Page 3238 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 18 August 2009
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I move:
That the papers be noted.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (3.45): Madam Assistant Speaker, this was essentially a ministerial statement without notice. I would like to just put that on record. I suppose we know why the minister did not want to give us notice, because there were so many falsehoods in what he was trying to convey to the Assembly there. We do not quite know where to start, but no doubt once this is adjourned the shadow education minister will have the opportunity to come back. I think there is actually a reason why he did not want to give us notice that he was going to be in effect making this ministerial statement.
First and foremost, he made some wild claim about the Liberal Party using the Human Rights Act to take over non-government schools. I just say for the record that that is absolute rubbish, without any foundation. This government’s record on non-government education and its attitude to non-government education speak for themselves. No amount of spin by this minister and no amount of pretending to be committed to non-government education in the ACT will change that fact.
The fact is that non-government education in the ACT still suffers from some of the lowest levels of government funding in the country. That is indisputable. We have a situation where, under this government, we have seen these low levels of funding continue year after year, to the extent where parents in non-government schools in the ACT are forced to pay—as a combination, it must be said, of lower relative levels of funding from the commonwealth and low levels of funding from this ACT government—far more in school fees than they would have to if the levels of funding were reasonable.
No amount of spin will change that. When we had this debate prior to the last election, we put forward more money on the table for non-government schools, to recognise some of that funding shortfall, some of that underspend. We had an odd statement from the minister, I think on the day that it was actually announced, in the Canberra Times, when he essentially said, “Anything they spend we are going to spend.”
But it was not in their policy. He tried to give the impression that they were matching what we had announced, and they were not. They were not matching it; they were continuing to deliberately underfund the non-government sector. Fundamentally, it is because there is a deep-seated hostility to non-government education within the ACT Labor Party. We have seen it time and time again with the ACT Labor Party. There is some conflict—I would not say that every member of the ACT Labor Party is hostile to non-government education—but there are large chunks, indeed large chunks of this party room, which are fundamentally hostile to non-government education.
We see it come out from time to time from Mr Barr when he refers to blazer schools and uses the pejorative terms that we saw in the past. He is now going to try and pretend that he is the best friend of non-government schools. I suppose he can see the numbers. He can count; he can see that there is a hell of a lot of voters who send their kids to non-government schools. They do so for a variety of reasons. Some do it for
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