Page 4184 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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difficult for families to manage to have one child at one school and one child at another.
This minister keeps talking in general terms about focusing investment on early childhood education. Is he seriously saying that the only places we are going to invest in early childhood education are in these four or five schools? Is he seriously saying that? Is he seriously saying that every other primary school that rolls out services to children in preschool and kindergarten and grade 1 and grade 2 will not be focusing on early childhood education?
He has created this myth that the government will be making a substantial investment in early childhood education. But every school is already doing that and we want you to invest in early childhood education in every primary school that you have control of. Do not just pick out special ones. If you want to have integrated programs, do it in the schools where the parents choose to send their children to school. Let us not have them moving all around the place if they do not choose to do so.
Some people choose to send their children out of area for a variety of reasons. But let us not have them moving there by giving them the impression that if they do not choose to send their children to these new P-2 schools, they are in some way not doing the right thing by their children and not taking the best possible option for their children. This is the myth. You are actually creating a two-class system. You have a P-2 school where all the best in early childhood education will be rolled out, and you have the others. Is that the way to run an equitable education system in the ACT?
This whole process of Towards 2020 has been a catastrophe—the formulation of the original proposal, the handling of the consultation and the shonkiest, dodgiest figures that this community has ever been subjected to. The minister said that he would fix these rubbery figures and then absolutely point blank refused to do so.
Then, major policy changes are included in the final announcement. The policy changes may or may not be good. We will get to the problems with the super school model. I know that some people say my new best friend Mr Clive Haggar is a great advocate of the super school model, and it was his suggestion two or three years ago that there should be a super school in Kambah. That seems to have been overlooked in this whole process of putting together the original proposal. They were in such a hurry to put this together before the budget that they forgot to mention Mr Haggar’s favourite proposal. They had to bring it in later on so that they could keep the education union just a little bit quiet on this process. Mr Haggar was quite right to ask on radio this morning why that proposal was not in the original proposal brought out in June. Presumably the only reason is that this mob was too incompetent to put it in in the first place.
There is an illogicality to the Stanhope government’s approach to super schools. The government says it will put new infrastructure into established areas. How illogical is it, Mr Speaker, to tear down a school because it is too small or tear down two or three schools because they are too small and replace them with a bigger school? They are going to replace west Belconnen with a bigger school. They are going to replace Kambah with a bigger school. Presumably these are schools that cannot be filled unless they close more and more schools.
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