Page 3314 - Week 08 - Wednesday, 22 August 2012
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Clause 6.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo—Leader of the Opposition) (11.57): I move amendment No 1 circulated in my name [see schedule 4 at page 3327].
This amendment was foreshadowed in my earlier speech. It makes it very clear that we do not think there should be any doubt that there is a right to an education beyond primary school, and that should be a right to a free education. That is something that the Liberals hold very dear. We believe that would have been one of the potential serious unintended or intended consequences of this bill in the form in which it was presented to the Assembly. I think that it would have been a very poor piece of legislation if it had passed unamended, and that is why I am moving this amendment, which we believe will fix it.
MR RATTENBURY (Molonglo) (11.58): As I very briefly touched on before, the Greens are supportive of this amendment that Mr Seselja has moved. It seeks to achieve something very similar to what I was intending to move in my amendment No 1, but with a different formulation of words, and we are certainly happy to be making this improvement in cooperation with the opposition.
The problem that we did see that was there and that needed to be fixed was the stark inconsistency between the proposed right to education and the existing requirements as set out under the Education Act. This point has been made tonight. It is clear that the status quo as set out in the Education Act is that there is a legislated requirement for all students to be engaged in educational training until the age of 17 or completion of year 12. In contrast, the proposed right to education would only have gone as far as providing the right to a primary education and would be silent on secondary education. This was clearly a nonsensical situation where different messages would be sent by different parts of the ACT statute book. Luckily, both the Greens and the opposition were awake to this, and both had solutions to fix it.
We will be happy to adopt the Liberals’ set of words, which would mean that the amended right to education in the ACT will read: “Every child has the right to have access to free school education appropriate to his or her needs.” So we will be supporting this amendment tonight.
MR CORBELL (Molonglo—Attorney-General, Minister for Police and Emergency Services and Minister for the Environment and Sustainable Development) (11.59): The government chose to adopt the obligation under the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. That covenant states at article 13.2 that “primary education shall be compulsory and available free to all”.
Thursday, 23 August 2012
The ANU-UNSW report considered and recommended the notion of “full-time” be introduced into the provisions of the act. This is not, however, an element under the ICESCR and the government chose instead to simply adopt the international covenant provision.
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