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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 10 Hansard (24 September) . . Page.. 3250 ..

MR STEFANIAK (continuing):

It is also a paper circulated for community consultation. We are providing a significant amount of time for that consultation, with comments invited up to 31 October of this year. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, before I go into what the paper actually proposes - and I think some of that actually takes up Ms McRae's point - I would refer her to the foreword by Fran Hinton, the chief executive, which says in paragraph 2:

The Paper's purpose is to seek wide community response on literacy teaching and learning; particularly on the eight strategies to enable government, the school system and individual schools to plan for the future.

Let me read the list of people to whom the paper is being circulated. It is being circulated through schools, school boards, the school board forum, parents and citizens associations, the ACT Council of Parents and Citizens Associations, the community via schools, the Primary Principals Association, the High School Principals Association, the Australian Education Union, the Catholic Education Office, the Association of Independent Schools, the Board of Senior Secondary Studies, the Chair of the Vocational Education and Training Authority, several universities and also the professional literacy associations.

Also included in the foreword, in the fourth paragraph, is this statement:

Included with the Discussion Paper is a tear out response sheet which members of the public may wish to use. Respondents may, however, choose to use a different format and write to the address on the response sheet. Alternatively they may wish to phone through comments on 2059358.

Then it goes on to say what will happen after the comments are received. It goes on to restate the department's commitment to effective consultation and the department's very real interest in what people have to say. So, it has certainly gone out to all the relevant players, and also it makes it quite clear that people can use the response sheet at the back. Even that response sheet says, "If required please add additional sheets". People can use that, or they might want to make additional comments, other comments, or comments in some other form. I do not really think you can get much more general than that to cover all aspects.

I would agree with Ms McRae in terms of the children she is talking about and those particular problems, especially the circumstances where the home is not necessarily conducive to developing literacy skills. That is something which, I think, this paper is picking up. That is something which the debate is picking up. That is something which, I think, all organisations and all key stakeholders in the education field are well aware of. It is commonsense. It is something the experts have been commenting on for some time. It is something that, obviously, we will need to address better. It is something that, quite clearly, will be addressed in this debate. I wonder whether the way Ms McRae is suggesting we go about it is really necessary.

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