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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 2 Hansard (28 February) . . Page.. 377 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

proportionately more than any other school, which put disproportionate demands on the school's budget for dealing with extremes of temperature.

We know that demountable buildings have very poor energy ratings, so the question here is: How fair is that? I am not supportive of what the government is doing, by the way. There are some really serious questions about the lengths to which this government has taken school-based management, but I will leave it at that. We have school-based management and schools will have to take responsibility for these issues, so some schools are going to have a much greater burden on them than others. Is that fair? Of course it is not fair. If the government wants to have a reasonable system, I would think that it should show us an energy rating for every school in Canberra. I would like to have that information. I ask the minister to table that information if he has it.

The minister and Mrs Burke said that no other school has a problem. I am glad to hear that, but I am also interested to know how they know that. Has the government contacted every school and asked them how they are doing in very hot weather. If that has been done, I would like to see the results tabled in this parliament as well. A particularly feisty group of parents went with their children to this protest and Mrs Burke thinks that that was exploitation of the children.

I would be interested to know how the children were involved in the decision to make their feelings known. I know that in education it is very good to empower children and to give them an opportunity to have a role in decision-making. Even primary school children are interested in being respected by teachers and their parents. The whole question of empowering children is to help them feel as if they have a say in things that affect them. I have not seen that criticised. I have seen it generally accepted as a good trend. If children feel that they are respected in what they have to say, they respect what other people say.

If these children have grown in a culture where they are listened to and they are allowed to express their feelings and if those children expressed their concerns about the heat and the environment in which they had to learn, then that is not exploitation of children. If Mrs Burke knows that these children were not consulted at all, that they are not being brought up in a culture of expressing their feelings and being asked for them, and they were dragged along in some way that they had no knowledge of what was going on, I would agree with Mrs Burke's concerns, but I need clarification of that. She must have it, I suppose, if she said that it was exploitation. She can speak again if she wants to explain that and I would share her concerns if that was the case.

I know that it has got to the point in this town that a number of parents are feeling that they have to take political action and make their views understood, because they are getting more and more frustrated. We are seeing the union representing the teachers responding in the same way, because they are also becoming very frustrated. I know that there has been a desire from the sector for some time to have the whole issue of school-based management put under the microscope in some way to see what are the actual outcomes of it.

We have had a number of problems with it over the last few years. For example, I recall clearly the way that schools were choosing cleaners. Concerns were expressed at one of the committee hearings about children cleaning schools. The principals were certainly

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