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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1262 ..

removal of the term “government” to allow the minister to grant scholarships, et cetera, to students of all schools, not just government schools.

Mr Speaker, the Canberra Liberals believe that these amendments will fill the gaps left open by the present form of the Education Bill 2003. In addition, as I was saying earlier, they will level the playing field in terms of benefits given to government schools that are not given to non-government schools. They will also make the Department of Education, Youth and Family Services more accountable for the state of the education system in the ACT. That means the entire education system—the government and non-government sectors.

The Liberal opposition believes, as we have said a number of times, that the ACT minister for education must be the minister for education across all sectors of the ACT, for all teachers and all students. Therefore, we believe it is imperative that the Education Bill enshrine principles that reflect that essential need.

We believe that this bill is reasonably sound. It is a development of the bill that the previous government commenced. Despite some hiccups last year with what appeared to be some social engineering of that draft bill which we at that time thought entirely unacceptable, the bill as it now stands will not damage education. It will benefit education and it will be acceptable. However, it is not creative and it does not push the current boundaries. Opportunities are being missed here to further develop education, to lock into place principles of excellence that go to the heart of effective and accountable education. That is why I will be moving amendments today to take this bill to a higher level of excellence. We believe that the government has fallen well short of enshrining very important principles relative to the core of education capability—our principals and teachers, who are the drivers of ACT education.

I implore the government and I implore the crossbenchers to ensure today that this bill enhances our teaching capability. I implore members of this place to support our amendments enshrining principles of teacher and principal responsibility, of standards of performance and leadership, of benchmarks embracing pastoral care of our students and the inculcation of values which are all, surely, as important as enshrining principles of academic excellence.

The Liberal opposition stands for an education system, embracing the best of both the government and non-government school sectors, which is diverse and which offers Canberra families choice. We stand for a system that provides for an effective, safe and academically excellent government sector which is caring of its students and promotes character development and a government sector which imparts values of respect and tolerance, particularly respect for teachers. Clearly, it is our belief that, while the ACT education system does not suffer to the same degree the problems seen in other jurisdictions, these problems do exist here and there is no excuse for that. A lot can be done to make the ACT education system that much better, to put a firewall in our system against the cancer that exists in other jurisdictions. The Education Bill should enshrine the principles underpinning the system that we want, that the community wants and that families are calling for.

It goes without saying that the Liberal opposition requires that the standards that we seek to insert into the government schools sector of this bill will conform with standards in the

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