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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2000 Week 12 Hansard (7 December) . . Page.. 3820 ..
MR BERRY (11.42): Mr Speaker, this motion is just an exercise about the government trying to require a committee to do the government's work. This work is a reasonable requirement of the government and there is plenty of information upon which to base such work within the government if the government is so concerned about it. It seems to me that the minister is so stubbornly rusted on to his view that he intends to waste the time of this Assembly on a motion requiring the committee to do the government's work.
The most annoying part of the government's approach in relation to this matter is that the minister knows that there has been a response from the Senate's Employment, Workplace Relations, Small Business and Education References Committee and he knows that there has been a response from the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training. He should know that teacher supply and demand is an issue which is monitored by the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs.
Mr Stefaniak: I am part of it. Table the letters, Wayne.
MR BERRY: Unless you have been asleep at the meetings, you should know that that is what they look at. According to the letter from the Senate committee, the next report of MCEETYA's teacher education taskforce is due for release early next year and the deans of education released recently a report on teacher supply and demand. These are things that the minister would know about through his involvement with the ministerial council and he is trying to flick pass to a committee the responsibility to deal with these issues at a departmental level.
It might be in the government's interest to try to keep our committees busy so that they are not doing things that are troublesome for the government, but the fact of the matter is that the minister knows that activity is going on elsewhere in relation to these matters and he would know, if he was so concerned about it, that normally the department would be doing this sort of work. If the department were to issue a report about the ACT workforce insofar as the education system is concerned, it would then be a matter for this Assembly and committees of this Assembly to take it on, if they desired. But for a committee to do the basic bureaucratic work that you require is just over the top.
Mr Speaker, I want particularly to refer the Assembly to a letter from the Standing Committee on Employment, Education and Training of the House of Representatives, chaired by Dr Brendan Nelson. Dr Nelson wrote to the chair of the ACT Assembly committee on this matter after she had written to him. I will just read to the Assembly his words:
The Committee agrees that the composition of the national teaching workforce merits investigation and notes that the ACT Government's efforts to manage the age profile of its teaching workforce through voluntary redundancies was examined during our inquiry into mature age workers. We are currently undertaking an inquiry into the education of boys and another aspect of the reference you have suggested, the gender balance of the teaching force, has emerged as an important issue in that inquiry.
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