Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 9 Hansard (22 August) . . Page.. 3137 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

The reporting of numbers is simplistic. One could test the fitness of many children and manage to achieve nothing more than lowering their self-esteem. How does the notion of fitness fit with health, particularly mental health? Is this proposal consistent with the health promoting schools framework? Did the government look at these questions at all? If so, I would like to see the analysis. It is certainly not reflected adequately in this tender document, and stakeholders were certainly not consulted.

Questions of the fitness and health of children are complex, sensitive and closely connected to family life. Any serious attempt to address these issues has to be informed by a broad understanding of all these aspects.

In the draft agreement between DECS and the successful contractor there are these four lines. Interestingly, this is only in the draft agreement. This is not in the request for tender, but we do have in the draft agreement four lines out of these many, many pages that say:

the contractor will be required to consult with schools regarding students with disabilities and other special needs.

There is no definition of what special needs are. I continue:

The contractor will be required to demonstrate sensitivity to the needs of all students participating in the program, to avoid any embarrassment or humiliation.

This is a tokenistic acknowledgment of the fact that there should be a broader, holistic approach to this matter, and that there is a broader mental health perspective that should be integrated into the process as well. How this important aspect of the program is to be evaluated is not specified. There are no performance measures relating to it in the documents. It is not mentioned at all, as I said, in the request for tender document.

I refer again to the "More than the sum of its parts" document:

With the introduction of an outputs-based budgeting and management system, the higher level impacts of ACT government have not been given enough attention. It is however, the higher level impacts that tell us most about quality of life, and are generally of more interest to the community as a whole. Government officials recognise that the higher level outcomes have been underdeveloped as an area of analysis and review, and in fact it was in part this recognition which led the ACT Chief Minister's Department to support the quality of life project.

This approach requires a move away from a reliance on the current mechanistic, engineering notions of assessment and the presumption that everything can be specified, measured and objectively proven. It also means allowing space (and time) for the unstated; finding ways of assessing quality which can accommodate those more indefinable, intangible aspects which are intuitively felt but difficult to demonstrate objectively.

Why is it that the government has not taken these very important principles into account, despite the fact that this really important work has already been done? I have to give the government credit for supporting work like More than the sum of its parts, and other work they have done on service purchasing. That is why it is so disappointing to see a document like this request for tender. It is as if none of that work ever occurred. If

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . .