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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1222 ..

MS TUCKER (continuing):

People in this place, particularly people of faith, talk at length about Christian values-values that are often stressed in this place. I am not a practising Christian but I have a very strong sense of God and I have a very strong sense of values. I believe that values in education are incredibly important and that by practice you teach values to children. The practice of the society should be to have a high quality education system for everybody, regardless of their capacity to pay.

Mr Pratt talked about diversity and choice. It is a choice if you can pay. Also, in some independent schools it is a choice if you have a particular academic standing. If you do not you will be removed because the school does not want to see its average brought down.

If you look at the children who go to independent schools, you will see that there is a very poor representation of Aboriginal children in the independent school system. (Extension of time granted.) As we are well aware, there are issues within the public system for Aboriginal children. So the argument of choice is based on capacity to pay. Mr Pratt might argue that if all schools were funded in exactly the same way, anyone could go anywhere. That would be true if the enrolment, suspension and exclusion policies were the same, but they obviously are not.

It would be interesting in the debate on the public/private issue to see whether a way could be found to have different models of education equally available to every student in respect of enrolment policies and other fundamental questions. For example, I know that there are some concerns from some schools about how they treat children on issues of sexuality. Some private schools demand the right to have a different standard of treatment for children who are questioning their sexuality because they see that as contradictory to their religious position and so on.

If everything is equal, then an argument can be made, but in my discussions with independent schools I have yet to see any of them willing to embrace that equal opportunity. However, I think the discussion can continue. The O'Connor cooperative school did have a slightly different approach to education. It was totally government-funded. We had the School Without Walls. So we did have diversity within the public system. Unfortunately, the previous Liberal government closed the School Without Walls.

I think there is a lot that we can do to increase educational opportunities. There could be different curriculum approaches within the public system. Some of the independent schools could be brought in under the public umbrella if, as I said, there were equal opportunities in terms of enrolment and exclusion policies, and so on.

I do not think the Connors report deals enough with the question of growing inequity and the kind of positive and progressive approach that we need to address it. The fact that this report does not articulate the value of school-to-community links-with individual kids at a high school level and with families at primary-indicates the narrow approach.

In that context, then, we should not gloss over the unwarranted and unfair cut in funds that was inflicted on the youth sector by this government in the last budget; and the number of strong collaborative projects that have not been sufficiently supported by the

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