Page 3563 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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where he lives. He had one child there whom he was still trying to get into the non-government system. It was a decision based on desperation to get out of the government system. He was not motivated by any particular religious interest. He initially decided to go to the government school. It was not because of financial capacity, either, because he could not afford to go to a private school or he only moved across because he was paying more for the product. But he had had first-hand experience of the non-government system, was extremely unhappy and did not want to put the rest of his children through that process.
Whilst these assessments may not be scientific, they clearly send the message to me as an elected representative that there is a degree of dissatisfaction amongst many people in Canberra that is driving them into the non-government schools or to the private schools. I have no problem with that; if that is what people want to choose, that is terrific. But I think it is very wrong. I campaigned on this in 2004: there has to be a good public system available offering a level of education, a standard of facility and arrangements within the curricula, the disciplines that apply in those institutions and the commitments from their teaching staff that are directly competitive with the private sector and the non-government schools.
I do not accept that people who want to go down that road should expect to get second-rate performance or to be told that they really have to scrimp and save just to get out of it because they worry about the quality of their children’s education. I heard Ms Gallagher when she was in the job talk about how we have the greatest system in on planet; I think Singapore was the only place that is supposed to be any better. If that is so much the case, it begs the question as to why the government is struggling to maintain its market share in the area of education provision.
Until the minister gets serious about this and starts doing the definitive research and approaches it in a transparent way, the concerns that are being expressed by Mrs Dunne, Mr Smyth and me in relation to the education system will continue to be raised because they are fundamental to any significant reforms or outlays that the territory government wants to embark on.
We have one critical point of the jigsaw here. We are being told what is happening but no-one is giving us persuasive evidence as to the cause. If you have got a business and you are losing customers, your solution is not to shut down the place, get rid of stock and throw people out. Education is a service where there is competition, choice and very high expectations, because most of us treat our children’s education as one of the most important things we can commit to. It therefore rests on the government to convince us that they are doing the best possible job.
I am not saying that there is deliberate intent not to, but I think you have to take stock of yourselves and ask, “Why do we have this problem?” If you hide behind shifting demographics, tell me why they are queuing up in droves to get into the Catholic system and the private school system in Canberra. Something does not add up here, and I think it falls on the minister to get to the bottom of that and convince this Assembly that he has a logical basis for the policies that he has been presenting since he was made a minister.
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