Page 1803 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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Mr Berry: So everything below that is gone.
MR HUMPHRIES: No, that is not the case, Mr Berry. The point is that schools of those sizes already exist in the Australian Capital Territory. They already function and provide a high quality of education. When those opposite attack schools of that size, they are in fact attacking the quality of education already being provided by schools of that size in the ACT. They are saying, by implication, that our larger schools cannot provide a high-quality education. I say, "Shame on the Opposition. If you believe that, you are seriously deluded about the quality that is possible throughout our system, and you are using your arguments to slur the education system generally".
There is ample capacity for the ACT to have larger average school sizes. I point to the fact that every other State in Australia has school sizes considerably larger than those of the ACT and manages somehow to sustain a reasonable quality of education at the same time. I would not say that they sustain the same high quality that we sustain, but I do not believe that is necessarily a feature or a function of the size of the school. It is, of course, a feature of many factors. It flows from many things that are good about our system, including the quality of our teachers, the quality of our curriculum development and a whole range of other factors. It is those sorts of things that this Government wants to preserve and that is why we are trimming the costs of running the system in other areas to preserve those essential, basic, fundamental strengths of our system.
An interesting argument has been put forward by the Opposition to the effect that the closures will wreak havoc in the system. Those were Mr Wood's words. Opposition members say that we are destroying public education in the ACT. I ask them exactly what feature of these changes causes that to occur? Is it larger schools? Is it the mere fact of having larger schools that creates this great problem? Apparently not, because we already have schools of that size, and they do not provide inferior quality education to their students, so that cannot be the case. Is it because we are actually closing some schools that have already existed? Well, we are not the first government to close schools in the ACT. I do not recall Ms Follett, as a public figure as she then was, complaining publicly about the closure of five schools by the Federal Government in 1988.
Ms Follett: I did.
MR HUMPHRIES: Well, perhaps you complained as you did about the conviction of Mr Duby the other day. None of us actually saw it, I am afraid to say. The reality is that there was not much of a from the members of the Labor Party about that. They acknowledged, and their Federal colleagues certainly acknowledged, that from time to time
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