Page 1880 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 30 May 1990
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MR WOOD: Mr Humphries has said time and time again until he is tired of saying it that he does not know those costs. He has gone down that path. He says he does not know them, and he will not know them until after the decisions have been taken. I believe that is entirely irresponsible.
Mr Collaery: He did not say that. It does not follow.
MR WOOD: Mr Humphries is determined not to provide a justification. He is refusing to do so.
Mr Humphries: The savings, not the costs.
MR WOOD: But you will not know the savings costs.
Mr Humphries: We do not know until we have decided in Cabinet what it will be.
MR SPEAKER: Order!
MR WOOD: But you do not even know what the savings of closing a school will be.
Mr Humphries: Yes, I do. It depends on which school it is.
Ms Maher: We do not even know whether we are going to close any schools, Bill, whether it be one or two.
MR WOOD: No, you are very thick on this. You do not want to go down that path of finding out the real cost of closing a school. You do not want to go down that path, I fear, because you do not want to know what that cost is.
Ms Maher: You are just not listening because you do not want to.
MR WOOD: I am listening most carefully.
MR SPEAKER: Order, Ms Maher, please!
MR WOOD: Having said that - and it has been a long debate and Mr Humphries is not going to concede he does not want to know what the real cost of school closure is going to be - I will proceed to other matters. I will focus on a couple of points that are not always well understood.
The demography of schools - the way that enrolments change, expand and contract over the years - is obviously a critical matter in education or planning. It is important for educational planners to know what the future enrolments are going to be - certainly to know as well as is possible to know. It is not an exact science. Projections are never entirely reliable; they simply cannot be. I believe that our Education Department over quite a long period of time has been as accurate as it is possible to be. I believe it is very good, but that also means that it makes
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