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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1330 ..

value-less, or are shells, or do not impart the values or the principles that are important for all of our children, not just those in the public sector. To seek to divide the sector, the community and parents and children on the basis of whether or not one sector, in this case the public sector, is somehow deficient as a result of this nebulous notion of an absence of values within the public sector really is, as I say, nothing short of shameful. Shameful.

MS DUNDAS (6.14): I address the amendment that Mr Pratt has moved seeking to make the study of different religions compulsory within our schools. I will not be supporting the amendment. I support the study of religions in our schools, and the different religions that are part of our community, that are part of our world, but I do not think we should be prescribing curriculum within this piece of legislation. It is a decision that is better left up to the education department and, more specifically, individual schools. Nowhere in this legislation do we prescribe that fractions need to be taught to students in year 5. Nowhere do we prescribe that students must learn business management skills. Nowhere do we prescribe that students must study Shakespeare. These are things for the curriculum and for the curriculum development system.

This Assembly is not made up of education experts. We need to be quite careful in what it is we are prescribing in this legislation. We all have opinions about what it is children in the community should learn and how this should be taught to them. It is all based on our own educational experiences. So we should not be tying this into legislation. It should be something that is part of the curriculum development process and something that schools have a say in. I will not be supporting this particular amendment.

MS TUCKER (6.16): The Greens will also be opposing this amendment. I am not prepared to support legislation that requires all government schools to offer studies in comparative religion. I trust our schools and education system enough to make such decisions autonomously. I am also not of the view that the purpose of this bill is to set curriculum in regard to government schools. I suggest that we wait for the curriculum development project inside the department to bear some fruit before we start weighing in. However, I might be inclined to support such a provision for non-government religious schools, as some contextualising of the value base on which they are built, it could be argued, would be a benefit for their students. Nonetheless, that is not the proposal in front of us.

MR PRATT (6.17): I rise to respond to those interesting comments. Firstly, minister, we will not stop trying to improve education, so you are wasting your breath if you are asking me to stop, as you just did. Minister, I will not stop holding you accountable for the way you exercise your ministry in education, so don’t undignify yourself by trying to be bullying in this place. Let’s stick to the debate. As for the Chief Minister, he, as he always does, seeks to misrepresent our position. What we have said here today—

MR SPEAKER: Order! Withdraw that.

MR PRATT: Okay, I withdraw that. The Chief Minister has misrepresented our position, as he always does, and what we have said—

Mr Hargreaves: Point of order, Mr Speaker. I think saying that somebody has misrepresented something is unparliamentary.

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