Page 568 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 5 March 2008
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It is interesting to reflect on the fact that through 2007 the government—when I talk about the government, I talk about both the ministers and the bureaucrats—really do not seem to have learnt anything about the process. The lack of preparation for school closures at the end of 2006 was a huge sore point, and the transition for children at the beginning of 2007 was, in many cases, very badly handled. We are still reaping the results of that today. But the really sad thing is that in talking to parents it is clear that it did not get any better the second time around. The minister for education promised a seamless transition.
I will give some examples of that seamless transition. For the children who moved from Cook to Aranda, so it would not be too difficult, their parents decided that they would actually start negotiations well in advance in terms 3 and 4 last year. They started having meetings with senior officials in the department of education and the senior leadership at Aranda primary school. A whole lot of arrangements were made and agreed upon about how to handle this influx of children from a school that would be closed and how to deal with that sensitively. That was all very good, this was all agreed to, but what happened? Through no fault of anyone, the person principally responsible for the arrangements at Aranda primary school—the principal—resigned over the Christmas period and went into retirement. There was no handover. No-one told these people ahead of time that this was going to happen, and there was no handling of these children coming from Cook.
They arrived on the first day of school to find that most of the things that had been agreed upon had not been put in place. Unbeknownst to any of them, the new principal had come in and made some policy changes about which the Cook parents had not been alerted because they were not on the school mailing distribution list. They were the parents of new students and they were not told. All of the students turned up and found that they were going to composite classes. The parents were not prepared for that and they did not have the opportunity to prepare their children for the fact that they would be going into composite classes.
The parents from Cook say to me, “We had electronic whiteboards in every classroom in our school and my children have gone to a school where that is not the case. We had shade covering over our playground and our children are now going to a place where that is not the case, and we have to say to our children that they are better off under the Stanhope government’s Towards 2020 proposal.” The children in Cook know that they are not. The parents in Cook and Flynn know that their children are not better off because of Towards 2020.
Gender and climate change
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (6.05): Following my theme for International Women’s Day, I want to talk today about gender and climate change. I think everyone knows—certainly Mr Stanhope does—that climate change is an equity as well as an environmental issue. We know that the poor and those with least influence at national and global levels will feel the strongest impacts. For instance, the Pacific Islands are already feeling the effects, but their only hope of influencing the global agenda and the post-Kyoto arrangements is through the influence of larger powers. This is where
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