Page 836 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 6 April 2022

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(e) not all staff had access to the technology they needed to do their work, especially casual teachers and learning support assistants;

(f) many teachers were unable to attend professional learning due to staffing shortages;

(g) Worksafe is currently investigating an ACT school over safety and teacher number concerns; and

(h) these are long standing, systemic issues due to ACT Government decisions; and

(3) this Assembly calls on the ACT Government to:

(a) stop the funding cuts to ACT public schools;

(b) determine and publish the exact number of teachers needed in the ACT, and the areas in which they are required;

(d) accelerate the infrastructure program to provide adequate learning space and resources for all teachers, relief teachers and support staff.

This motion is, in many ways, is a simple one. It is to get this government to do what it should always have done—that is, to provide the right amount of resources to our frontline teachers. I think we saw the evidence today, in the quotes from the union about what has happened at Calwell School, that that simply is not happening.

Members, if you go to the latest Productivity Commission report on government services and have a look at table 4A.14, you will see that, in the reporting period of that ROGS report, this government has cut real expenditure per FTE student in public schools by 3.3 per cent during the period 2010-11 to 2019-20. That is not some random period. That is the period that is articulated in that table in the latest ROGS report. In that 10-year period, real funding, FTE, per student in public schools, has been cut by this ACT government.

Incidentally, in that same period, funding to schools has increased by 42 per cent from the federal coalition government. They are the facts. So unless Ms Berry or one of the other members here is going to say that the Productivity Commission is lying, then it is there in black and white that they have cut funding.

Ms Berry: I have a point of order. The member of the opposition has accused the government of lying. That is unparliamentary and he should withdraw.

MR HANSON: On the point of order, what I said specifically was that these are the facts in black and white and that, unless the minister or someone else is going to accuse the Productivity Commission of lying, then those facts stand. I have not said that she has lied; I said that the only way that she could prove that those facts were unreal would be to accuse the Productivity Commission of lying.

MR ACTING SPEAKER: Thank you, Mr Hanson. There is no point of order.

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