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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (7 August) . . Page.. 2434 ..

Mr Berry (continuing):

Mr Speaker, I had a fair bit to do with the creation of the Lanyon youth centre. That is an attempt to tackle holistically the problems of kids at risk. I know that Project Saul is another one that talks about kids at risk, because it talks about their social problems and their home problems, and unless those are solved they do not continue their education. They drop away. We all know that. Why do we debase this report by going off and having cheap political shots at each other? As far as I am concerned, it is appalling, Mr Speaker.

I urge members to look at the report in detail. I will not go through the detail because we will have a test at the end of the session-it is called the October 20 exam, Mr Speaker-to see whether or not we know what we have read.

Mr Hird asked where the $27 million is coming from. It is coming out of the government's budget. What about the $8 million for the rolling stock? That was just a garbage exercise because he knows damn well, Mr Speaker, that the government ran down the rolling stock for ACTION as a prelude to sale. The sale was interfered with, so, oops, we have got bad buses and old buses with metal sticking out of their tyres. That is where the money is going to come from-out of the normal budget to maintain a bus fleet.

This report, Mr Speaker, is titled Adolescents and young adults at risk of not achieving satisfactory education and training outcomes, and I would like to see this as part of a holistic package, because, when we talk about kids and their lack of achievement at school, I will bet you pounds to peanuts that you can chase a lot of it down to some problems in the home. It might stem from poor parentage and the environment in which they live, or peer pressure in their everyday social life. Some kids get bored at secondary school and do not see a future for themselves, so they turn to drugs, alcohol or all sorts of other things. There has to be a holistic approach.

We cannot say that the teaching staff at our schools are not looking after the kids enough. We cannot say that the counsellors are not looking after the kids enough. We can say that there are not enough counsellors. We cannot question the commitment of our teaching staff and the counsellors to do a great job for the kids. Teaching, Mr Speaker, is not a job; it is a vocation. We need to celebrate the fact that we still have people going into the teaching profession as a vocation. These sorts of reports point up to us the things confronting that vocation in looking after our kids, and I commend the committee for coming up with this report.

I still think, Mr Speaker, about the kids at risk socially. What about the kids at risk outside the school area? Let us put such reports into one volume. We keep talking about a holistic approach to looking after young people. We talk about a holistic approach to the drug problem and a holistic approach to community safety, but what do we do about it? We cut off a piece of it and we look into it deeply, but then we have solutions which do not fit necessarily into the jigsaw of a holistic solution. If I have any complaint about this report, Mr Speaker, it is that the terms of reference were not wide enough to have a more holistic approach to kids at risk.

Mr Speaker, I did not finish secondary school, so I might have been considered at that time to be a young person at risk of not achieving satisfactory education and training outcomes, but I certainly was not at risk at home and I certainly was not at risk

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