Page 1628 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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building the future fund was standard expenditure masquerading as new policy. It is largely standard expenditure—but not all. There are a fair number of very good, quite good and somewhat good initiatives which I applaud and which any government, Liberal included, would be proud to have delivered—or promised anyway.
If we went outside now and asked people whether they would like to fund their retirement by profiting from drug addiction or civilian-targeted anti-personnel weapons, what do you think 99.9 per cent of people would say? I am pretty confident that there are not that many psychopaths out there. You do not need a report to tell you that tobacco shares and investments in cluster bombs are immoral. The government should have sold them the day it learned about them, so do it now.
I would like to thank Trevor Cobbold from Save our Schools for his ongoing work and research into the impact of the ACT government’s education policy on our students and our teachers. Many of their planned initiatives are a welcome move towards improving outcomes for our students, particularly through funding for students with a disability and students at risk. To quote Clive Haggar from the Australian Education Union, “The budget augments the ACT government’s small, positive steps taken during 2007 … to rectify the damage done particularly to public secondary schools by the 2006-2007 Budget.” Remember the functional review.
It always worries me when a minister cites thousands or millions of dollars of expenditure when asked a question about education, as though spending money is, of itself, of benefit. This is not using the budget as a tool to implement a program of improvement in delivery and content of education services—or, if it is, it is not telling us about it.
The emphasis on early childhood education is certainly a coherent plan of government. But there is a lack of strategic direction for other parts of the learning process, with high schools remaining the standout example. Spruced up and new schools, even if state of the art, do not guarantee good teaching.
And more and more is being asked of teachers. Mr Assistant Speaker Gentleman, let me tell you from experience that there is no more exhausting work than teaching—this job has nothing on it—except maybe nursing. To teach well, teachers need the respect of the community, lots of professional support, chances to learn as well as to teach, and time out from face-to-face teaching to do all the work that teachers have to do.
New school buildings and state-of-the-art IT present new challenges to teachers, who have to be constantly adapting to new technologies, often without access to the professional development that used to keep teachers abreast of the demands of their profession. I want to see more money to help our teachers do their jobs as well as they can—more money to help them deal with the range of behaviours of students, which will always be problematic regardless of how many computers are in the classroom.
Providing this well-targeted funding is great but, as Mr Cobbold states, there is no real increase in recurrent funding. Recurrent funding for government schools in 2008-09 will increase by 4.6 per cent in dollar terms. The consumer price index for Canberra is
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