Page 3765 - Week 12 - Thursday, 22 November 2007
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Mr Howard or Mr Costello. The establishment of boards of management would be a retrograde step for the ACT, and would have the potential to hamper current clinical streaming arrangements and future planning.
There are also indications that a returned coalition government would look at creating a separate funding pool for specific purposes or targets and that it would deal directly with hospital chief executives, answerable to boards of management, rather than working with the states and territories, who alone have a jurisdiction-wide picture of where services should be located and where the gaps exist. The last thing the health system needs is another half-a-dozen Mersey takeovers, or more pork-barrelling and cherry-picking. Yet that seems to be the preferred vision that the coalition would encourage. Such an approach would seriously undermine the planning and management of state and territory health systems because every hospital is part of an integrated system of care.
The federal Labor opposition has placed education at the core of our long-term strategy for our national security and our national prosperity. A Rudd Labor government has promised an education revolution—a revolution in commonwealth investment and a revolution in the quality of our education outcomes. Commencing with the earliest years of education, federal Labor has committed to providing all four-year-old children with access to 15 hours of preschool, delivered by a qualified early childhood teacher in preschools, kindergartens and childcare centres. This recognition of the early years of schooling fits well with the ACT government’s continued commitment to and investment in the early years.
In the 2005-06 budget, Labor here in the ACT allocated $8 million over four years to honour its election commitment to increase the provision of preschool education for eligible four-year-olds in the ACT from 10.5 hours per week to 12 hours per week. Families in the ACT have welcomed this initiative, and our commitment continues to ensure that all young children have access to high-quality preschool programs. We are also in the process of creating four new early-childhood schools to cater for children from preschool through to year 2. These specialist schools will focus on early childhood education and early intervention, giving Canberra families the option of a different style of early schooling for their children, and establishing a solid foundation for learning in the future.
Under its education revolution, the federal Labor Party has promised greater investment in school education, and these new initiatives will add lustre to our existing, world-class education system. The federal Labor Party has also announced a trades training centres in schools initiative, which will provide grants of up to $1.5 million for new or upgraded ICT labs, trade workshops, commercial kitchens, hairdressing facilities, graphic design labs and plumbing workshops.
This new funding will help to support the huge investment that the ACT government is making through its massive $90 million program of capital upgrades across our public schools. As part of this investment, we are funding upgrades to all schools more than 12 years old not yet upgraded; upgrades of all preschools; the construction of gymnasiums at Belconnen and Stromlo high schools, thereby providing a gym at every public high school in the ACT; and the construction of a new performing arts
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