Mr MILLS - 2007-05-02
Your budget income is now $3.3bn. This means that you will have over $1bn more to spend. Despite six years of massive increases in taxation revenue, MAP testing results for Years 3, 5 and 7 in the last annual report at pages 47 to 51 are failing to show improvement with some areas actually declining in student literacy in the past five years. Considering the numbers show no improvement, Territorians are interested to know how you are spending the $1.1bn more that you have to spend in lifting education standards.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, we have increased the Education budget each and every year since we came to government. In fact, before we came to government, I had a couple of little insiders in the department, they used to know what was going on. I used to catch up with a couple of them at the TAB in Cavenagh Street at lunchtime. We would get to about late September or October - they used to come and talk to Alf about this because he knew a couple of these individuals. They would say: ‘Education is about $8m over’. I used to say: ‘It couldn’t be! It is only October; we have only just started the financial year’. They would say: ‘Oh, no. We are already in strife’. By November, that figure could have been $20m or $30m and I used to worry about this bloke’s advice …
Mr MILLS: A point of order, Madam Speaker! It is interesting to hear about the TAB …
Mr STIRLING: … until we got to budget time!
Madam SPEAKER: Minister, please pause. What is your point of order?
Mr MILLS: It is interesting to hear about the TAB, but we are interested in the increase in academic standards, not the capacity for this government to spend.
Madam SPEAKER: There is no point of order, member for Blain. As you will be aware, there is a fair bit of latitude in relation to answering questions. Minister, if you could come to the point.
Mr STIRLING: Madam Speaker, they used to bleed those agencies dry, Health among them. Not only that, they used to lie about the budget in Health and we caught them out. We caught them out in the Public Accounts Committee, on the record, and Education, about their funding, trying to pretend that they had a bigger increase in a particular financial year than they actually did by underwriting what they had spent the year before. That is how they used to run the budget.
We are honest; we are up front. We have transparency, we have the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act, and so the sorts of shonks they pulled can never be pulled by this government or, indeed, any future government of the Northern Territory.
We have funded healthy increases into every agency, but particularly with Education and Health. The reason those figures might go backwards - and I am going to go to the minister for Education on this point - is if you get totally illiterate, totally innumerate children coming into the system, and you sit them down and make them do a literacy/numeracy test, which the MAP is, guess what? Hello! They fail. Guess what that does to the results? You do not have to be Einstein; even you could work that out. It has the effect somewhat of lowering the results across the board.
Madam Speaker, I will defer to my colleague, the minister for Education.
Mr HENDERSON (Employment, Education and Training): Madam Speaker, I did want to talk about this issue because it is very important. I share, in spite of the argy-bargy across the table, a very great desire, with the shadow minister, to see outcomes improve. Certainly, if you look at the MAP testing results and you drill down and understand what is happening across the Northern Territory, we have more students sitting these tests than ever before.
Under the previous government, it was not compulsory to undertake MAP tests in the Northern Territory. Guess what? None of the indigenous kids in remote communities, in all of those bush schools, sat the MAP test. The only testing necessary was in our urban schools. That is pretty close to being correct as I have seen all of the data.
This is a government that actually wants to see every single child achieving benchmark. We have a long way to go; however, if you do not measure it you cannot manage it. The CLP did not measure it, particularly in the bush.
If you break down what results we are getting, the further you get out of the major centres, particularly Darwin, into the regional and remote areas, the main issue that affects those MAP testing results is attendance. That is the No 1 issue that we all have to focus on. I urge every member of this House to work with their communities to get kids to school.
If you look at our MAP testing results for our 29 primary schools in Darwin and Palmerston, at the moment all of these numbers are lumped in with regional schools in the comparisons, and we are compared to regions like Albury/Wodonga and places like that across Australia. I asked for an exercise to be done looking at our Darwin and Palmerston schools, and I pay credit to these schools and their teachers. Eighteen out of the 29 schools exceed the metropolitan averages of Sydney, Melbourne and the ACT. Those are the results that I want to see in the bush. If we can do it in Darwin we can do it in the bush.
Attendance is the key issue, and the reason those figures are showing declines is that there are more kids sitting the test. We are not hiding the problem, we are acknowledging the problem. Under the CLP, those kids were never tested and they were never reported on.
ANSWER
Madam Speaker, we have increased the Education budget each and every year since we came to government. In fact, before we came to government, I had a couple of little insiders in the department, they used to know what was going on. I used to catch up with a couple of them at the TAB in Cavenagh Street at lunchtime. We would get to about late September or October - they used to come and talk to Alf about this because he knew a couple of these individuals. They would say: ‘Education is about $8m over’. I used to say: ‘It couldn’t be! It is only October; we have only just started the financial year’. They would say: ‘Oh, no. We are already in strife’. By November, that figure could have been $20m or $30m and I used to worry about this bloke’s advice …
Mr MILLS: A point of order, Madam Speaker! It is interesting to hear about the TAB …
Mr STIRLING: … until we got to budget time!
Madam SPEAKER: Minister, please pause. What is your point of order?
Mr MILLS: It is interesting to hear about the TAB, but we are interested in the increase in academic standards, not the capacity for this government to spend.
Madam SPEAKER: There is no point of order, member for Blain. As you will be aware, there is a fair bit of latitude in relation to answering questions. Minister, if you could come to the point.
Mr STIRLING: Madam Speaker, they used to bleed those agencies dry, Health among them. Not only that, they used to lie about the budget in Health and we caught them out. We caught them out in the Public Accounts Committee, on the record, and Education, about their funding, trying to pretend that they had a bigger increase in a particular financial year than they actually did by underwriting what they had spent the year before. That is how they used to run the budget.
We are honest; we are up front. We have transparency, we have the Fiscal Integrity and Transparency Act, and so the sorts of shonks they pulled can never be pulled by this government or, indeed, any future government of the Northern Territory.
We have funded healthy increases into every agency, but particularly with Education and Health. The reason those figures might go backwards - and I am going to go to the minister for Education on this point - is if you get totally illiterate, totally innumerate children coming into the system, and you sit them down and make them do a literacy/numeracy test, which the MAP is, guess what? Hello! They fail. Guess what that does to the results? You do not have to be Einstein; even you could work that out. It has the effect somewhat of lowering the results across the board.
Madam Speaker, I will defer to my colleague, the minister for Education.
Mr HENDERSON (Employment, Education and Training): Madam Speaker, I did want to talk about this issue because it is very important. I share, in spite of the argy-bargy across the table, a very great desire, with the shadow minister, to see outcomes improve. Certainly, if you look at the MAP testing results and you drill down and understand what is happening across the Northern Territory, we have more students sitting these tests than ever before.
Under the previous government, it was not compulsory to undertake MAP tests in the Northern Territory. Guess what? None of the indigenous kids in remote communities, in all of those bush schools, sat the MAP test. The only testing necessary was in our urban schools. That is pretty close to being correct as I have seen all of the data.
This is a government that actually wants to see every single child achieving benchmark. We have a long way to go; however, if you do not measure it you cannot manage it. The CLP did not measure it, particularly in the bush.
If you break down what results we are getting, the further you get out of the major centres, particularly Darwin, into the regional and remote areas, the main issue that affects those MAP testing results is attendance. That is the No 1 issue that we all have to focus on. I urge every member of this House to work with their communities to get kids to school.
If you look at our MAP testing results for our 29 primary schools in Darwin and Palmerston, at the moment all of these numbers are lumped in with regional schools in the comparisons, and we are compared to regions like Albury/Wodonga and places like that across Australia. I asked for an exercise to be done looking at our Darwin and Palmerston schools, and I pay credit to these schools and their teachers. Eighteen out of the 29 schools exceed the metropolitan averages of Sydney, Melbourne and the ACT. Those are the results that I want to see in the bush. If we can do it in Darwin we can do it in the bush.
Attendance is the key issue, and the reason those figures are showing declines is that there are more kids sitting the test. We are not hiding the problem, we are acknowledging the problem. Under the CLP, those kids were never tested and they were never reported on.
Last updated: 09 Aug 2016