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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 726 ..
Debate resumed from 2 March 2000, on motion by Ms Tucker:
That the report be noted.
and on the amendment moved by Mr Berry:
Add "and the dissenting report be rejected".
MR STEFANIAK (Minister for Education) (10.42): I am in the process of finishing, Mr Speaker, but I want to make a couple of other points before I do so. There are a number of significant omissions from the report. There is no mention, for example, of the Commonwealth's submission, which cites a dozen extant projects in schools and states that the central role that schools play in the community makes for an important element in the work for the dole strategy. That submission goes on to conclude that, overall, the Department of Education and Community Services proposal is considered an excellent opportunity for participants to gain experience and that there is excellent employment outcome potential for many of them.
The committee's report relies very much on the arguments of the AEU. The AEU have always had an ideological stance on this subject and they have made well known their opposition to the scheme. The report misses the fact that the work for the dole project involves unemployed people working on a variety of tasks to support a school's operations, most of which are outside the classroom, and most of which do not involve support provided by teachers. It is not about working directly with students. Therefore, a lot of the information provided by the AEU and relied on by the inquiry had limited relevance and could mislead.
Mr Speaker, the project is a very good one and has the overall support of the ACT community and, indeed, the Australian community. The amendment that we are looking at here really does smack of totalitarianism. It reminds me of Stalin in the 1920s, who used to blot out pictures of people he had fallen out with, such as Trotsky and the other hot shots one reads about in history books and so on concerning the old Soviet Union. The amendment smacks of censorship. Also, it is rather extraordinary to ask a member to withdraw a dissenting report. I do not think something like that has any place in this Assembly. It would set a disastrously dangerous precedent. I ask members to reject the amendment.
MR BERRY: Mr Speaker, I seek leave to speak again on this matter.
Leave granted.
MR BERRY
: I welcome the opportunity to contribute again to this debate. I heard Mr Stefaniak talk about the ideology of others, using the language of totalitarianism and that sort of stuff. I think that Mr Stefaniak is caught in a pre-1989 time warp. He is concerned more about the wall in Berlin that he is about the realities of the ACT
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