Page 1938 - Week 06 - Thursday, 9 June 2016
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We support every cent of the funding for our children in our public schools who require extra learning support. We will maintain this funding, but we will also provide support to those children in the non-government school system who are being left behind.
Currently, the government is relying on potential federal funding in this sector, but it has acknowledged the need, as was reflected in the Shaddock review. I will quote from a recommendation:
The Panel believes that the issue of ‘perceived disparity’ remains an unnecessary, ongoing, contentious and sometimes divisive one in parts of the ACT community. The Panel urges the ACT Government and the non-government sector to work together to promote greater school and community understanding of the regulations of the needs-based SRS model, in regard to additional funding for students with a disability.
That is what we will do, Madam Speaker. As a starting point, the Canberra Liberals will provide $5 million a year for a total of $17.5 million in support of children with special needs in our non-government schools. This will help meet the individual learning needs of those children and will go some way to assist in the implementation of the recommendations of the Shaddock review across all Canberra schools. We will work closely again with the Catholic and independent schools across the ACT to implement this funding.
Madam Speaker, this is just the beginning of our extra support for the education system, and we can provide that because we will not be spending $1.65 billion on a tram over the next 20 years.
And we will fix our health system. We have all of the elements to give Canberra the world’s best health system. We have excellent staff, a medical teaching school, a world-class medical research facility, universities that train nurses and much, much more. But, as we know, under Labor we now have the longest waiting times for emergency departments in Australia. We have got the most expensive health costs in Australia. We have a toxic workplace culture, and we have a critical shortage of hospital beds. With a growing and an ageing population and health expenditure consuming about a third of the budget, we must make fixing our health system a core non-negotiable priority.
We need to make the system bigger. It needs to be smarter and it needs to deliver better services. This means more hospital beds in more locations, it means a better culture for our staff, it means a better experience for patients and it means a greater focus on prevention and early intervention. Under a Hanson Liberal government we will restore the 60 overnight hospital beds that have been cut by the Labor Party at the planned University of Canberra Hospital.
How our city is planned, how our local environment is preserved and how our city is connected is also fundamental to our way of life. We are privileged to live in a city so beautiful. It is a beautiful bush capital. But in recent years what we have seen is Civic and our town centres degenerate and our suburban environment spoiled in many places.
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