Page 988 - Week 04 - Thursday, 7 May 2020
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video
school arrangement based? What were the assessed risk factors? Why were the acceptable risk factors able to be developed for staff at these schools but could not be applied at all?
The ACT is unique in using this hub school arrangement. As we come to the end of week 2 of term 2, from the experiences of families and teachers it is abundantly clear, from the hurried and sudden news drop we saw this morning, that it was always a flawed model, an experiment that every parent, student and teacher is paying a price for. No wonder every other state and territory in Australia steered well clear of it.
The host of unknowns I outlined earlier in relation to the hub school model are no clearer now than when the plan was first announced. We still have parents confused about the registration process, clearly demonstrated by the huge numbers of students turning up at their regular school or their nearest hub school without a registration. We still have ongoing issues with transport to and from hub schools and to and from before and after school care. We still have no satisfactory answer as to how students with individualised learning plans are being supported. We still have no answer as to why hub schools are preferable to opening up all local schools, given the greater mixing of different groups, making contact tracing near impossible in the unlikely event that there is an outbreak. We still have no acknowledgement of the additional and sustained burden on parents, students and teachers. We still have no transparency on why this decision was made in the first place.
On 9 April I wrote to the minister, asking on what advice the hub school arrangements had been made. On 6 May, yesterday, the minister responded. Her answer is baffling at best and condescending at worst. The letter states:
While the advice of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee and chief medical officers is informative, the government remains independently accountable.
Informative? Is that the net worth of the collective years of expert and professional advice to government? Merely a source of information? Independently accountable? We can all wonder: accountable to whom? If it is to the parents, the students and the teachers, this government is not listening.
The letter goes on to say that the government accepts the health advice that schools are safe but that the government has to consider matters such as “practicalities of administering school education in the current environment”. Let us be clear here. At no time have health professionals suggested that our schools are unsafe. If they need to balance the “practicalities of administering school education in the current environment”, perhaps this government should have listened to the medical advice from the beginning and not shut down our schools to face-to-face teaching in the first place.
If the AHPPC advice is merely “informative”, when you add it to the same advice provided by the commonwealth Chief Medical Officer, the Australian Medical Association and the ACT’s own Chief Health Officer, you have to wonder why all these experts and their collective years of knowledge have been swept aside.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . . Video