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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1328 ..

of the Assembly. I am certainly all for making governments more accountable and making sure that information is available. But there is such a thing as too much information and the information not being considered within the right environment. You will be able to access these documents and I am sure that the Department of Education, as the minister has already said, would not refuse a request to see them. You could have said that they should be tabled, which would be a completely different framework. It is up to members to access that information. I think that this is, again, overly prescriptive and does not take into consideration that these documents are already being accessed.

MR PRATT (6.03): I wish to respond to a couple of those comments. When we enshrine these principles in legislation we are not talking about detailing and drilling down to the operational way of how you collect reports or how you compare school performances. What we are saying is, “Let’s put in legislation; let’s enshrine in the bill, the desire to have this Assembly receive those reports.” It may take us time to put a system in place but don’t tell me or don’t tell the Assembly that we cannot develop in good time a system which goes to the heart of exercising a stronger accountability on our entire school system. Don’t tell me we cannot do that and don’t tell me we cannot build a framework in this legislation which aims for that objective. What we are saying is that this Assembly should have a stronger role to play in assessing how education is performing in the ACT.

Why should we not be seeking to achieve that objective? Why should the government—and the crossbenchers—reject any initiative undertaken to try to improve the accountability of the ACT education system? That is what the community requires: that the education system be more accountable. This bill ought to enshrine a framework that seeks to have reported to the Assembly the performances of the entire system and schools across the board. Whether it takes one, two or three years to put in place a mechanism for how you would carry that out is beside the point. Let’s put the framework in place; let’s seek to achieve those sorts of objectives.

Question put:

That Mr Pratt’s amendments be agreed to.

The Assembly voted—

Question so resolved in the negative.

Amendments negatived.

Clause 24, as amended, agreed to.

Clauses 25 to 27, by leave, taken together and agreed to.

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