Page 1036 - Week 03 - Wednesday, 30 March 2011
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MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.38): Just to respond briefly to some of what Mr Barr had to say, it is worth going back to what Trish McEwan actually said in her open letter to the Chief Minister:
I also sought assistance from Education Minister Andrew Barr because I believed that Bimberi would operate within the overarching legislation, policies, guidelines and management plans that guide ACT schools and I thought Mr Barr would have an interest in monitoring these at the centre.
Presumably, from the tone of what Ms McEwan is writing, she does not believe Mr Barr had an interest in monitoring these at the centre. She went on, and this is the part that Mr Barr addressed:
Teachers were despondent when criticised by Official Visitor Jeremy Boland in The Canberra Times in November for “not trying hard enough”, and the silence from our managers and from Mr Barr suggested that our leaders also believed it was our fault.
Mr Barr has just got up and said, “Well, yes, and I said that those weren’t my views.” That was the level of going in to bat for these teachers working in difficult circumstances. There was not a public commendation. There was no press release saying: “Our teachers are trying hard. They are doing their best in very difficult circumstances.” It was, “Well, they’re not my views.” But he was not prepared to go and fight for them. That is the frustration that has been expressed here by Trish McEwan. She felt that the minister responsible for Bimberi had no idea and was not prepared to act and that the minister for education was not putting up a forthright defence of teaching staff within Bimberi. She also said, as I discussed earlier, that the Attorney-General and others have let them down.
Across the board we see the attitude of this Labor government. It is not to try and protect those who are trying to do work in difficult circumstances. There is a lot of rhetoric about that. But when staff are publicly criticised, the best the education minister can do is to say to them, “Oh, well, they’re not my views.” That is perhaps at the heart of why Trish McEwan feels that the education minister was not fair dinkum in going in to bat for her and her colleagues.
There was a quote that I did not get to read earlier. Paragraph (4) of Ms Hunter’s amendment is instructive. It calls on the minister to:
(a) immediately ensure all staff are made aware of their mandatory reporting obligations;
(b) encourage all staff (both present and former) and members of the community to make full and frank contributions to the Bimberi inquiry; and
(c) take the strongest possible disciplinary action against anyone found to have attempted to in any way pervert the inquiry.”.
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