Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 366 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

day, taking into account the humidity, it is not hard to imagine the extent of the temperature rise which would affect kids.

I come to the management of this issue. We have seen a public howling match between the P&C and the department and minister, and the government and its department have been trying to shift responsibility for this matter to somewhere else. There has been an argument about temperatures in our schools since last June, to my knowledge. It strikes me that there has been an extraordinary breach of management principles if we have been unable to sort out that issue over that period of time. Last June it was raised at a committee hearing. The committee recommended that the government do something. The best the government could come up with was a review after the issue exploded recently at Gordon primary.

Mr Speaker, I cannot for the life of me remember when there has been such an extraordinary outburst by parents and kids, save for when schools have been being closed-again, as a result of the activities of this government. I cannot remember another event when people have complained so bitterly and so loudly about the failure of the government to provide basic infrastructure. We all know that there are provisions in the Occupational Health and Safety Act whereby third parties have to be protected. It is a responsibility of the government to ensure that these kids are safe and that the teachers are safe. I think that there is a question mark over the safety of children in these environments.

Leaving aside the safety issues for a moment, let us take into account the education values. You cannot educate kids in a high-temperature, high-humidity environment, and you can back it in that it will be both. Finally, you cannot avoid your responsibility to provide adequate infrastructure for children. The government does that, generally. All of the schools across the ACT have been built to high standards at government expense, especially those built prior to self-government. All of them are heated by various systems of heating. Some of them have equipment for the transmission of fresh air. All that is provided by the government. The schools, I understand, pay the electricity and gas bills for their heating, but the infrastructure for heating, air handling, ventilation and those sorts of things is provided by the government.

The government cannot say now that it is entitled to ditch its responsibilities when the environment inside a classroom deteriorates to the point where the safety and quality of education are affected by inadequate infrastructure. The government has to take responsibility. It cannot flick the responsibility to schools to take money out of their school-based management funds if the government has not provided this infrastructure.

Did the government make sure that everyone's infrastructure was up to scratch before it introduced school-based management? Obviously not. That is an important point. If the government was able to point to something that it did to make sure that everybody's infrastructure was up to scratch before it introduced school-based management, I would like to see it. I do not think that the government did.

There are schools out there that are now deteriorating and schools that are saving money and adding to their cash balances arising from school-based management. The reason they are doing that is that they know that the government is miserable and they are saving for rainy day. I would rather see them spend it but, quite often, the cash balances

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .