Page 1647 - Week 07 - Tuesday, 29 May 1990
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welcome one more opportunity to try to make that issue clear, but I am getting a little bit sick of repeating myself on this matter. As I have said many times before, it is the Government's intention to establish the criteria under which the Government can save money through a process of consolidation of schools.
Ms Follett: How much?
MR HUMPHRIES: If I may answer Ms Follett's question, that depends on the amount the Government seeks to make in the way of savings in the education budget. If the Government sought to make, for example, $1m worth of savings, we would obviously have to close a relatively small number of schools. If it sought to make $6m worth of savings, it would obviously have to close a very large number of schools. Members opposite apparently want me, as Minister, and the Government as a whole to embark on the process of working out how much we want to save at this point before we have established what it is exactly that we would need to do in order to close schools and what it is that the community would accept in the way of a closure program.
This is not the way this Government sees things. We see it as important first of all to establish the criteria under which the Government can close schools at all, and then to establish what circumstances that would entail and how we would go about doing that. Having established that, we would then set about the task of identifying what it is the education budget is expected to deliver in the way of general savings to the Government. We would then seek to work out how many schools that would be in terms of the amount of savings required. I make no apologies for this process. I see it as vastly preferable to a process which has us naming schools before any amount has been established. I believe this is the responsible path to go down.
MR WOOD: I have a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. Mr Humphries, is it not then the case that you have embarked on a destructive course with absolutely no idea about what you want to achieve? You do not know what the figure is and you are upturning the whole system.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is a political point more than anything else, Mr Speaker. I think it is vastly more responsible of this Government to canvass carefully the issues associated with this closure of schools before we get to the process of naming schools or identifying how much money will come from the closure of individual schools.
Ms Follett: Why?
Mr Kaine: It is called "community consultation". You talk about it so much and do nothing about it.
MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Kaine sums it up exactly; it is community consultation about the issues to begin with. I could go to
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