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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (20 June) . . Page.. 2186 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I have not yet had the experience of having a child of my own attending the education system in the ACT as my son is still too young, but when he does and when perhaps others do also, I will want to send them to a government system because I am a product of the government system in the ACT. I grew up in Canberra and I experienced the government system. I found the government system to be a superb system. Mr Speaker, I want to make sure that it is a superb system for my children. I want to make sure that it will be a system which, as Ms Tucker pointed out earlier, does address the needs of students and that does address the needs of those who have particular educational challenges or difficulties that they need to overcome. I think it is incumbent upon this Assembly to make sure that the education system is of the highest quality possible and that it is available free of charge to every student in the ACT.

The initiative announced by the government of free school buses is not something that delivers that result for me. The government cannot stand up in this place and argue that it is an education initiative, even though it did briefly for a while and then realised that it had to back off. I want to see an education system that delivers on issues such as literacy and good curriculum development. I was appalled to learn in the Estimates Committee before last that the department of education will no longer have any officer in its central office responsible for curriculum development, not one. I think that is disgraceful. The ACT used to be a leader in curriculum development and in the support it gave to teachers and schools on different curriculum issues. There is not one officer in the department of education now available for curriculum development. How can you have a top-quality system, how can you have a system that really delivers good educational outcomes for students, when the central support needed to deliver that outcome is no longer there? That appals me and it has to be rectified.

Mr Speaker, this initiative as announced by the government is flawed and does not deliver to the great mass of people in the ACT who are entitled to see better from the government when it comes to education services. I should stress that it is not just about seeing better in the government sector; it is about seeing better in the non-government sector as well. We all know that the great bulk of non-government schools are not elite schools. The great bulk of non-government schools are schools that cater for people on average incomes, people who choose for religious reasons or some other reason not to be in the government sector. The Labor Party's initiative actually addresses that. The policy announced by the Labor Party addresses the fact that we have not only to give support to our government sector, which so desperately needs it, but also to start to look at ways of addressing the inequity between the government and non-government sectors in terms of funding.

That is a debate that we need to have. It is a debate that we need to work through. At least the Labor Party has recognised that that needs to be done. What has the government done in this budget to do that? What has the government done to focus on those key issues? It has not done enough. The government chose with its single largest initiative of $27 million not to direct it to education, but instead to direct it to an initiative that benefits barely a quarter of the entire school population in the city. That is selective. It may be tax relief, Mr Rugendyke, but it is tax relief only for some, not for all; nor is it tax relief based on need. It is neither of those things.

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