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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1210 ..

MR PRATT (continuing):

unnecessary, a waste of time, a waste of $276,000; that the review itself was a "job for the girls"and that the appointment of a co-convenor of the education lobby group Public Policy was biased from the outset.

The ALP has already blown the ACT's budget and this report takes it a further $276,000 into the red. Is this where the $7.4 million slush fund is going-to fund the government's budget blow-out?

Naturally, all systems can be improved. The previous government had identified many of the necessary improvements. Indeed, the Assembly, the new government and the general public knew what areas required improvement. The Labor Party had-

Ms Gallagher: What are they?

MR PRATT: I will tell you shortly. The Labor Party had, prior to the election, identified its education policy, and has had more than a year to implement it. Upon its election the ALP had an opportunity to hit the ground running as far as the implementation of its policy was concerned.

I should note that I generally agree with many of the problems that Connors has identified in the government sector-but, as earlier noted, these are problems that have been identified historically and, more importantly, there are fundamental areas within the government school sector which are begging solutions, and Connors has not provided these.

I speak, for example, of the vexed issues of teacher retention, school principal overload, teacher management, accountability of teacher and curriculum performance, teacher support in difficult schools, managing disruptive children, the need to redevelop school cultures to better instil values in our children, child obesity and fitness, drugs education in schools, teacher development, bullying and violence, and more. Connors has identified many-but not all-of these areas as needing attention but she has not offered funding or management solutions to where we might focus on some of these areas.

Mr Speaker, we are committed to an effective and robust public school sector. On this side of the house we believe in this strongly because it is the inalienable right of a community to have that service and it is the duty of government to provide that service. It is necessary to aim to have this sector as effective and attractive to our parents as it seems the non-government schooling sector is becoming.

We needed to see Connors drill into the sector and provide concrete solutions for where it can be improved. Instead, Connors has simply waxed lyrical about how important the government sector is. Well, Mr Speaker, we already knew that and so it did not need repeating. There was no apparent need to call for yet another review and delay decisions that would have seen the allocation of the $7.4 million remaining from the $27 million "free school bus"program-that which was going to be placed "inside the school gate".

It is of great concern that such a large amount of money was spent on an inquiry which, as I pointed out earlier, has fundamentally failed to come up with concrete solutions. I shiver at Ms Connors' suggestion in a speech given during a recent press conference

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