Page 2420 - Week 09 - Tuesday, 7 August 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES: Tirade is probably a better word. They say that we have had a total disregard for community interest. I have mentioned already that in my view the community interest is very much in providing ourselves with a financial environment in which we can move into the future, but I want to answer the comment that there has not been proper reflection of the needs of the community through this process.
We have had a two-stage public consultation process, a long and extensive one. It was not an exercise in cosmetic activity. It was not a piece of face-saving. It was a real exercise in public consultation. It resulted in over 180 submissions being received from people in the community and it did result in the Government actually modifying the criteria that it had put forward in its first stage of consultation for consultation in the second stage. If the Government was intent on proceeding with a particular course of action, one would ask why it went through that process of seeking public views and being rebuffed on particular points.
The fact is we were intent on hearing what the community had to say. I, as Education Minister, made a policy to get to as many public meetings as I could and to speak to as many people about the issue as I could. I responded to every letter that came in to me on the subject, I went to as many public meetings as I could arrange, I met with a number of delegations from schools talking about the issues and I reject the assertion, made by Mr Wood, that I was not appraised of the issues that this whole debate brings up. I am appraised of those issues. I am thoroughly appraised of them and I believe that on this basis the Government is entitled to make some decisions in the light of the evidence before it.
To say there has been no careful or accurate planning, as this motion also affirms, is simply not true. More than 100 options were considered by the project team before a reduced range of options was presented to me and to the joint party room and to the Cabinet. A great deal of time, hundreds of man-hours - or whatever we call them in this non-sexist world we live in - were employed by the Education Department carefully considering the options, exploring the opportunities and discovering what costs and what benefits would flow from particular decisions. To suggest that there has not been enough work I think is just ludicrous, utterly ludicrous. Information supplied to the Government, both from the community and from the Education Department, was extremely detailed, running into a very large pile. Objections came from some of the closing schools, but I have to say that in many cases they were based on a number of factors which I believed we were entitled to put to one side, and I think that we have to get on with particular decisions in the light of the evidence before us.
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