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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 12 Hansard (11 November) . . Page.. 3962 ..

MS McRAE (continuing):

Western Australia, for instance, has 14. Tasmania has 20, plus the chief executive officer. The Northern Territory has 17. New South Wales has 23, with three who are ex officio. In South Australia they get up to 27. In Queensland there are about 15. I gather that there are changes afoot, particularly in New South Wales, where they are grappling with a very big board that they find quite difficult.

Membership of the boards varies from State to State as well and tries to reflect the key interests that must be represented around the table when grappling with these very serious issues to do with assessment, the credibility of assessment, the relevance of those assessments to the ongoing vocational education, further education, and general workplace capacity to work, that must come out of good assessment processes in the ACT and everywhere, and in particular to provide that quality control for the courses that are registered by boards around Australia. So you do see a reasonable diversity of membership around Australia, with all of them trying to balance the same interests; trying to balance government and non-government schools, trying to balance employers' interests, vocational education's interests, universities' interests, and general community interests. In each case they are coming out with a slightly different solution, but effectively trying to solve the same problem.

The answer that we have come up with here and that is part of this legislation is definitely not to the approval of everybody in the ACT. All members have been lobbied by different interest groups to try to increase the size of the board and include them around the table. I commend those groups for their interest because this is, indeed, a crucial board, as I have said several times already, both for the interest of the registration of appropriate courses and for the future interests of students in the system. There are different unions that would like to be represented and there are more parents that would like to be represented on the board.

There are several ways that we can come up with a solution, and I have grappled with several of them. One of the first solutions that I thought of was to create ex officio places, additional places around the table, so that at least people could be involved in the discussion if not in the final decisions. But that, of course, was fraught with difficulty because very often decisions are not made by vote; so, at what point do you throw people out? At what point do they not become full participants? It is fraught with difficulty, so I abandoned that idea, although it definitely had some appeal. In essence, it is a reflection of what happens already, albeit not at the main table, in terms of participation at subcommittee levels, of which there are numerous numbers and which allow plenty of participative activity by any interested body, as we have seen in the past, which has yielded a place at the table.

The next interesting point was to say, "Okay, if we want to increase the size of the board, whom can we throw off?". At this point I come to a point of difference with the Government, which may or may not be supported by others. I think it is time we grew up. Although I accept the Government's argument that somebody who does not reside in the ACT has proven to be a very valuable sounding-board and a very valuable addition to the board thus far, I think, given that we are moving to a statutory authority, it is time we severed that link. It is time to say that we are quite capable of running our affairs for the ACT and to take that person off the board, with the proviso, of course,

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