Page 3778 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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They simply have not bothered to explain. That is because this government does not respect the people and the organisations that underpin preschool education across the ACT who have called for the process to be slowed down, because it just does not understand the situation that preschool committees are now in, or because, in fact, it has no explanation for implementing the plan so irresponsibly and destructively other than that it wants to show its hairy chest. It is a pity the government could not have picked a similarly hairy-chested sector to do it to.
Of course, in the pattern of other debates over this so-called proposal I imagine we will hear some schoolboy debating ripostes—that the legislation requires a six-month consultation and we all agreed to that and that the Liberal Party was much worse in the past. This is a debate that goes on in the Assembly, but that debate represents something much more serious out in the real world. It is facile and damning to use the statutory minimum consultation period, finally negotiated against government resistance when the Education Act was first passed in 2004, as the rationale for pushing the process so fast.
The government might claim it is still making the hard decisions and being courageous, but it still has not shown the courage to really explain why it is doing these things in the manner that it is. Indeed, the whole consultation process is farcical. Extending the time frame for people to make submissions, for example, and then using that extension to ensure that fewer submissions are publicly available until the final decisions are done and dusted is another contemptible device. This is a reflection not just of the education minister and the Chief Minister; it is a reflection of every Labor MLA in this place.
Then we can look at the preschool component of the 2020 plan. I question how the viability of preschools has been determined, and I have yet to see a good social analysis of the costs and benefits of bringing the surviving preschools more concretely into the primary school sphere. The Greens are advocates of evidence-based policy. We have gone to the Towards 2020 website and trawled through the research documents the ACT government offers in support of its Towards 2020 proposal.
There is a range of documents which advocate the importance of early childhood education, but none that look particularly at the value of integrated preschools as opposed to the very strong, well-established stand-alone model we have in Canberra. There is significant material on the importance of the early childhood years. There are also interesting papers on the provision of seamless services across these early years. However, I could not find any evidence that is specific to the decision to close 22 preschools and to make the remainder a part of early childhood, primary or even P to 10 schools. This does not, in fact, mean that that is the wrong thing to do. The point I am making here is that there has been no evidence presented on the government site to justify the decision.
While I am pleased that the Canberra Pre-School Society and, I imagine, many of the preschools themselves are prepared to go along with and even support this plan, the value of this shift is not obvious. In places such as Macarthur, the Causeway and Reid, which do not have primary schools, and Hall and Tharwa, where it is proposed to shut down the primary schools, there might be very strong arguments not to do it. In other
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