Stanford EricaERICA STANFORD (National—East Coast Bays): Thank you Madam Speaker. I'm pleased to rise to take a call tonight on the Education and Training Bill. It's always a pleasure to follow Tracey Martin. It always allows me to insert a bit of vim and vigour into my speech because she always says things that make us on this side of the House raise our eyebrows. The first thing that I would say is that obviously she referred to the Tomorrow's Schools Review Independent Taskforce report that was put out. We all know this Government spent millions and millions of dollars with this review travelling around the country spending a great deal of money on fancy lunches and croissants and coming up with a range of new ideas that were going to have a—[Interruption] Yeah they did. They had croissants. Hon Member: What's wrong with croissants? ERICA STANFORD: Nothing wrong with croissants but they are relatively expensive in the grand scheme of things when we're spending taxpayers' money. But that's right we always remember that the other side of the House forget that it's not their money; it's taxpayers' money. Anyway the point is that they went around the country and they had what the Hon Tracey Martin said was a conversation that was needed to be had. I don't know what the conversation that was had was because as Nicola Willis pointed out in her speech earlier on tonight we ended up with recommendations that were going back to what we had in the past of education hubs that were this massive centralisation which no one was happy with. I have to acknowledge Nikki Kaye as Nicola Willis did earlier on this evening because she went around the country and she spoke to principals communities families teachers parents and even children in the 30 meetings that she did and the pushback on what came out of that review was extraordinary. As Nicola Willis said a great deal of work was done between her and the Minister of Education to water down some of those changes that were so opposed by the sector and families and parents. The Minister went on to talk about the wonderful job that this Government has done in getting rid of those unnecessary charter schools and he said that they're all doing fine now that they're special character schools and that that was always good enough. I actually have to say that those charter schools have done more for increasing our educational achievement in this country than this bill will ever do. Nicola Willis pointed out that there isn't almost a single thing in this bill that will lead to an increase in educational achievement and outcome and I have to say that the charter schools and the model that was in place before had some incredible results and getting rid of those is a massive step backwards. But I won't go on too much about that because it's not in the bill and I know that the Speaker will want me to get back to the bill. What I want to talk about—and we've alluded to it earlier—is this idea of the taking away of the responsibility around zoning from school boards. As Nicola Willis pointed out there's sort of this shadow of what was left of the Tomorrow's Schools review. Most of those things were stripped out but we were left with this problem and we are still very opposed to this. There isn't a single school in my electorate that I have spoken to that's in favour of this. It's really interesting when you're working with schools as a local MP to see the pitfalls of the Ministry of Education when they get involved in things like zoning and even new classrooms. They've failed miserably so many times in being able to account for growth and in understanding where growth in communities is and that's just when they're looking at classrooms. That's why we have such a lag of availability of classrooms because they always get it wrong. It's really interesting that in this case the Minister when he was in the chair earlier said that Well the ministry will still be consulting with school boards before and during the consultation process." but we all know well that the Ministry of Education will pay lip service at best to the wants and needs of the community because it's not as simple as drawing lines on a map. Actually if they're going to consult with the boards and they're going to consult with the schools why not just leave that process as it is with the boards and the schools because they know their communities best? There has to be a balance in between numbers of students and where they can go and communities where people live work play and shop and where they feel connected to. There has to be a balance and as Nicola Willis pointed out earlier this will bring up the possibility of an excuse by the ministry to not put in place builds of new classrooms because they will simply jimmy round the zoning to make up for not building new classrooms. In fact we already see it but that will lead even more to not taking into account communities' wants and needs in terms of their communities and where they feel connected to and that balance will certainly be swung more in favour of numbers rather than the needs of communities. I don't want to go on too much more. The last thing I would say is that we're also very concerned that this bill removes that specific accountability placed on school boards to raise educational achievement by muddying it with three other objectives and giving them all equal weighting. On this side of the House we don't argue that those three metrics aren't important but not having educational achievement as the number one top priority of that list in our opinion is not a good thing. In the dying few seconds that I wanted to take up I just wanted to say that on this side of the House we strongly back communities boards of trustees families and local areas. They know what's best for their local schools and it's not the Ministry of Education coming in and making decisions for those local communities. We will always back those local boards teachers parents and communities above the Ministry of Education and we will not be supporting this bill."