Page 3611 - Week 08 - Friday, 24 August 2012
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
in Canberra, who would all lose and lose in the order of millions of dollars—when, Dr Bourke, were you planning to tell them? Why did you think it was preferable for families in Canberra to log onto the News Ltd site to see how hard their school would be hit? The figures are all there. They are all there, Dr Bourke. Everyone saw them, except you.
Why did you so fulsomely embrace Gonski only a week or so ago without any reference to the fact that a Gonski remodelling of funding support just will not work for Canberra? The union knew that. The government schools knew that. But they had blind faith that that would be fixed, but it was not, until all the talk, all the issues that were brought up by the independent schools and by the opposition, both at the local level and at the federal level. How it will be funded is perhaps another mystery. (Second speaking period taken.)
Indeed, apart from anything else, what will this do to the $27 million payback expected by the Education and Training Directorate because of Labor’s financial mismanagement, Dr Bourke? And how do teachers feel? They took years and a strike to get their last enterprise bargaining agreement. What chance have they got under Labor next time?
While Dr Bourke and others have been lauding the praises of Gonski and suggesting it was the answer to every school’s funding dilemma and we should all get on board now, the reality is that, if implemented without adaptation, Gonski would slash money from 26 out of 27 Catholic schools, 73 out of 84 government schools, Dr Bourke, and 13 out of 16 independent schools in the ACT, and some $23 million would be taken out of the ACT education system.
Dr Bourke’s words to the estimates committee, that the implementation of the Gonski review recommendations would have wide ramifications for education funding in the ACT in the future, were, in retrospect, prophetic—maybe that was “pathetic”. But I do not think he actually realised the full extent of that statement. Since that statement was made I hope some more work has been done to better understand what those ramifications will be. The changes to funding, as they currently stand, will impact Canberra families enormously, and I cannot begin to imagine how schools in the ACT will cope if any of those changes come to pass.
We already know that Canberra families, whether they have children in the public or the non-government education sector, face enormous costs pressures. Housing, electricity, petrol, food, have all gone up and despite the claims and the advertising hype, not every family has been compensated for the negative and costly impacts of the carbon tax here in Canberra. And if this Labor government gets another four years, anyone with any interest in education in Canberra should be afraid.
MS HUNTER (Ginninderra—Parliamentary Leader, ACT Greens) (3.12): As the ACT Greens’ spokesperson for education and training, I note what a big year it has been for the directorate, principals, teachers and students—a year of managing several national partnerships, preparing for the end of some and the beginning of others; a year where we saw the new enterprise agreement with teachers that will ensure they are properly reimbursed; a year of implementing the new quality frameworks and
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video