Page 4253 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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Mr Hanson: The right to wag—isn’t that four?
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER (Mr Hargreaves): Order! This is not an arithmetic quiz.
MS HUNTER: I forgot his name for a moment, sorry. This debate is actually about a right not to be discriminated against. Shopkeepers are not the truant police, and to suggest that we should make them truant police is certainly ill-conceived. We all know that children are obliged to attend school until they are 17 years of age. That is perfectly consistent with the protection afforded to them against discrimination on the basis of their age.
There is one last one that I think that Mr Corbell may have just picked up on before. It is a very good one, I think, to go along with the other examples that I have given.
Mr Hanson: “The right to wag” is only a three word statement?
MS HUNTER: A three word slogan, Mr Hanson, but maybe you will catch up. By the time I am finished, I am sure you will have caught up. I will give you another example.
We sit here in Canberra right on the border with New South Wales. Queanbeyan is just across the border. School holidays between New South Wales and the ACT do not always match up. I can tell you that right now. So for those kids who might be legitimately on their school holidays in Queanbeyan, what are you saying? Are you saying that they cannot come across the border into the ACT, go to the shops and get a pizza and some soft drink? Will they be refused service? Again, that is just another example of how unworkable this bill is.
The Greens will not support the bill. We would support a constructive debate about how best to engage with young people who do fall through the cracks in the education system and how best to help them get the best education outcomes possible. That is really what I think you are attempting to do. I think what you really want to do is to be working out how to engage and keep those young people voluntarily and happily engaged in their education.
We will never support a mechanism that creates a very loose discretion, an open slather discrimination, against young people, or anyone else in our community for that matter.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (8:00): Mr Speaker, never is a very long time and I think we might have to make sure Ms Hunter keeps to this. We have this very high-minded approach. Ms Hunter likes to remind us just how long she worked in the community sector and that is well and good. But after all this time working in the community sector have we actually heard from Ms Hunter or anyone else in the Greens a concrete proposal to deal with the issue? Here we had a principal who had a problem and he wanted to deal with it—
Ms Hunter: There were experts who—
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