Page 4328 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 13 October 2009
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same thing: the principals are the best ones to address these problems. The principals are there at the coalface; they are the ones that are struggling with the issues that we are talking about here. It is not the bureaucrats, it is not us; it is the principals. What we are saying is that the principals can be trusted for 10 days, but we cannot trust them for 20 days. That seems to be coming through loud and clear. Across the border, we have people working under the New South Wales education system, a few kilometres outside of our area, who have more autonomy than our principals.
I cannot see any logical reason for not making this change, Mr Barr. The My Way classic, the Sinatra classic that we are talking about, I think typifies this approach, where in many ways recommendations to this minister are proving to be a waste of time and energy. His reaction is always the same—it is either his way or no way. We have seen this with recommendations that have been put by committees and his first reaction to the opening of the schools that we are talking about—a categoric no. He doesn’t say we will examine these points; it is just a categoric no.
That is not my way, so I am not going to pursue the matter in that regard. Mr Barr, read the words to that song and you will find a few other indicative measures as to what happens when you do things your way. I am very, very disappointed that you have come only part of the way. I do not know what the reason is. I do not know what your thinking is in not going that extra step. Certainly the principals within the ACT jurisdiction deserve our trust and our faith in their ability to translate the policies that are enacted and the acts that are enacted here.
We should not have any problem with accepting their ability to translate and to put in place the measures that we are talking about. We are having to look at not only the days—and I think there seems to be a little bit of your being stuck in the middle on the days—but the suspensions themselves do not do very much for either the overall impact on the students coming back into the system or for the students themselves in the short term. We have to do more than just suspend them.
We have given them opportunities within certain areas to say yes, look, there are opportunities there. But there is no encouragement; there is nothing to make sure that something is done by the people who are suspended. We have to address all of these issues in order for the whole solution to be found. We have got to not just examine seriously the symptoms, but root out the causes of the problem. As we said before, before you can address the problem you have to actually admit there is a problem, Mr Barr, and that still seems to be a major stumbling block with you—to address the fact that there is a problem. We have got a huge problem and we are not addressing it.
Overall, the real question that we are talking about here is: why does the minister not trust his principals to have the same autonomy that their counterparts in New South Wales, Victoria, South Australia, Queensland et cetera, in all other jurisdictions, enjoy? Why don’t the ACT principals have the same ability? Mr Barr has been failing on this issue for some time and now is the opportunity to make genuine reforms, Mr Barr. We are challenging you: go the whole nine yards. You have gone 4½ yards, Mr Barr—go the whole nine yards. Meet us on this, and do not be stuck in the middle. Step up to the mark and acknowledge the fact that the principals that we have in place can be trusted, that they can deliver the reforms that we need to have implemented in order to combat some of the issues that we have had with behavioural problems.
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