Page 3159 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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There has been cooperation on planning and writing of units of work with the institutions, in particular with Historic Places ACT, the National Gallery of Australia and the National Library. These partnerships continue to be ongoing, and currently across the ACT there are no fewer than 26 such institutional partnerships. It is partnerships and collaboration that bring success.
I am heartened that the federal Labor Party has taken a more collaborative approach and has committed to cooperating with the states and territories on education reform. This will be something new to the education debate, and I look forward to the constructive negotiation between a federal Labor government and the states and territories. When governments work together, I am sure we can make an already great education system even better.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.14): This matter of public importance is brought on because we are in an election period and everyone in the Labor Party across the country is working to script. And this is what we have here. What Mr Gentleman said was in fact not nearly as extreme as I expected, which I suppose is probably just an indication of Mr Gentleman’s incapacity to stick to his terms of reference, which we have seen more than once this week. He could not actually deliver the sort of thrashing diatribe that I think his colleagues expected on what a terrible person Minister Bishop is, what an outrageous interventionist the Prime Minister is and how dare he tell the people what they should think about history and history teaching.
We have got this thing here that we want to be more collaborative. Yes, the Labor states have been very collaborative, because every time a federal minister does something in relation to education they take their script and they trot it out. It was quite interesting last week or the week before, when the Prime Minister announced and put out the history paper, they all came out—Queensland, New South Wales, South Australia—and they all used exactly the same words: “We are not going to be bullied by the commonwealth; we already do this.” It was interesting to wait and see what this minister would say. Of course he said the same thing: “We have a wonderful history program in the ACT.”
Mr Speaker, as a parent of five children, three of whom have completed schooling in the ACT in a variety of schools, and as a former history teacher, I can tell you that there is not substantial history teaching in the ACT. There are great history teachers and there are great individual programs.
It is interesting that here, when Mr Gentleman quoted the minister being concerned about a content-heavy emphasis, there is no content in the history curriculum in the ACT. There is no guarantee that your child who starts school in kindergarten in the ACT and goes all the way through to year 12 will get even a smattering of an idea about the progression of history, say from pre-history in Australia, through white settlement, through the 20th century and into the 21st century. It does not happen. There is no progressive “let us build on this and build on that”.
As I have said before, there are occasions when I have had children in three or four different levels in school and they are all doing the same things. I do not know how many times we sat down and simultaneously put together projects about the gold
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