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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (27 October) . . Page.. 2276 ..

MR OSBORNE (continuing):

you are looking at the vest-wearing Minister. I am a little confused as to why you chose to do that, Mr Humphries, given that we are in the middle of an inquiry. Reading through your press release, I do not think you do need to write to the committee because all of us in here are aware of what you are proposing. I am a little confused as to why you chose to do it.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, let me illustrate the point I am making by taking a further example. In the next few weeks the Government will write to the committee and provide information about a number of proposed sites for the prison. What it will do, I suspect, is say, "Here are the options that we consider are worth examining for a site of a prison. Here are the pros and cons about each site; this is how large it is; et cetera, et cetera". When it does so, the committee will have the option as to how much it ventilates that information to the rest of the community. Mr Speaker, it is certainly not my intention that, having put the information before the committee, it should be only for the committee's eyes and the rest of the community should not be able to see the information as well.

If the committee views the release of information about proposed sites as being an affront to the committee in some way, I have to say that causes us a problem because I think that the community has the right to see the information about those proposed sites. Similarly, other information about this process deserves to be in the public arena, and I simply say I think we should put it there. Mr Speaker, I am happy to work closely with the community to try to resolve these problems. I am not in any way wishing to cut across the work of the committee, but I also do not want to have a process which is not as open as possible. That means we may need to work out some compromises in the agendas of the committee and of the Government.

MS TUCKER: My question is to Mr Moore. Mr Moore, I was interested to see in the Canberra Times on Friday the 23rd an article stating - you can inform the Assembly whether it is correct or not - that you have apparently intervened to orchestrate a trial of the split campus between part-time Reid and Ainslie Baker Gardens preschools, so that the teacher in your local preschool could remain a full-time teacher and that you have claimed this would be a fantastic opportunity for a trial of an innovative new model. I was interested in that because in the Education Committee's inquiry we were told by a senior public servant, and I will quote:

It is harder for a full-time teacher to operate separately in two part-time preschools without impacting on the parents and the provision of education. That is because you need time to set up the preschool in the morning, or before the session starts, and then you need to put equipment away as well. So, if you go through that process in the morning in one preschool and then have to move to another preschool to do the same thing for another part-time group, that means that the session in the afternoon would have to start later in the day, which has an impact on the accessibility for parents.

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