Page 3785 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
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students were going to be enrolled, so, yes, that was closed. But it is quite wrong to say that there was no consultation and there was no warning.
Ms Gallagher: Six months? Six months of conversation?
MR STEFANIAK: It might not have been six months but it was real consultation. It was real consultation, Ms Gallagher, and when you are talking suspension you are talking probably about 15 months consultation—certainly 12 months—to give the preschool a chance to come back. If you look at recent history and at the facts, very few preschools were closed by the previous government. You say there was no warning. But there was warning. There was not the sham of the statutory six months consultation that you appear to be going through after the event. There was consultation; there were suspensions to give them a chance to come back and, as the record shows, some did.
There were special circumstances too; for example, the Causeway preschool, which was down to certainly fewer than 10 kids. That may not have even got back towards the 17 but because of the special circumstances I think that one remained open. So if you just have a look at those preschools you will see that, far from there being no warning, far from there being no consultation, there was. The views of the community were taken into account. The preschools were given every chance to survive, and if they showed signs that that was so, they were given the big tick and allowed to; and if, tragically, they were not, they were closed.
I do not think anyone on this side has ever said, Ms Gallagher, that we would never close anything. Of course you have to, but you have got to do it properly and you have got to do it with real consultation. I think the consultation and the warnings given by the previous government were a lot better than what you lot are doing now.
MS PORTER (Ginninderra) (4.05): Mr Speaker, as outlined by Minister Barr, the government will be opposing the motion of Mrs Dunne and I would like to speak to Mr Barr’s amendment. The public education system in the ACT will not benefit by standing still, as Ms Gallagher has just said. It certainly will not benefit by attempts to send it back to the 1940s. This government is embracing the 21st century, Mrs Dunne, and is making the necessary changes in order to prepare our children for the future.
This government has a strong track record of increasing support to early childhood education and this continues as part of the Towards 2020 proposal. Mrs Dunne talks about the confusion around the proposal—confusion driven by misinformation that those opposite love to emphasise and spread, I might say. This government has injected money into the early years of schooling by lowering class sizes, by increasing the hours of preschool education available to families from 10.5 to 12 hours per week, and now as part of the school renewal program this government is proposing to provide specialist early childhood schools and formally link preschools to primary schools.
Mrs Dunne says that across the world there is increasing recognition of the importance of early childhood development. This government knows this and this government knows that it needs to set the foundations for learning, behaviour and health through the school years and into adult life, and this government has taken this
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