recreation and Racing, that is simply not possible, for the reasons I have given.

MS McRAE: I have a supplementary question. Mr Stefaniak, can you explain why private companies such as the Cannons and the Cosmos get preferential treatment, and not Australian rules football?

MR STEFANIAK: Those, I understand, were given as part of business and a guarantee given by the Treasurer. The Treasurer can give guarantees.

Mr Whitecross: So they should not have asked you that sort of a question.

MR SPEAKER: Order!

MR STEFANIAK: Will you shut up, Mr Whitecross? That is a different case entirely, Ms McRae. If the Rams would like to put a similar type of request to the Treasurer, maybe that would be looked at. That, Ms McRae, is comparing oranges and apples.

MR MOORE: Mr Speaker, my question is to Mr Stefaniak as Minister for Education. Minister, I refer to the 10-point national literacy action plan that you jointly released last Sunday with other State and Territory Ministers for Education. In particular, I refer to point 1, which says that from 1999 every child entering primary school will be assessed by teachers to determine their literacy needs and ensure plans are developed for the children at risk if they are not making progress towards national literacy goals. Could you inform this Assembly how these assessments will be implemented, given that your Government this year conducted the new literacy assessments, which apply only to Years 3 and 5, while abolishing the learning assistance program assessments which were used to assess literacy and numeracy needs of students in Years 1, 2, 4, 6 and 8? It is also pertinent to remember that Year K assessments for Reading Recovery are not used in over 40 per cent of primary schools because they no longer employ the Reading Recovery program. Could you assure the Assembly that aggregated system data for the new assessment scheme in Year K will be available to Assembly members and to the public? Further, Minister, on 8 May you stated, in answer to my question on notice No. 411, that the data I requested on the result of the learning assistance assessments in government primary and high schools for 1995 and 1996 would be made available once the results of the new ACT literacy assessment program were made available. These latter results were published a month ago. I now ask you to fulfil your commitment to release the learning assistance assessments and provide answers to parts 2, 3 and 4 of that question on notice No. 411.

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