Page 2187 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 15 August 2006
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confidence; he would make information available; he would be more honest, more open, more accountable. Well, that has fallen over well and truly by now.
This has been an extraordinary committee because, not only did we have the first in-camera hearing for an ACT estimates committee, but maybe this was the first in-camera hearing ever for an estimates committee in this country. We should have had a second. The committee received a confidential submission about certain sexually inappropriate behaviour in an ACT government school. The gentleman who wrote the submission asked that it be kept confidential but he implored us to do something about it. When we had the questioning in the committee, the minister got very nervous and there was a thought that we might have the hearing in camera. Out of respect for that school and the students involved, we said, “Well, let us talk about it later.” Mr Pratt and I fought very hard for the matter to be heard in camera but that did not happen. There is a wishy-washy recommendation from the committee that the education committee have a watching brief for 12 months. How you can have a watching brief on inappropriate sexual behaviour is beyond me. I think it is negligence.
In our dissenting report we call for the education minister to table what has happened, for the education minister to table what has been done from the education perspective, and for the police minister to tell us where the investigation has gone or has not gone. As we say in our dissenting report, if there were an outbreak of head lice at your kid’s school there would be a note sent home the next day. Everybody knows that to stop the spread of head lice you get a note that is sent home, you wash your child’s hair and you do all the appropriate things to stop the spread of something that affects their health. Yet we have received a quite a detailed document with a list of allegations, numbers involved, what happened and where it happened. We have decided to keep the document confidential so it will not be in the papers, but it will now sit as a confidential document that will not see the light of day. We have not been given an answer to what happened to the young women affected and what action has been taken, and that, members, is a shame.
Errors, omissions, mistakes, contradictions, assertions and wild hopes lead Mr Pratt and me to doubt the ability of the Treasurer to deliver or justify any of his reforms, and that is why the estimates committee has not passed a recommendation to support the 2006-07 budget. In the dissenting report, which I hope people take time to read, we have tried to do the best we can. Most of it is material that was knocked off by the committee and we were able to cobble it together last night. I apologise if there are spelling errors, formatting errors or typos, but it was a late night. We look at what happened, we ask that the review be tabled and we ask that more detail be tabled for all the proposals. We think just to say “trust us; we have an idea; we think it will cost x million dollars” is unacceptable in this day and age.
The old AAS versus GFS applies here. Because of the Stanhope-modified GFS and depending on which number you want to take, today the ACT either had a $176 million surplus, a $122 million deficit or a $91 million deficit. There has to be some consistency here and there has to be consistency with the other states. We make recommendations in respect of that. We look at the inability or refusal of ministers to detail proposals and, indeed, ministers stopping public servants answering questions that they could have answered.
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