Page 1490 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 14 May 2014
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It does so in many ways across our schools and the Canberra Institute of Technology. Education opens up individuals’ opportunities for our citizens and provides a basis for business and economic growth. Education contributes by ensuring that Canberrans have the skills and the knowledge to gain meaningful and dignified work and to ensure that we continue to be seen as part of a smart and innovative city.
The ACT has the best-performing education system in the country, being first or equal first in all of the 20 NAPLAN domains and ranking amongst the top 10 in international performance. This is a direct result of the investment of this government over the last decade in supporting our high-quality education. It continues to be supported by recent announcements, including parental engagement, the work of our Teacher Quality Institute and the announcement of testing new recruits, ensuring that we have the best of the best teachers for our schools.
We are supporting the productivity of our workforce by investing in our early education and care sector through scholarships for certificate III and degrees. We have seen a 94 per cent increase in long-day places since coming into office. We now have over 9,500, and more places will come online this year.
We have put over $11 million into infrastructure for early childhood care and child care over the last few years. Some childcare expansions are at Campbell cottage, Appletree House, Gungahlin centres, and, of course, the expansion of the site for child care at Taylor school, up to 65 places. The list goes on. I can wax lyrical on the investment of this government through the Education and Training Directorate. It is a timely opportunity to compare that significant investment that sees us ranking in the top jurisdictions of investment in education and the results that that brings to what we saw in last night’s federal budget, which has been described as a mean budget.
So let us be very clear about some of what we will see. The commonwealth has abandoned a number of national agreements as agreed by COAG. The national education reform, the commonwealth has backed away from the previous 4.7 per cent plus enrolments growth funding commitment and reduced it to CPI plus enrolments from 2018, as I understand.
The national partnership on Indigenous childhood development will see the child and family centres grant terminate from July of this year. That is worth over $1 million to the ACT, and that funding supports the West Belconnen Child and Family Centre. That is a direct impact of the decisions taken last night by the Liberal Party.
The budget sees the funding promised for the centre for quality teaching and learning at the University of Canberra gone. Of the $26 million that was committed, $25 million is yet to be paid. That is $25 million taken away from our community, taken away from the University of Canberra.
It has been articulated here that Tuggeranong gets $26 million for a department to stay in Tuggeranong. Look, I welcome that. I am from the Tuggeranong Valley and I am very pleased to see that that department will stay there. But when you compare that with what has been taken out of this community, it is no great prize to have business as usual for a federal department to stay in Tuggeranong.
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