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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2003 Week 10 Hansard (25 September) . . Page.. 3727 ..

MS GALLAGHER (continuing):

mother raises the child, need male role models in their lives. I am a single parent, and I choose my role models based on the people, not the gender. It is too simplistic to say that they need male role models. They need good role models. They do not necessarily need to be male, and they do not necessarily need to be female.

In relation to the schools, we are doing a number of things and several things are being done nationally. Locally, we advertise through our recruitment campaigns for teachers, and target men on our web site. We have young male teachers who are enjoying their work in ACT government schools.

It is a little harder in relation to employment in child care. We do not employ childcare workers-the centres do that. With the shortage of childcare workers at the moment, I think they would take anyone. I do not think gender is an issue in child care, but there are very low numbers of men choosing to study early childhood education in the ACT.

I do not think an advertising campaign is going to help, because the issues about child care are the nature of the work, the wages and the career path. Unless you solve those, you are not going to attract men into the jobs. We are doing that. We are supporting the wages claim by the LHMU in the Industrial Relations Commission. We are looking at ways to retain staff in child care through streamlining traineeships and opportunities at CIT.

In areas the ACT government has control of, we are looking at addressing the work force issues which exist for childcare workers, and to get potential childcare workers interested in coming into the industry. This is not targeted at men, though. It is targeted at childcare workers, although it may be men who choose a career in child care-and that will be fine. We take the view that you deal with the work force issues, rather than saying that we must solve the problem of gender imbalance. There are more serious problems in respect of work force issues in child care and early childhood than the fact that there are simply not enough blokes in it.

Mrs Burke: You sound a bit anti-men, Ms Gallagher!

MS GALLAGHER: I am not anti-men, Mrs Burke! I was concerned at a number of other comments made by Mrs Burke and Mr Pratt. It is almost as if a view exists that children in the ACT are not getting adequate provision of educational services through child care, or through the schools-that something is missing; that they are not getting the best model because there are not enough blokes in the system.

I dispute that. As I said before, I have worked in the child-care industry. Our children get extremely good service here in our child-care centres. The centres are of an extremely high standard. That is based on the professionalism of the staff, not their gender. The fact is that they are providing services to our children which I would argue are the best in the country.

That is seen in our schools as well. When it comes to recruitment to positions within government schools, where we have control over the positions, people are appointed in line with the Public Sector Management Act. Again, they are appointed on merit, not on gender.

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