Page 3129 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 16 September 2015
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On 27 March the cage was removed, by 1 April an independent investigation was commissioned and sometime between 27 March and 1 April the principal of the school in question was removed. That is as much as the public have been advised. But who made the decision to remove the principal before any inquiry was started, and on what basis? What was the evidence and was the decision to remove the principal taken while the terms of reference were being framed? Was the principal questioned during this period and was anyone else, including other teachers, being questioned while the terms of reference were being determined? Who wrote the terms of reference and what was the basis for the scope of the inquiry?
The fact it took 10 days is troubling. We on this side of the chamber, as indeed members of the public and the media, could have drafted something much shorter than that. The basis of the inquiry surely was: who authorised it, why, when and how? It took 10 days to get the terms of reference, five months to investigate it—and at the end of it we got less than an accurate report. For the whole five months that this sorry saga dragged on the minister regrettably and incessantly made matters worse by firstly promising a quick inquiry then promising one deadline after another, then variations on the reason for the delay, including a correction written into the estimates Hansard evidence of the public servants being examined.
When that failed to stop the questions, blame was pushed onto the directorate. Repeatedly, we were told that this was, after all, an HR inquiry and so nothing could be divulged. Funny; we thought it was about why a boy was put into a purpose-built cage. The answers fooled no-one—not the parents and certainly not the Canberra Times, whose editorial on 29 August was headed “Blame game will fool no one”. Even the ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Association were critical of the lack of action and transparency. They suggested that the whole school community in the ACT knew the primary school in question, so the minister’s refusal to speak to anyone and especially to the school for fear of identifying it was misguided.
As the Canberra Times editorial said:
The parents deserve better than this unsatisfactory affair engineered by a minister whose lack of judgment and probity continues to cause her difficulties.
On 8 September the somewhat contracted report was presented. That brought another round of outrage, not only from this side of the chamber but throughout the community, much of it from Ms Burch’s own electorate. Among a series of letters to the editor, one from Greenway suggested Ms Burch follow the Simon Corbell option. Another, from Calwell, suggested in defence of the principal:
Having found their scapegoat, Joy Burch and her education director have sloped their shoulders. They shouldn’t have. The buck doesn’t stop with the principal; it stops with them.
Does suggesting the buck does not stop with the principal but rather the director-general and/or the minister provide an insight into why this inquiry took over five months and only investigated one person—or, more correctly, only found one person, the principal, guilty? What if the directorate staff had been found guilty? What implication would that have had for the minister or the director-general? Where should the buck stop?
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