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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 4 Hansard (2 April) . . Page.. 1227 ..

MR CORBELL (continuing):

delivers more dollars to the richer schools. How can we justify that on any good public policy basis? It is immoral. There is no other word for it-it is immoral. But, unfortunately, it is the approach that those opposite advocate and will seek to protect at all costs.

Funding issues must be addressed at the national level. Ms Connors outlines a range of issues that the territory government can advocate and put forward in the national forums where we have national representation, including obviously at the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs.

Mr Speaker, the Connors inquiry is a worthwhile piece of work. It will greatly value and inform the decisions this government makes in the expenditure of the remaining money set aside from the Liberals free school bus bribe scheme, and it will put in place a well-informed structure as we move forward on education and funding issues in the ACT. The government obviously will not be supporting this motion.

MR STEFANIAK (12.11): Mr Speaker, whilst I must confess I have not read the report word by word, I have looked at the salient details. I must say that I would have to agree with Mr Pratt that the Assembly should express disappointment in relation to this inquiry. For starters, I do not think the inquiry tells us anything we do not already know and, therefore, I would tend to agree with Mr Pratt that the inquiry was probably very much a waste of time and money-the $250,000, which I note has blown out by about 10 per cent. I wonder how many other things this government has done are blowing out by about that amount?

Mr Cornwell: It would put some airconditioning under the seats, wouldn't it?

MR STEFANIAK: Yes, it would put something under the seats-maybe a bomb or something to get them moving on a few things.

I also note that Mr Corbell said that Mr Pratt had missed the point that the report was about funding. I hardly think that is the case at all. Several points in Mr Pratt's motion quite clearly deal with funding, including paragraph (3), which states:

In fact, it is probably more than that, Mr Pratt, because I think that funding has been available since the free school bus scheme was abandoned by this government. It went to the election on that and it abandoned the scheme-fair enough, that was an election promise. As a result of that, it had extra money to spend on education. We have not actually seen that yet.

I would think it must be fairly obvious but we still have this-

Mr Corbell: Yes you have-$19 million was spent in the last budget, Bill.

MR STEFANIAK: What about the $7.4 million, Mr Corbell?

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