Page 2031 - Week 08 - Tuesday, 5 June 1990
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Collaery and Mr Duby were initiatives that my colleague Mrs Grassby had developed during her stewardship of housing and urban services. We will see how the Government's proud boasts on housing stand when the Priorities Review Board's recommendation to sell off the stock of surplus public housing is implemented. There is plenty of time for these proud statements today to be judged by the Canberra community.
Let me return to the central issue of education. I am sure the Government is getting tired of the Opposition returning to this subject. Let me assure you that the Opposition is not getting tired of raising it. The community demands that we raise it, and every member of this Opposition will continue to raise it until the Government gets the message. Members opposite have only got to go out into the community to get that message. They would only have had to walk a block down the street to get it this morning.
In preparing myself to take on one of the responsibilities that our leader, Rosemary Follett, gave me in the shadow ministry of planning, I had occasion to re-read a work that I had first read while an undergraduate student of Adelaide University. It is a work with which I am sure Mr Collaery, who is not here at the moment, would be very familiar, as no doubt would other perhaps thoughtful members of the Government. The work that I am referring to is that seminal work by Professor Hugh Stretton - now of Adelaide University but sometime of Oxford and the ANU - Ideas for Australian Cities, first published privately in 1970 but regarded now as the fundamental work on Australian urban design, one of the few truly original works of political philosophy developed in Australia and a work that marked a turning point in the way Australians see cities.
Prior to Stretton's work, it was fashionable to denigrate suburbia and to say that suburban areas are merely a wasteland. Stretton argued that Australian cities can develop a pattern for enlightened civilisation in the suburbs, and he took Canberra as his model. He developed in that work, in great detail, the way the neighbourhood school concept became so central to Canberra's planning and was central to the development of the community in Canberra.
Mr Jensen: It still is.
MR CONNOLLY: "It still is", says Mr Jensen. Well, I hope that is the case and I hope it still is in 18 months' time when you people have seen the light and given up on your proposal to close 25 schools. I am sure that, when you close your 25 schools, that neighbourhood school plan will be in tatters, unless of course we adopt the marvellous lateral thinking of Mr Collaery, and perhaps Mr Jensen agrees with this. Mr Collaery said the other day, "It is all a question of definition". So there will continue to be neighbourhood schools; it is all a question of definition. Well, no doubt, as I have said before, the new
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