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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 3 Hansard (9 March) . . Page.. 732 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

youth sector who work with disadvantaged young people were worried about the young people being put into this situation. We are interested in what happens to young people who are unemployed.

I have a very strong commitment to education and to valuing the work of teachers. That is an ideal I have. The teachers organisations, the major stakeholders, told this committee that this was going to add a burden to their workload which they could not carry and did not want to carry. The teachers of our society and the Primary Principals Association said that this is going to take away from the work of education. Yes, we have an ideal. I have an ideal. The Greens have an ideal which says that we want to make sure teachers are respected and supported.

Then we have the issue of the janitors and the administration staff. What is the ideal here that I have as a Green member? I want to see janitors' work respected. I want to see the administration workers acknowledged and respected as well. I want to see that we actually understand what has happened to that particular group of people through school-based management. The committee heard clearly that we have seen an increase in the workload for administration workers in schools, but we see that these people are now going to have another workload. So there is another ideal that came into play in decisions that I made on that committee.

Then we have another ideal - that the Public Service does its work thoroughly for the government; that the Public Service or the chief executive officer or whatever department is involved works thoroughly on proposals. Now, what happened in this committee inquiry? We saw the whole program change because as things were brought up things were changed. It was not a well thought out proposal.

At one point we had school counsellors being dobbed in to look after all the mental health needs of these young people in the schools. Counsellors were not asked. The counsellors could not do that. (Extension of time granted) I thank members. The counsellors said, "No, we cannot do that. We cannot look after the children in schools. We cannot take on this extra workload". "Oops; okay, we will change it", says the department, so that got changed midstream. Initially, of course, we had these young unemployed people helping children with numeracy and literacy problems too, but that got pulled out. Even the Commonwealth Government could see that that was going to cause an outrage. This was not a well thought out process, so there is another ideal that I am extremely concerned to see flouted through this process.

This committee did make recommendations about training. Mr Stefaniak is saying that work for the dole is not a training scheme. Exactly. Once again Mr Stefaniak has totally missed the point of the committee's report. This is not a training program. What had become quite clear about putting these young unemployed people into schools was that there had to be training. Of course there did. It was not going to be properly resourced. It was going to have to be done by the people working in the school system already, and it would be at the expense of the other work they do.

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