Page 2804 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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illogical nature of what we are facing here. It does not make sense to do it in this way. That is what the community is finding very hard to come to grips with.
Mr Speaker, in the dissenting report from the committee’s main report, Mr Pratt and I put on the table a number of grave concerns. One of them concerned a document we received as a committee about allegations of activity at a Canberra school. It concerned alleged bullying and sexual assault in that school. I just want to look at the action taken in a Sydney primary school this week over some internet porn that had been downloaded to a young student’s mobile phone. What the school did, when it came to their attention, was to act very swiftly. This is in stark contrast to what has happened here in the ACT. The child was counselled. The children that had been shown—
Mr Stanhope: You are a disgrace.
MR SMYTH: You are the disgrace here, Chief Minister.
Mr Stanhope: You know the circumstances of this.
MR SMYTH: The children who had been shown the images on the phone were counselled and a letter went home to all of the parents of that grade saying, “We are aware of this incident, we take this very seriously and we feel a responsibility to do something.”
That happened in a Sydney primary school. The child was in fifth grade. I ask members to parallel that to what happened here in a Canberra high school, where nothing was sent home. If something like head lice occurred in a class, the entire class gets a letter sent home saying that there was an incident of head lice; would you please take appropriate action? But we have been given documents, which will remain sealed—I do not even think the minister has got a copy of the document because the committee sealed it. That document will now stay sealed. It will not be acted upon, even though the individual who wrote it out of great concern felt that not enough had been done to protect the community from incidents like this in the future. That is a great shame.
I just want to parallel the difference between what happened in Sydney. It was immediate. It was effective. It said that we have got a duty of care to take this as wide as we feel we need to so that we protect the innocents that are under our care, as opposed to what appears to have happened in the ACT, which is very little. That might be the reason that so many people choose to leave the ACT government system—because they do not feel their children are getting the care that they deserve from this system.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (3.19 am): Mr Speaker, it is necessary to reinforce the comments made by my colleagues about what the government has done with this T2020 proposal. I have visited a number of school communities, and have found them in shock about what awaits them. This is because they have never been properly consulted. There was never any feedback. There was never any warning. It has been quite a sobering experience for me and I think all of my colleagues here on this side. I think it has also been a sobering experience for a number of the government MLAs.
Mr Speaker, Towards 2020—I said this yesterday and I will say it again—is not a vision. It is not a panacea for the future. It is not a 20-year look forward on how this government
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