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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 4 Hansard (28 March) . . Page.. 928 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

budget. I accept that it may be difficult to do that, but I think Ms Tucker has missed the point on that. I have not seen too much of that from a cursory glance at this report. I would hope to see it in other reports.

Mr Berry raised a couple of points in relation to the approach of Mr Hird. I was at the hearings of the committee for some hours and Mr Hird did not seem to me to be agreeing with a lot of the points that Mr Berry was making. He seemed to have quite a different view on a number of things that his colleagues on the committee were putting. I think Mr Berry might be being a little churlish, once again, in terms of the approach of Mr Hird.

Mr Berry: You were not at the deliberative sessions, Bill. That is where the decisions were made.

MR STEFANIAK: He certainly was not on the same wavelength as you, Wayne, and thank God for that.

I come now to the education budget and the criticism of it by the P&C council. I note that Ms Tucker has not come up with any comments in relation to that. She got the report on the independent audit on Saturday. I got the final report on Saturday, too. I am glad that the delivery system works very efficiently. I appreciate that the P&C council has not seen the final report, but I am amazed that it is still on the same tangent. The Government has maintained its promise in real terms. It has maintained the promise it made in 1995 and it has maintained the promise it made in 1998 in relation to keeping funding in government schools, primary and secondary, at real terms. In fact, as this report shows quite clearly, not only has the Government honoured its promise to maintain education funding for schools in real terms, but also it has spent, when one extrapolates the graph I will be tabling from the report, approximately $37m over six years - assuming that what the Government wants to spend on education gets through this budget process - over and above the actual ACT consumer price index. So it has spent considerably more than promised.

It is fairly obvious why that is the case. As this report points out quite clearly, sometimes the Government adopted a CPI which was greatly in excess of the CPI in real terms for a particular financial year. That is acknowledged in the report. As a result of the enterprise bargaining agreement with teachers in 1996 - Mr Berry might like to listen to this - the Government put some more money in there. In 1997-98 the Government put extra money in for its excellent computer initiative for the government school system and it will flow right through to the 2001-02 budget, about $20m worth of information technology. There has been the occasional program where extra money has gone in. Other programs have been funded as the result of this real terms guarantee. I wonder whether they would have been able to proceed were that not the case.

There have been movements within the system. Sometimes we might have liked to get an increase of $10m and only got $8m. There have been some changes in the system; we do not resile from that. That is just part and parcel of good administration. But we have certainly done better than the previous Labor Government did. I think there was to be a cut of 84 teachers under them. I do not think it was 90, as my colleague Mr Moore

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