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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 6 Hansard (14 June) . . Page.. 1705 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

Brendan Smyth doubled the travel costs of children who are educated in the non-government sector. We are going to repair that damage. We will use this money to restore the single zone bus system.

We know what it will cost and we know that we can do it. We know that with this money we can provide a better education system for kids in both areas, rather than take this cynical approach of going out to try to buy the votes of a small sector of the school community. Mr Smyth, 75 per cent will miss out under your plan.

What Labor intends to do by way of this and other measures is redirect that funding into schools. We will redirect these funds into the government and non-government sectors under a shared arrangement. The funds will be used on a needs basis with a priority on the programs I mentioned earlier-programs such as reducing class sizes in the K to year 3 category and support services for students up to year 12, together with any additional class size reductions which are achievable and appropriate.

I go back to one of my earlier points: it is important that we save all of the money. We want to save the $27 million and we want to put all of it back into these programs. We want to see the whole community develop-not just 25 per cent of the community which is being given an election sweetener by a government that has lost all credibility because of its cross-zone bus fare scheme.

The government was stinging from the introduction of that scheme and they felt they had to come up with a big bang to try to buy back votes. I do not think that those parents can be bought off. Yes, there are many parents out there who would save significant amounts of money as a result of this government bribe, but at the end of the day they would rather have it put into schools.

Since I came into this Assembly nobody has said to me that the quality of our education and our education results would be improved by free school buses. Not one person has said this to me. We have never received any evidence, anywhere, that education would be improved as a result of free school buses. Even non-educators would fairly easily come to the conclusion that getting kids to the school gate for free is not necessarily going to improve their education. You have got to spend it in the schools.

Mr Speaker, an inquiry that Ms Tucker, Mrs Burke and I are involved in has identified many areas where this money could be well spent. Our committee has not received any evidence which suggested that the areas we are inquiring into would be improved by free school buses. But they will be under the proposal which Labor has put forward, and that is the difference.

Mr Speaker, there is no doubt that this matter is so important for the community that it ought to be an election issue. I think the Liberals thought, "Well, Labor won't be saying anything about this because it is a bonus for a few people out there." But this proposal is inequitable and unfair, and that is one of the reasons why Labor can quite easily criticise it. We stand for fairness in the community; you do not. You are trying to pick off a few votes with a big election buy-out. Well, it will not work because the rest of the community know that they are being sold out, and that is what we are here to prevent. We will be going to the electorate on the basis of our promise to save a big chunk of that money for use in our schools to improve education.

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