Page 1357 - Week 05 - Thursday, 31 May 2007
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MRS DUNNE: This is how the whole matter could have been avoided. At no stage did Mr Barr express concern that there was, at the very best, a misapprehension or a misconnection about what the facts were.
It is not sufficient when you actually come in here and are confronted with a censure to bluff your way through. At no stage did he say that he had made a mistake and that as a result of that mistake he was having the matter reinvestigated. Mr Barr could have resolved the issue. He could have got to a situation where, simply by acting in a parliamentary fashion, we did not spend, as Mr Stanhope said, an hour and a half or an hour and 20 minutes on this debate this morning.
On the subject of some of the issues raised by the Chief Minister this morning—I put this on the record again—Mr Stanhope and the Labor Party have the capacity to fall into very cliched positions on issues. When it comes to education, it is where the cliche machine runs hard and fast. The Chief Minister this morning was saying that the opposition is not concerned about government education. He said, “Mrs Dunne does not care about government education.” I think he used the words “Mrs Dunne has no emotional attachment”—or words to that effect—“to government education”.
I would like to put it on the record again, and some day the members of the Labor Party will learn this, that the two Dunne children who are currently in school attend, very happily and to the great satisfaction of my husband and I, ACT government schools. At the moment we would not have it any other way. We have been regular users of the ACT government school system. We have not used them exclusively. As many people in the ACT do, we pick the school that suits our children and currently the schools that suit our children are ACT government schools. Probably for half their schooling life our children have attended ACT government schools.
When you are talking about five children, that is a substantial number of years. The ACT opposition is absolutely and utterly committed to great education in the ACT irrespective of the sector. We do not pick favourites and we do not pick enemies. We want both systems to prosper. That is why I have constantly spoken about my concerns about the failure of this government to address the drift to the non-government system, especially in the high schools.
Mr Barr, by his own admission, says that unless we do something the ACT government high school system will become the system of last resort for children, and that would be a disgrace.
But as yet Mr Barr as the minister for education and Mr Corbell and Ms Gallagher as previous ministers for education—indeed, no-one on that side of the chamber and I do not think anyone in this chamber—can tell us definitively why people are moving from one sector to the other. We all have our theories, but we do not know why and until we know why we cannot address the problem and Mr Barr will not find out why.
Debate interrupted.
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