Page 1911 - Week 07 - Thursday, 31 May 1990
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Mr Berry: It was lithium for both the people speaking.
MR COLLAERY: Mr Berry has said it was lithium so that he could get up the ladder quicker. But I assure you, Mr Speaker, that will be a long time before the ALP is back up the ladder in the ACT.
Mrs Grassby: You want to bet? You should go to some of the meetings, Bernard.
MR COLLAERY: We have a very smart population. You might have scored some good points in the last couple of weeks, Mrs Grassby, but that will not change anything. You certainly insulted a member of the Rally executive in your speech. She has informed me that she never said any such thing.
Mrs Grassby: I beg your pardon; she did so.
MR COLLAERY: In any event, I am not going to involve myself. It is all hearsay. Neither you nor I know the truth of that matter, Mrs Grassby. The fact of the matter is that the Residents Rally has been around for years - you forget that; you think we are some phenomenon that just came in during the Assembly election campaign - and we have always been committed to the idea of neighbourhood schools and believe that no school in the ACT should close until all alternatives have been considered and the school community - students, parents and teachers - have had an opportunity to discuss the proposal and make recommendations on future ramifications.
The truth of the matter is that Mr Humphries has issued suggested criteria for school restructuring and the debate should continue. But in the new style of Labor - and Ben Chifley would certainly turn in his grave on that hill outside Bathurst - there is not to be a debate. Opposition members are getting straight into that sort of nonsense rhetoric, going out on the band wagon and having their hirelings at meetings to make comments and break up the proceedings.
Mr Speaker, this ministerial statement by Mr Humphries certainly does develop a strategy for education. It has been well received within the teaching sphere, I can assure Mrs Grassby. There is a need to attend to the salaries and conditions of teachers - the great people in this system who carry out the real work, the people whom we have skimmed over in this debate so far. The Teachers Federation has endorsed this Government's broad aims of ensuring that there is proper budget appropriation for the school system, that there is a degree of autonomy for schools and, above all, that the centrist policies developed under Labor do not continue.
During the election campaign the Residents Rally rejected the concept that a traditional bureaucracy should control
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