Page 675 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 22 February 2012
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MR HANSON (Molonglo) (5.52): I will speak only briefly. I was not intending to speak for long. But as I was listening to the debate put forward and the points made by Mr Seselja and Mr Doszpot, it did bring to focus: what do this government believe in, genuinely believe in, and can you trust them? What we are seeing is a pattern of behaviour where they quite clearly believe one thing and would have us fooled, I think, that they believe another. I think that the point that Mr Seselja just raised about the policy that was voted on behind closed doors, that was put forward and was agreed to by the left faction, including current ministers, that the growth of private education is facilitating the fragmentation of Australia’s children along ethnic, cultural and, particularly, religious lines, flies in the face of the rant that we heard from Dr Bourke. And I found that quite offensive.
The language that he used in the assertion he was making that somehow this motion was deliberately trying to have that effect, I found, quite offensive. And if you go back and review what he was saying, I think that it was quite appalling that this minister could come in and make that assertion about Mr Doszpot and indeed Mr Seselja. You could note that they are both from an ethnic background. I think that for Dr Bourke to sort of suggest that somehow this was an attempt to be divisive, and it is the Liberal Party that are being divisive about these matters, is disgraceful, and I certainly will be reviewing the Hansard to see what it was exactly that Dr Bourke insinuated that the Liberal Party are trying to do when it comes to education and trying to pit one group against another. I think it is abhorrent that he would suggest that such a thing is occurring.
But we know that this is an election year. My warning to the residents of the ACT is: you simply do not know what this government believes when it comes to things like education.
As we saw just this week, this is a government who railed against other initiatives like drug driving. We saw Minister Hargreaves back in 2008 saying: “I am not going to be in the position of punishing ACT drug users for their addiction. The government attitude to that is clear.” This is a government that spent five years calling that legislation redneck, attacking the Liberal Party for the temerity to say that this was a road safety issue, and then during an election year we see Simon Corbell, who voted against that legislation on every occasion, as did every member of the government, come out and say it is now important to support that legislation.
What we are seeing is a deep-seated belief that comes from Labor that they are trying to present a facade that is something else. And what we are seeing worse than that is their attempt to characterise the Liberal Party as something else. There is no question that Mr Doszpot, Mr Seselja and the rest of this party support both public and independent schools. But we want to make sure that as a result of the Gonski review the independent school system does not come under threat. We have seen what the Labor Party wants to do behind closed doors, and we know that the Greens’ policy is that school funding should be placed on an equitable footing by reversing the excessive increase in commonwealth funding to non-government schools in recent years.
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