Page 1810 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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MR SPEAKER: Order, Mr Moore! Ask your question through the Chair.
MR MOORE: Through you, Mr Speaker, I ask Mr Humphries. He assured me in an interjection a minute ago that the breakdown was now available. Less than a week ago I was told by an executive member of the P and C that they did not have those figures.
The real question that we need to ask is: what are our overall social goals? The anti-social-justice Government has not provided the terms of its overall social goals. In education it has proposed an economic solution without any educational justification at all. We still have heard no educational justification for the closure of these schools. There are plenty of educational justifications for keeping them as they are.
The first and the most important of those is to do with morale. One only had to talk to people in the Page area after the Page school closure to be aware of morale. Most of the students were expected to go from Page to Scullin, yet Scullin's enrolments rose by only 50. What will happen here when we have a wholesale set of closures and the students do not go where you want them to go? It is all very well to draw lines and figures on the map. This has happened once already and the same situation will arise with these students. Instead of going to the school that is nearest to them, that supposedly has enough room, they will go off to other places. Then we have to put other restrictions on where students can go and what choices they can make. Therefore, the whole notion of choice suddenly falls down in a screaming heap.
In the meantime you have students, parents and teachers who are all distressed. Where are the changes going to take place next? What happens to the education system when there is low morale among its teaching staff? The same thing happens when you get low morale in the public service or in a business - it starts to fold up and it does not operate the way it should. And there is low morale in the education system. Morale was low under Labor and it is getting even lower under the anti-social-justice Government that is in office at the moment.
What do the students say about this? I have great joy in reading from a letter that I received just yesterday from a grade 1 student, Erin Cameron Smith, from Ainslie Primary. I shall pass a copy of it to the Minister. It says, "Dear Sir, I don't want the school to close. It is a good school and that is why I like it".
There is a very deep philosophical basis to that grade 1 student's letter. I think it is very important that at least somebody has started to try to find out what the students think. Yesterday I was at Ginninderra High School, which is the largest high school in Belconnen, with more than 900 students. It has had up to 1,000 students.
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