Page 3072 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 17 October 2007
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affairs. In the context of Anti-Poverty Week, we need to understand that the policies of the federal government in respect of refugees are about keeping these people in poverty. The Stanhope government is about lifting people out of that poverty. I urge the Assembly to support the motion.
Motion agreed to.
Education—senior secondary system
Debate resumed.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.55): Mr Speaker, senior secondary colleges are an important issue, and it is a shame that Ms Porter has put forward such a paltry and insubstantial motion to address this very important issue. I will be asking the Clerk to circulate an amendment to the motion as soon as he is able to. In the meantime, I will dwell on the motion as it currently stands.
This is not quite a self-congratulatory motion; it is a sort of “gonna” motion that has come from Ms Porter. The Stanhope government is under considerable pressure in the area of education because of its lack of performance, and that was exemplified today in question time. I wonder how many times Ms Porter can ask the same question and Mr Barr can answer it about how much money they have spent on bricks and mortar. Mr Barr thinks that I am terrified of this. A principled and well thought out education policy—the sort that he will see from the Liberal Party, in our own good time—will, in fact, be much more than the mere bricks-and-mortar approach that we have had from Andrew Barr.
Let us go back to the “good money after bad” comment that Mr Barr thinks that I am so frightened of and which Mr Barr insists on verbalising on a regular basis. Mr Stefaniak and I were taking bets as to how long it would take in the answer to a particular question before Mr Barr managed to say “good money after bad”, and then we were taking bets on how many times he would say it. You have to have more arrows in your quiver than that one if you are actually going to run a reasonable critique of educational policy.
What has always been said—and I said it to Mr Barr at the War Memorial on the day that he announced the policy—is that I do not have a problem with the capital injection of funds into education. I said to him personally at the War Memorial at the post-budget function that I did not have a problem with the capital injection, as long as we knew what we were doing with it and why. I have said this consistently. Until we know why children are leaving the ACT government education system, we cannot make a proper investment. Unless we know why people are leaving, much of the investment will be just putting good money after bad.
When you look at the education budget over the last two years, the criticisms that have arisen about it—apart from the horrendous issue of school closures—have been about cutting back the number of teachers. If we are going to have an effective teaching and learning environment, which Mr Barr says that he is producing, why are we cutting back on teachers? The most effective way of improving your teaching and
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