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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Tuesday, 30 March 2004) . . Page.. 1345 ..

MS DUNDAS: I said that I would like to move the amendment for the government and non-government sectors. At the moment I have moved it for the non-government sector, as this is the non-government section of the bill. I missed the opportunity to move the amendment to the government section of the bill and I will be seeking the Assembly’s support to recommit that clause so I can move the amendment in respect of the government sector.

MR SPEAKER: Okay. The question is that Ms Dundas’s amendment No 5 be agreed to.

MR PRATT (8.45): Mr Speaker I move my amendment No 2 to Ms Dundas’s amendment No 5 [see schedule 5 at page 1383]. I simply seek to tighten Ms Dundas’s amendment. I think her amendment is leading in the right direction but, rather than leaving it open for a school to decide whether or not a student who has been expelled for more than seven days needs to undertake counselling, I think any student who has spent that amount of time out of school needs to be counselled. I think that the school and the department should be making sure that a student who has been either randomly seven days or seven days in sequence out of the system ought to be subject to a departmentally-oriented counselling process rather than perhaps another arrangement which might be a little bit too casual. I think we should lock that in as a principle.

MS GALLAGHER (Minister for Education, Youth and Family Services, Minister for Women and Minister for Industrial Relations) (8.46): The government will not be supporting Mr Pratt’s amendment but will be supporting Ms Dundas’s amendment. I think Mr Pratt has again possibly unintentionally failed to notice the subtleties in Ms Dundas’s amendment, which do not require the department of education to ensure that the child is given reasonable opportunity to attend counselling. As these are students in non-government schools, the responsibility for a child’s expulsion or suspension is with that school. Again, Ms Dundas’s amendment reflects that. I think it is probably a mere oversight by Mr Pratt.

Again, there are differences in respect of schools being able to force students to undertake counselling, particularly if their parents are not happy that they do so once they are suspended. The words are that the director must ensure that “the child is given reasonable opportunity”. I think that goes as far as school communities can go to make sure that someone has the opportunity to attend counselling. I would be very surprised if schools can force students that they have suspended to attend counselling.

MS TUCKER (8.47): Ms Dundas’s amendment, which echoes an amendment to an earlier clause which she will move later on, ensures that students suspended for seven days or more in a month can get access to counselling. This is particularly important for students attending non-government schools because they can so much more easily be suspended or excluded.

I was thinking that at a future time an amendment should be moved that would require non-government schools to accept all students in their area, in recognition of the very high level of government funding that they receive. We would need to think through more thoroughly the aspects of the system we would then be setting up. But I think it is worth making the point that, as almost all schools in Australia are essentially government-funded, the time might well come when we need to do away with many of

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