Page 1593 - Week 06 - Thursday, 3 May 1990
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He and I have been on the hustings together and I know that he comes to the debate with the experience of a whole career in education. I welcome that. We join with him in his concern for education. There is just as much concern for the quality of public and private education on this side of the house as on his side of the house. I also want to say that I disagree with Mr Wood's assertion that there is no scope for future consolidations, amalgamations, cuts, whatever you want to call them. That scope is very large indeed, and I will come to that later.
I want to make the question of consultation my main subject this morning and I want to answer Mr Wood's points on that. I will come back to that in a minute, but first of all I would like to deal with the question of whether the figures that he raises are nonsense. Yesterday I spoke about my druthers in the hospital scene. Of course we would all like the best hospital in the world on Acton Peninsula, but we have not got the money. Of course we would all like to enlarge the schools budget, have smaller classes, more teachers, better status, more computers and more libraries. We want all those things; of course we do. However, having seen the realities, I have no doubt at all that we are not in a position to afford them and, furthermore, I believe very strongly indeed that, given some of the amalgamations, reconstructions and reorganisations that are ahead, we will come out with a better system altogether.
I now wish to turn to that so-called "nonsense figure" of 13,533. I will explain again how that was arrived at and will comment on my own view of that figure. There is no doubt that the Department of Education has done a careful job in taking some 1981 figures of total capacity, then some revised figures of 1988 and coming up with a figure that reflects the total largest possible capacity of 168 schools. I have all the figures here. Some of these undercapacities are quite startling, especially in the primary school area. Under that 13,533 we have 7,472 surplus places. That is a real number; it is not a nonsense number. It is the number that the Chief Minister used some time back and that Mr Humphries used. I have some criticism of that number and I take the criticism partly from a minute of the Department of Education itself, which says:
The figures currently being used for school capacities and surplus places are based on formulas developed in 1981 and revised in 1988. It will probably be necessary, as part of the planning process, to revisit these and allow schools where relevant to put a case for revision of current capacity figures.
That indeed is what I meant when I said that, if you went from school to school - and there are 168 of them - and looked not at the total possible capacity in 1981 or the revised capacity in 1988 but at what the school board, the P and C or the teachers said, then I think you would find this kind of answer.
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