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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 7 Hansard (21 June) . . Page.. 2360 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

Rock solid, rusted on, is a promise by Labor to extend our brilliant kindergarten to year 2 initiative to year 3. That may or may not be good educationally, because there is a lot of literature that says that you may not benefit as much in respect of the year 3 age group-kindergarten to year 2, sure, crucial; year 3, maybe not. But he has promised $2.75 million. My department has costed that. If you multiply that by four, you get $11 million. You take your $11 million off your $15.82 million and you are down to $4.82 million over four years. This leaves $1.2 million to fund all those other things he has listed. He has listed about 10 other things, ranging from kids with disabilities, kids at risk of leaving school, other at risk kids, and counsellors. There are a plethora of things which the Labor Party say they want to fund additionally, and he has $1.2 million over four years to do that.

As well-and I am pretty sure I am quoting correctly the joint press release that he and Mr Stanhope put out-they want to fund across both systems: the non-government sector and the government sector. The $2.75 million for their year 3 initiative is just for the government sector. So $1.2 million each year for four years across both sectors does not leave very much. Given the Labor Party's record of financial management, I think people should be rather scared about that.

I am not going to talk about the great educational initiatives that we have in this budget, or indeed about the fact that we have managed to increase the education budget every single year that we have been in government, despite operating for most of those years under difficult circumstances. I will leave that for the education debate. But we at least have a track record of being able to fund initiatives and we have a budget which is now in the black. Labor does not have that sort of track record.

There has been a huge hue and cry from Mr Berry that about 75 per cent of Canberra students are not going to benefit from this initiative. He may or may not be right. My colleague Mr Smyth has indicated that he thinks the number will reach 20,000, which means that probably about 65 per cent or 66 per cent might not avail themselves of this. They will certainly avail themselves of the one-zone initiative which Mr Smyth has mentioned, which I think not only takes in school students but also extends to university and CIT students as well. That is an excellent initiative.

Maybe 65 or 66 per cent will not need to avail themselves of the initiative. They might live very close to a school. They perhaps have some other transport arrangements. Their parents might drop them off. Perhaps if they are at college, they might have their own transport. Indeed, if they are at primary school or high school, they might ride a bike to school, as a lot of students do.

I am the only member of this place to have been born in Canberra and go through our school system. Mr Corbell might have grown up here but I am not sure whether he started his education in kindergarten, as I certainly did. Our house in Narrabundah was about 100 yards from Griffith infants school. There is no way in the world that I would have thought of availing myself of a scheme like this. When I went to Red Hill primary the distance was probably less than 1.6 kilometres. Why get a bus? It would have taken too long.

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