Page 3659 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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Government, on page 179, shows what we get - retention rates to Year 12 in the ACT are 85 per cent while the average across Australia is 47.95 per cent. Our retention rates are 177 per cent of the national average and we spend 120 per cent of the national average.
Mr Speaker, to those of us on this side of the house it looks like we are getting a pretty good bargain. We may be spending a bit more than the national average, but what we are getting for our dollars, what we are getting in terms of educational quality, is far in excess of the national average. If you want to simplify it, we have an above average retention rate that is more than three times greater than our above average spending.
Whatever way you look at it we get a good deal for what we spend on education. We see an excellent system and want to save it; they see an excellent system and want to tear it down to the national average. Well, averages are not good enough for Canberra.
60 Minutes Program : Amnesty International
MR COLLAERY (Deputy Chief Minister) (4.52), in reply: I am pleased to stand up. I will not dignify some of the comments here with a riposte because they are probably beneath the standard of debate that I see in other parliaments that I visit. The Labor Party is in deep need of some grief counselling. There is a bitterness and an angst, seven, eight, nine months after they were put out of office, which is really something to behold. I thought that my colleague Dr Kinloch spoke from the heart at the commencement of the adjournment debate. I felt that Mr Berry spoke from his bile duct - Bilious Berry. It was most inappropriate and unbecoming in an Assembly that is attempting to get some acknowledgment interstate.
As a Minister with six portfolios who travels a lot, and as a Minister who meets 30 or 40 Ministers every quarter in this country, I can say to you that the overriding message is of sympathy about the way the national press has treated our fledgling governments, both of our governments, because it is not long since the present Leader of the Opposition was complaining to me and others about the way the national press was treating our Assembly. That is why I say, Mr Speaker, that the comments that are put forward occasionally from the Opposition come from way down in the body; they are from some very nether regions. I will not be too explicit but they are very unbecoming. Their behaviour is very opportunistic.
I wanted to speak tonight on another issue. As Chairman of the ACT Parliamentary Group of Amnesty International I want to say a few words for the record to mark the 29th anniversary yesterday of Amnesty International.
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