Page 768 - Week 03 - Tuesday, 1 April 2008
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Let us remember that, for five of those six years, Jon Stanhope and his Labor government and three failed ministers have been in charge—Mr Corbell, Ms Gallagher and now the current education minister. Let me read another dot point:
There were no significant differences found between the percentage of ACT students above or below the OECD average for reading literacy, contrasting to a significant increase of 4 per cent of Australian students performing below the OECD average.
Again, we hold the position. Congratulations, minister. But the words “significant decline” really do worry me. When we talk about the minister and the way that he trots out a $300 million spending program, as if to say, “Wow, aren’t we wonderful,” the only answer seems to be, “We’ve spent lots of money, therefore we must be doing this better.” I do not think the community believes that.
The minister says, “I’ve sat through more meetings; I’ll make a bet.” I hope he goes and sees Mr Stefaniak after the MPI so that they can compare notes, because, from memory, Mr Stefaniak is the only minister to get a tick from all parties, including the education union, when we dropped the class sizes in the 2000 budget. I remember the headline: “The most significant education result in the history of self-government”. There have been no headlines since.
The problem relates to the confidence that people have in the public system. Confidence in the public education system comes from the management of that system. We have only to look at the debacle outlined in the Canberra Times this morning, in the minister’s answers in question time and, indeed, in his press release. Let us look at the time line for this. I quote from this morning’s newspaper:
A spokesman for ACT Education Minister Andrew Barr said no decision had been made on which option would be taken and departmental representatives would meet the school board members on Thursday.
So on Sunday night, as the Canberra Times went to bed, no decision had been made. But suddenly there is a press release issued this morning headed “Communities to be consulted on school transitions”. Now, suddenly, the ACT government has “no plans to relocate students of Lyons primary school”. You have only to ask: what happened between last night when the Canberra Times closed off and early this morning when the minister made this decision?
How does this come to light? It comes to light because the community feels gypped by the consultation process that this government constantly goes through. They felt gypped in 2006. The minister says, “I sat and listened to a lot of people.” But it did not change a great deal, because decisions had already been made and numbers had already been factored in to budgets. That is not consultation.
We see it all the time with this government. What about Minister Gallagher’s smoking legislation? “I’ve made a decision; it will be implemented soon and there’s been no consultation.” What about Griffith library? “No consultation because we knew what you would say; we didn’t care, we’ll close it anyway.” Of course, there was the
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