Page 925 - Week 03 - Thursday, 21 March 2019
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As I said, the government will respond to this petition more formally at a later date, but I want to assure everybody in this place, the parents who have signed that petition and others in our schools that I am taking this situation very seriously. I understand the trauma that families have experienced as a result of this.
MRS KIKKERT (Ginninderra) (10.24): I wish to speak in support of this petition. I remind the Assembly that last month I shared, with permission, the story of a Canberra family from my electorate of Ginninderra whose young child has been repeatedly physically harmed at school. According to what they have shared, he has been punched, pinned, dragged, strangled and more—all by other children. They have kept a catalogue of his numerous injuries. At the end of year 1 the parents requested a meeting with the school. They got nowhere. But their faith in the government’s school sector led them to re-enrol their son the following year. The violence continued and worsened. The child became terrified to attend school.
He experienced frequent abdominal pains identified as a consequence of enormous stress. He faltered in his studies so much that a tutor told his parents he was at least a year behind in his learning. Eventually the parents felt compelled to pull their son out of this government-run school for his own protection. Attempts to negotiate a way forward produced no results except to leave the mum feeling, as she said to me, that she now knows what it feels like to be bullied.
Every student, teacher, and principal deserves to be safe in ACT schools. I say that as a mother whose five children have all attended these schools. The sad reality, however, is that kids in more than one school are not safe, and parents know it. They have also learned by experience not to trust this government’s internal responses to this problem. This morning hundreds of them are fairly and rightly asking for an independent inquiry. Madam Speaker, I commend the petition to the Assembly.
MS LE COUTEUR (Murrumbidgee) (10.26): I would like to talk briefly on the other petition about viable public transport for the ANU. This is something about which I have sent at least one letter, I think, to the minister because there clearly are quite a lot of people who go to the ANU. I appreciate that some of these people will be well served by the—I was going to say the blue rapid because I cannot remember the new number that it will have—the blue rapid which goes along Barry Drive and by UniLodge. That will serve quite a few of the users of the ANU. But for an awful lot of people who live or work in the further parts of the campus, it will not.
There are also quite a lot of people in Canberra who, of course, go to the ANU for lectures and things like that who will no longer be able to do that by public transport. Given that the ANU has a policy of reducing parking provision, it is an area that needs to have good public transport.
I do not know what discussions have happened between the ANU and the ACT government about this issue but I know that the ANU does have an internal bus system. But that internal bus system is not available, to the best of my knowledge, to people who are not staff or students at the ANU. And the ANU, of course, gets thousands of visitors to the campus every day.
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