Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .

Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1265 ..

The bill did not get finalised in the last Assembly and there has obviously been further consultation in relation to it. Its genesis, however, is terribly important. It is to have one bill that covers our whole education system, because whoever is minister for education is minister for all education in the ACT: government education, non-government education and even those who home school, and there is provision for that in this bill.

The bill replaces the Schools Authority Act 1976. I think that act needed revising. Times have certainly moved on since we had the Schools Authority, which finished effectively when we got self-government. Of course the Education Act goes all the way back to 1937 and has its genesis in the New South Wales act of the nineteenth century; so there are some fairly elderly acts there in need of a major re-write, and this bill a culmination of that.

It will be interesting to see how the bill actually pans out in practice. There were a lot of very valid concerns raised by a number of people in the whole consultation process. There were valid worries that I recall the department had in relation to some of the issues raised by various stakeholders, and there are some grave difficulties in terms of exactly how those issues have been resolved.

Any act of parliament is a living document and there may well be need from time to time for this document, despite the fact that it has been probably close on five years from go to whoa, to be amended from time to time as we see exactly how these new provisions work out.

I was quickly flipping through the document prior to speaking on it. The vexed question of voluntary contributions, which was a very difficult issue, I see is now dealt with in the bill itself. But that alone is a very vexed issue. Government education is free in the territory, and it always has been. It has been since we have had our own Schools Authority Act 1976, which was when the ACT effectively—legally—took over from what applied before. That was the New South Wales department of education—the government system I went through here.

Even then education was free and meant to be free. But I can recall paying, I think in 1967, a $16 voluntary contribution—I don’t know how voluntary it was—for books and things like that at Narrabundah school. The fact that schools need a contribution to assist them is a vexed issue. I think it is right and proper that people do make a contribution if they can.

I am not sure what the figures are right now in terms of voluntary contributions, but certainly in the late 1990s it was anything up to about $4 million of basically the total budget right across the territory, a not insignificant amount. And there are some vexed questions in relation to that and in relation to subject levies. It is interesting to see in clause 27 that that has actually been effectively codified by putting it into legislation. We will wait to see whether there are any problems arising from that down the track.

That is just an example, and I raise it because I think it is a good example of a very vexed issue and a very real issue in terms of somewhat competing principles. They do not have to be competing but they often are seen to be competing in terms of government schooling.

Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .