Page 2547 - Week 08 - Thursday, 30 August 2007
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This minister has failed on this, along with all his predecessors, who are trying to sweep this under the carpet and say, “We have signed up to the national safe schools guidelines et cetera.” We have seen here horrendous figures: 12 sexual assaults in our schools in the last financial year. Don’t you think we are ever going to learn anything? Are we going to do anything about this? Are we going to come here year after year and see these figures churned out? When is the minister going to take responsibility for it? When are we going to change the culture in our schools? What is he going to do to assist in changing the culture in schools so that teachers are not terrified by kids at school, their peers are not terrified by the behaviour of children at school and schools are not locked down? A high school in my electorate was locked down twice this year because of the behaviour of quite junior children in the school.
We have to have an end to this. This minister here is the person who really needs to take responsibility. He is the person with whom the buck stops. He is quite keen to talk about how he is improving the status of government schooling by spending a whole lot of money. But some of the things that you are going to have to do to improve the status of schooling in the ACT do not necessarily require bricks and mortar; they require a cultural change, and this minister is not prepared to do it.
We have seen again during the estimates process a complete reluctance on the part of a Labor minister to make any real commitment to non-government schooling, and we actually—at last—had some honesty. Over the years we have had successive ministers for education saying, “We will do something about it,” especially when it gets close to election time. The Chief Minister makes some vague undertakings that they will fix the problem after the election.
I commend this minister because at least he was honest when he said that he had no intention of increasing the level of funding to the non-government schools to anything like the level of funding that people who attend non-government schools in New South Wales would achieve. He may consider getting to a stage where we might provide national average funding. But that is a long way off.
The people who send their children to non-government schools in the ACT had better beware: the Labor Party is out for them. It spends its time talking about how it wants to look after all children, but when it really comes to the crunch the minister’s performance in estimates should have been an eye opener for any parent who sends their children to non-government schools. That, added to the attempts at various ALP conferences over the last few years to actually get into the ALP platform an undertaking not to provide any government funding to non-government schools, should make parents who send their children to non-government schools very afraid of this government and all of its companions in the states and territories. While there is a Labor government in this town, there will never be funding justice for people who send their children to non-government schools.
Let us not go through this charade of saying: “We are from the Liberal Party; we are elitist and we only care about children who go to non-government schools.” Let us talk about the real facts. The real facts are that in the ACT something like 80 per cent of children at some time in their career go to a non-government school. When you talk to the parents and look at the figures—these are the figures—you will see that there
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