Page 3546 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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He has seen that it is a problem that if we continue this decline, especially in the high schools, the ACT government will become a minority provider of high schools. This is a matter of considerable concern to me and to the community. I was actually criticised by the Chief Minister last year for saying this, but what will happen if we continue the current trend of discouraging or not encouraging people to send their children to government high schools is that we will soon be in a situation where only the poor and the attractively badly behaved will remain in the government high school system, to the detriment of education for all in the ACT.
There will not be competition between the sectors. There will come a point where the government high school system becomes so marginal that there will be not just a one percentage point a year departure but a radical departure, especially from the government high school system. We ask ourselves why this is. I have my own pet theories, Mr Barr has his own theories, and I know that Mulcahy has his own theories on this. Most members in this place have a theory about why people choose the non-government sector over the government sector. Some of us choose it because they would like their children to have a religious education, based either on a particular religious persuasion or a general Christian education.
In the past I have sent my children to Catholic schools, although not exclusively for that reason. There are other reasons. There are a lot of people who choose to send their children to Catholic schools, not because they are Catholic and they want their child to have a Catholic education, but because they see that it provides something different, something better and something that they will choose to pay for.
Cost is an interesting element in this debate. As I have said, there has been considerable discussion, this year in particular, about the decline in government school enrolments to the benefit of non-government schools. They are leaving the government schools and going to the non-government schools. The last published ABS figures show a 20-year gradation that reveals that in the period 1984 to 2004, non-government schools increased from 32 per cent of total enrolments to 41 per cent of total enrolments. At the same time, of course, the reciprocal decline was that in 1984, 68 per cent of children attended ACT government schools. In 2004 it was a mere 59 per cent. We have seen stagnation in the 2005-06 figures in terms of proportions, but we are still, as we know, seeing fewer people attending school.
We have to ask ourselves why a parent who chooses to send their child to a parochial, low fee paying school is making a significant outlay for something that could be provided around the corner by the ACT government for much less. This is the question that was asked by Chris Uhlmann in one of his pieces about education when he was writing for the Canberra Times. On Monday, 5 June, just before the budget, he wrote, “To put this in brutal economic terms, you have to worry about a free product that is losing market share to one that is quite expensive.”
We have to ask ourselves: if we do have such a fantastic education system—and the statistics show that that is the case—why do we have this decline in enrolments? Why are people prepared to pay one or two or three or, at the top end, tens of thousands of dollars every year to send their children to a non-government school when we as a community should be providing a service of comparable value? Why is it that the
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