Page 835 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 2 April 2008
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If we are really going to get to the nub of this, Mr Barr has to start listening to the parents and what they are saying. He has to understand what they are saying about what he has done. I will enlighten Mr Barr. According to his own department, the reasons for moving are, first, quality of education; second, professional standards; third, school culture; and—the most important factor—teacher quality. The inescapable fact about education is that this government gets an F for fail. It has failed the students; it has failed the parents; it has failed the teachers. It has failed in every way.
When we ask—when the community asks, when this Assembly asks—for the true basis for why the government has done what they have done, we will not be given the answer that people deserve. When elected in 2001 and re-elected, the Stanhope government campaigned heavily on open and accountable government. Here they are: “ALP Labor priorities”, “good governance”. “Our agenda is the new emphasis on open, democratic and responsive government.” They have not been open; they have not been democratic; they have not responded to the community in the way that the community deserves and wants. If they want to be, they will release the functional review that has led to this debacle.
In many areas where the functional review has been quoted as the basis for change—where the government releases or uses the small amount of statistics out of the functional review to its own benefit—the government has been proven wrong. On education, it is wrong. The government constantly ignores the community and its wishes and it ignores its own surveys. It ignores the reason this is happening.
Yesterday in the MPI, the minister came down and said, “Mr Smyth, you are wrong when you quote the PISA figures on what is happening to education; it is about all students—all students in the ACT education system.” Fantastic! We finally got the minister to acknowledge that there are other students than those in government schools. He does not want to talk about them; he does not want to fund them. But when there is some blame to be shared, when there is some fault to spread around—when you want to spread it around—the minister for government schools is quite willing to say that the reason that we have had this significant decline—which he fails to mention in his press release, which he fails to give us an answer for—is that non-government schools are included as well.
Give us the breakdown, minister. It is your report. You have got access to it. Ask us what the relative declines in the two sectors are. Come back and give us the full picture. Don’t just rope in somebody who on most occasions you ignore and then come back in here and use them as the excuse for your failure.
What do we want? The minister said this: “What do we want?” What do we want from our education system? I think everybody in this place is united in that we want a system that meets the needs of students, their families—their parents—and the community that they enter into. How do we get it? The government’s simple answer is to build more buildings, to renovate and to do things that should have been done over the last 20 years of self-government. We all acknowledge that there has not always been the money. But that is just a small part of it. The government’s own survey said that it is way down the list of what parents want.
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