Page 868 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 2 April 2008
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MR STANHOPE: I remember Mrs Dunne standing in this place—
Mr Smyth: Your memory loss is still affecting you.
MR STANHOPE: I remember Mrs Dunne standing in this place as shadow minister for education and imploring Mr Smyth and Mr Pratt to leave the issue alone because of the damage that they were doing to a number of individuals in a government high school. And what was the purpose of the attacks by Mr Pratt and Mr Smyth? It was a personal agenda. It was an agenda designed to create a political point at the expense—at the enormous expense—of a young person involved in incidents at one of our high schools. It was absolutely outrageous—grubby, outrageous politics.
MR SMYTH: Chief Minister, if you are the fifth-best education system in the world, why did the ACER report identify significant declines in literacy in the ACT over six years and why is the exodus from your fifth-best system in the world continuing unabated?
MR STANHOPE: It is not continuing unabated. The decline in the move from the public sector to the non-government sector is at its lowest, I understand, for years and certainly lower than it was during any of the years of the previous Liberal government. It is, I think, 0.8 per cent in this last year, two years after a massive reform, Towards 2020.
Whoever thought, claimed or suggested that we could, in two years, turn around the decline or the drift from the government to the non-government sector? We never claimed it; we never suggested it; we never asserted it; and we know it is not possible. We have never claimed, thought, asserted or imagined that you could turn around a 30-year period of continuing decline from government to non-government schools in the ACT in the space of two years. But we are having a go. We are the first government since self-government, now 19 years, to have a serious go.
We have taken the political risk; we have taken the hard decisions; we are investing massively; we are standing behind the system. As important as anything in relation to encouraging community support for the government system is a government, a Chief Minister and ministers that will stand beside the government system and say, “This is our system. This is our system of first choice. This is the system that we will continue to invest in and that we will invest in massively.”
We took the decisions. They were hard decisions; they were politically problematic, as you all know. We took the risk because it is so important. It is so important that we maintain our edge and seek to produce the best outcomes possible in the public education system. We are succeeding. In the space of two years we have slowed the drain. We have not overturned it; we have not overcome it; but we are turning it around. The results this year are a significant achievement by this government in terms of declining enrolments.
It is interesting, again, that the question today was focused entirely on the government sector. Why would not an opposition that is so blatantly aligned with the
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