Page 3182 - Week 10 - Thursday, 15 August 2013
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say they do not want a review into ACTEW, because they know exactly what it will uncover—the failure of the shareholders, of Andrew Barr, Katy Gallagher and, no doubt, others before them from the Labor government.
We will continue to litigate the case. We will continue to fight on this issue. We will continue to dig into the issues surrounding the dam. It is difficult, with the limited resources and the obfuscation we see from the government and the deliberate attempts to muddy the waters, but we will continue to dig and we will continue to advocate for that proper audit of ACTEW.
I commend the work that my colleagues have done in digging into some of the problems that we have seen here. I think that it would be a prudent thing for the government to do, on behalf of their shareholders, on behalf of the people that they hold the shares for, to say, “Yes, this hasn’t gone well; we’ll cop it and we’ll have a review so that the same mistakes we made in the office building, the same mistakes we made in the jail, the same mistakes that we made on the dam, don’t get simply repeated in the light rail project.”
Proposed expenditure agreed to.
Proposed expenditure—Part 1.20—Canberra Institute of Technology—$66,054,000 (net cost of outputs) and $3,757,000 (capital injection), totalling $69,811,000.
MR DOSZPOT (Molonglo) (8.02): The Canberra Institute of Technology enjoys a unique place in Canberra’s education sector. Unlike other states, CIT is the only publicly-owned technical and further education provider of vocational education to the ACT and region. It has in recent times, and by its own admission, experienced some turbulence over a short period of time. It had to stare down the prospect of a merger with the University of Canberra. It has watched changes to TAFE in adjoining states following the national partnership agreement on skills reform driven by the commonwealth government. It has experienced some difficulties in maintaining international student numbers in light of the adverse experiences of some international students interstate and some, frankly, dodgy RTOs in other states delivering less than acceptable training.
CIT has managed to come through all those issues reasonably well. International student levels have remained reasonably consistent and it has achieved a cash surplus, something that the Bradley review warned it would need to improve. However, on other fronts there are still issues to contend with. I speak as someone who has enormous respect for the work that has been done by the CIT, by its teachers, by its management and for the students that have come through the CIT. As a former member of the CIT Advisory Council for a number of years, I have a very long and deep respect for the CIT.
But there is an issue that just will not go away and I was hoping it would have come to fruition by now. That issue is bullying. Bullying is becoming an endemic cancer in our society. It is disappointing to realise that it is present not just in some of our schools but it continues through the tertiary education levels. This is quite soul destroying to a lot of people. I do not intend to dwell on this appalling chapter in the
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