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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1226 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

place? The answer to that is no, and that I think is an issue that this Assembly needs to consider further. There is simply a line in the annual report of the department of education which shows how much money went to the non-government sector. We do not know how well it was spent, we do not know how it was spent, we do not even know if it was spent, although presumably it is. These are the sorts of issues that Ms Connors has appropriately outlined.

This is not simply a debate about public versus private, but if you want to make it one, that is fine. This is about accountability for public funds and it is about making sure that public funds are spent in a way that our community considers to be both appropriate and focuses on its needs. That is the philosophy behind the inquiry. The reason the government commissioned the inquiry is that we recognised, first of all, you can never spend enough money on education; but, secondly, because you can never spend enough, you have to make sure that what you do spend is spent well to meet your objectives of delivering a high quality education system.

Mr Speaker, I thought some of the points that Ms Connors raised in her report were interesting. I was particularly interested to see the results of her detailed investigation into the interest subsidy scheme. I was very interested to see that the overwhelming majority of those funds went to the three most wealthy private schools in the ACT-an enormous amount of money, tens of millions of dollars of public funds, being used to subsidise elite facilities in elite non-government schools.

Mrs Burke: It's all about choice.

MR CORBELL: I do not have a problem with choice but I do have a problem with some elite schools that charge high fees, that pick and choose who they accept into their system, using public funds to further enhance their elite status. I do have a problem with that and that I think is unacceptable, and Ms Connor's inquiry points that out.

If as a community we decide that it is okay to do that, that is fine. That is the purpose of the report. I will not agree with such a decision but at least there will have been a discussion. The reality is that this subsidy has been hidden. There has been no accountability in terms of where this money has been going and no public understanding of the fact that tens of millions of dollars have gone to the three most elite non-government schools in the ACT.

How can that be justified? How can this government, how can any government, justify public funds being used to support, say, the development of a dramatic art facility in the richest non-government school in the ACT-

Ms Gallagher: Airconditioning under seats.

MR CORBELL: -with airconditioning under the seats, when public schools struggle even to get their gymnasium upgraded? That sort of issue is centred around equity and need, and that is what this report is all about

Mr Speaker, Ms Connors has identified a very wide range of issues and she is right to also focus on the issue of the relationship between Commonwealth funding and territory funding for schooling. It is unfortunate that the federal model for funding schooling now

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