Page 1797 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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made some wildly optimistic statements about the savings that may be made, but he is charging ahead with no idea of where he is going.
In yesterday's question time he answered a question - as he has done on other days and in other places - about the expected savings from school closures, but he has no idea. In his answer he seemed to want to be in a position where he can hack away at schools as the need arises, as that need is determined later. Even if we take the figure that he has touted of $100m over some period or other, it would nevertheless be essential for the Minister to be able to identify quite clearly what he hopes to achieve by school closures. That seems to me to be a basic principle - that you know what you are going to achieve.
He is quite unable to make any statement to that effect. Nowhere has there been any study that he has initiated that can show what his program will achieve in the end. On this side of the house, we believe it will achieve only damage, an entirely negative effect. But before he embarks on this rash course he must know whether he can make the significant savings that he seeks.
The Labor Party argues that our schools are good, and nobody in this community denies that. We know that they are educationally viable. We maintain that they should not close. But even if we take the argument on the Minister's stance, he must demonstrate that he can achieve what he wants to achieve, and he cannot do that. The likelihood is that he will close schools, wreak havoc on the system and still not make the savings that he sets out to make.
In recent times, a cost-benefit study has been made by a very competent academic of the Australian National University, and I see in today's paper that that is being considered by Department of Education and ACTION officers. I am pleased about that. I want to refer to that document and to another document by a graduate student in economics at the University of Canberra that has come to my attention. The academic's findings have been widely reported. I hope the media have been successful in sparking the Minister's interest.
I first want to refer to a comment by the Minister, as I believe I heard it at a public meeting, when he indicated that, really, there were no great savings by way of staffing if schools were amalgamated. I think this is one key element. It is something that perhaps the Minister has come to learn. Although I do not think we could call it a cost-benefit analysis, he did indicate in this chamber - and I would be very happy to see the detail of it - that there were savings of about $200,000 per school from the last round of closures a year or so ago. That is an interesting figure. We should bear in mind that that figure probably did not include the additional costs that are associated with school closures. It does not relate to any financial aspects of refurbishment, bussing, cost of
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