Page 3545 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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This is an important motion relating to the funding of education and educational facilities in the ACT. The ACT has a proud record in education. When we compare ourselves with other states and territories in Australia, we do remarkably well.
Much of the public debate in the last six months or so has centred on the provision of educational facilities. Much of that debate, as we all know, has centred on the current government’s desire to close 39 schools to add to the school that they closed last year. While that is an important matter of public policy, it is not something that I propose to concentrate on today because there are other aspects of the Towards 2020 proposal that have been somewhat overshadowed in the debate about whether or not we should close 39 schools to add to the school that the government has already closed and make it a nice round 40, and I have raised them in the past.
The proposals by the minister that may eventuate in the imposition of new structures in ACT schooling are untested to a large extent in Australia. Certainly we have not tested the opinion of the people of the ACT in this regard. The consultation documents, which are published by a whole lot of people other than the ACT government, attest to that. There is very little reference in many of the submissions that have come in on Towards 2020 about some of the radical restructurings, the redesign of education proposed in here. But I do not particularly want to dwell on that either.
One of the underpinning principles that Mr Barr spoke about at length in this place in the budget context and in his press conference to announce Towards 2020 was that there was a significant decline in the number of children attending government schools. There are two reasons for that. One is a problem of demographics. In a sense we cannot do much about that, although I have made a significant contribution to reversing the demographic decline in the age cohort five to 19. I hope that others will do their part as well. Mr Seselja is making a significant contribution.
One of those is simply that the big bulge that we used to have in that school age group is now getting older and that cohort is getting smaller. There is a smaller school age population than there was 10 or 20 years ago. There is no denying that that is a fact of life. Without significant immigration of people with school age children, we will not address that because, even if we have our children, they will not be school age children for some years to come.
The other aspect of this issue is the drift away from a reliance on government schooling. An increasing proportion of people are choosing to send their children to non-government schools. Members of the opposition have been raising this for a number of years. Mr Pratt, when he was the shadow minister for education, raised it consistently with his opposite numbers, Mr Corbell and Ms Gallagher. I have raised it with Ms Gallagher. Consistently Mr Corbell and Ms Gallagher said that it was not really a problem; there was nothing very much they could do about it and they were not really concerned about it. To the credit of this minister, he has recognised that it is a problem. He is the first minister in the Stanhope government to recognise it as such, and he should be congratulated on that.
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