Education Legislation Bill

I have to admit that I thought we were on the title and commencement, but clearly we are still on Parts 1 and 2. This bill—

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Sorry, this is clauses 1 and 2, which is the—

Clauses 1 and 2?

The CHAIRPERSON (Hon Chester Borrows): Yes, which is the title and commencement.

Thank you very much for the clarification, Mr Chair. I would hate to go wrong and deviate from the subject. I am not sure I can take a full call on this, but I thought I would just have a little go.

💬 Hon Ruth Dyson: Oh yes, you can—yes, you can.

Other members of the House are urging me on, so I will do my best to say something pertinent and relevant. The Education Legislation Bill—sometimes I think these titles are extremely misleading, because they do not really say anything. You do not know whether they are the amendment bill or the legislation bill. There have been hundreds of these bills, but the title should, I feel, be more evocative, be more exciting, and be more relevant to the subject of the bill, but this one, again, is not particularly like that.

We have got problems with this bill for a number of reasons. Really, it has been pretty well thrashed out at previous stages, but we are concerned about a number of aspects of the bill in terms of the schools’ changing of school hours and other such matters, not to mention the charter provisions, which, of course, are a red rag to some of us because of the privatisation of what has been an excellent public education system. I guess we would like to see the title and the clauses in the commencement reflect that. This is actually a bill that could have been called the “Education Omnibus (Let’s Sneak In Some Awful Things While Doing Some Things That Are OK) Bill”—something like that—but that is not a very good title, either.

I would just like to take the call to say that the Green Party is not able to support this bill, despite some of the things in it that are what I just described as OK. Then there are some things in it that are actually not OK. But the worst thing about this bill, including the title and commencement, is that we never got to hear any reason for a lot of these things at the select committee. We never at the select committee heard any explanation for these changes around principals managing several schools, around the issue of hours in schools, around numbers of early childhood children at home being cared for, or around the charter schools. We never heard any reasons why these things were important.

At this stage of the process I am expressing the Green Party’s disappointment that the title and commencement clauses, like the rest of the bill, shed no light on what is actually a critical issue. The critical issue at this point in time is public, quality education, not piecemeal, bit by bit, undermining, in the name of choice and flexibility, a system that is based on making sure that every child in every community has access, more or less for free—it is not free any more, but more or less free—to equity in education. As we have heard in this Chamber today on other issues, we have a crisis in terms of poverty in this country. We have a problem with our institutions, and this bill, these clauses and this title, should reflect what is in here, which is that we are let down again. It is not that the Green Party or this House is let down again—I can live with that—but whom we have let down again are the children of this country and the parents and the families, because this is a bit of a mess.

We did not get many submitters because, under the title of Education Legislation Bill, this bill sounds really innocuous. It sounds like it is has got nothing. “We are just kind of, like, legislating education. It is just kind of, like, a cool thing to do.”—what a load of rubbish. Thank you very much.