Page 560 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 19 March 2014
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However, I do welcome the opportunity to speak on this motion that Mr Gentleman has brought forward. Given the range of informative and positive things one could debate in this chamber about the state of education across Australia and in the ACT, I find it interesting that the Labor Party has chosen to focus on the issue of the ACT government’s actions in relation to signing up to Gonski last year. I say “interesting” because it was hardly a time of outstanding leadership by the ACT government. In short, they had signed up to a financial arrangement that had more “to be advised” notations to it than substance.
There were so many unknowns to the agreement—an agreement, I might remind the Assembly, that was rushed into by this government ahead of the rest of Australia. The Chief Minister enthusiastically signed up to the first offer on the table, unlike other states that hung out and that, history has shown, were able to negotiate a better deal. In her defence, the Chief Minister explained away her haste by saying that we had to accept that Canberra would always get less than the other jurisdictions in relative per capita terms because, she claimed, our schools were well resourced anyway.
For much of last year we on this side of the chamber sought repeatedly to get details from the ACT government about what it was they had actually signed up to, whether Catholic and non-government schools would be better or worse off and what was the total that the ACT had agreed to. There was good reason why we and the Catholic and non-government school sectors were nervous. It is well known that within the Greens, the Labor left and the Education Union that supports the ACT Labor government there is an ideological dislike for certain sections of the school community. We know that at one Labor conference there was a Labor left motion involving current ACT ministers that referred to non-government schools as “divisive in the community”.
Over the period of the Gonski review process the ACT had three education ministers. Minister Bourke was very focused on assuring us and the ACT education community that he and the ACT government were committed to the essence of Gonski. What that meant we never really did find out from Dr Bourke. We also had a Chief Minister who, in response to one of the questions from this side of the chamber on the principles underpinning the schools resource standard, said, “The base amount in non-government schools would be discounted by the parents’ capacity to pay non-government school fees.”
This was an issue about which there was a lot of concern. The ACT opposition moved a motion that in part called on the Chief Minister to:
(a) release the details of the funding offer or offers provided to ACT schools;
(b) advise the Assembly what financial and any other implications acceptance of the offer will have for all schools in the ACT;
(c) table the financial modeling that was required to determine the ACT Government’s position, including the cost implications for the ACT Government in the forward years;
(d) outline where the funding across the forward estimates will come from;
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