Election Wrap - 19 September

Has Katy got transport now?

Are they re-buying the buses they sold off last budget to fix the deficit we didn’t have?

I am so cranky with this govt for selling off all the carparks ‘to encourage people to use public transport’ but then failing to provide enough buses for the people who want to use them.

Is Canberra really such a rev-head bogan town that we need to invest so heavily in motorsport? V8 super cars failed. Rally of Canberra failed. Summernats – thank god I live south side. Surely global warming and the high price of petrol are enough to indicate that motorsport has a limited lifespan and injections of taxpayer money is money pissed up against the wall.

• Invest up to $200,000 in a 5 year motorsport strategy that will provide a blueprint for promoting and growing motorsport in the ACT.

Wow – $40k a year. Looks like they’ll have an APS3 running it

So a party that can’t even organise a poster campaign without stuffing it up wants to run our Assembly?

As for education, previous experience with the SOS campaign suggests any improvements in our education system need to start with the pen pushers in the education department not the schools. Ineptitude and timer servers were the 2 words that came to mind when dealing with the department’s public servants so if this initiative holds them accountable for their non performance then it may have legs.

and then the old chestnut of the motorsport comes back from the ALP – give it a rest guys, enough already!

All the special ed parents I know value the teachers very highly. Many of the ideas we have put forward to improve our system were originally proposed as solutions by one staff member or another.

For every disadvantaged child, a wrap-around approach will be most successful involving parents, teachers and other specialists such as social workers or counselors or in our case therapists.

It is vital for these kids that parents and staff work together, and I find it personally upsetting to see attempts made to wedge the teachers and carers. If this is successful it will be devastating for the kids.

My principal spent a family weekend at the coast personally working on my daughter’s program. That means a lot to me. I am just trying to help encourage the government to provide her with the resources she needs to do her job.

I have nothing but the highest regard for the calibre of people I have dealt with in the education department and particularly in my own school, and I believe that using wedge politics to mess with the lives of those who are already disempowered in society is just plain low.

I don’t care how my teachers or my children or my friends vote or what they believe. I love them and respect them because of who they are and what they do.

Thumper is right. But there are some teachers who do quietly go about their job and don’t swallow the union line but never let on.

Teachers are aware as anyone of the difficulty some families have of getting support for special needs kids – like the many children with autism. The complaints mechanism is most important for these families and it is often a case of disagreements by officials in the department and not any wrangle with the teachers.

I doubt many teachers will ever vote Liberal.

Zed’s courting the far more numerous parents.

I hold myself to higher standards than he obviously does 😉

NickD: You were polite to Steve Pratt? You are dead in my eys.