Page 1048 - Week 06 - Thursday, 27 July 1989
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unfamiliar. I thank also Tracy Williams, Melinda Stirling, Kim Blackburn, Jean Cochrane and other secretariat staff who did noble work, often at strange hours of the day and night, including yesterday. I re-echo the remarks of other chairmen. I recall Bill Stefaniak doing the same and Gary Humphries as well. The citizens of Canberra, Mr Speaker - I would really like to emphasise this, I am so aware of it over these 11 weeks of this Assembly - should be grateful for the quality, dedication and professionalism of our public service staff.
What then have we done? What do we recommend? I hope the report speaks for itself. Briefly, we have recommended that the ANU and the Canberra Institute of the Arts amalgamate as soon as possible. To that extent we recognise and participate in the dramatic changes in tertiary education undertaken by Minister John Dawkins and we thank him for his attendance with us. We commend the leaders of the ANU and CITA for their thoughtful and well-argued cases and their careful route to affiliation, and perhaps that is the clue to it. We therefore recommend an even more careful path for the ANU and the CCAE.
Those institutions, excellent institutions both, with such different backgrounds and experiences and range of excellence, need an extended courtship before any formal consummation can be achieved. Courtship involves, in the words of the song:
Getting to know you;
Getting to know all about you.
That is a joyous task we lay on the staff and students of both the ANU and the CCAE. Preconceptions need to be set aside - perhaps not the happiest choice of words now that I look at it again.
The two campuses need to exchange ideas, personnel, hopes and fears; they need to exchange excellences. So I call on the professors, administrators, student leaders and the staff and students of both institutions to try a period of, as used to be said, walking out together. If our Assembly could help or participate in that process, I hope we could be appropriate matchmakers. Just as a beginning, could we sponsor a special Bruce-Acton day of joint activities on both campuses. I commend this to the Deputy Chief Minister.
Meanwhile - and I recall that seven years was once an approved period of waiting for one's beloved - there are more important, immediate initiatives and tasks. None is more significant than removing from the three institutions the paralysing dilemma of uncertainty. Without delay the CCAE needs to change its formal status to that of a university, as is the case with other CAEs throughout the nation. It must not be left as the only CAE in the country which does not have that status. Otherwise it will not be able to compete fairly for staff and students. The CCAE
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