Page 2860 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 15 August 1990
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MR SPEAKER: You have sought leave to move a motion. Would you please formally move that motion so that we can vote.
MR WOOD: I thought that by reading it I had done so. I will do it formally for you. I move:
That the Assembly opposes the closure of any school.
Mr Collaery: Mr Speaker, there is a subsisting motion before the house, that the Bill be withdrawn.
MR WOOD: This takes precedence over that.
MR SPEAKER: Order! The point is that, by the Assembly giving leave to Mr Wood, his motion takes precedence. We will deal with that issue first. The question before the house is:
That the Assembly opposes the closure of any school.
MR WOOD: I was saying that the community very clearly opposes the closure of its schools. The community is focused now very much on the actions and the votes of the people in this Assembly. The proposal that first came up was that made by Mr Humphries when he dropped - almost out of the blue - a proposal to close 15 to 25 schools. It was an ill-considered idea. It came, I suppose, within two or three months of his accession to the position of education Minister. At that stage, and even more clearly since, it became quite clear that it was ill conceived, ill thought out and ill prepared, and it had no foundation in sound data or sound consideration. That has been amply demonstrated by the debate in this parliament and in the community.
I was saying yesterday, only too briefly because of the nature of the debate, that the Minister's tactic throughout has been to rely on two arguments - firstly, that we have to save a lot of money, and indeed we concede that financial circumstances are tight. His second argument has been that he will tell us all the information when we know which schools are to close, though that argument has subsequently been amended, and he will tell us all his reasons and his arguments, his rationale, when the budget is presented. I doubt that we will see it in the budget because it hardly exists.
With the lack of evidence that the Minister has been able to bring out, it is no wonder that school after school has been able to demonstrate how foolish, wrong and incomplete his data is. Not one school has been able to say, "He has given us good and sound reasons. He has given us something we cannot contest". Every school has come back to members on that side, as they have to members on this side, with sound evidence to retain their schools. They have been able to demolish the arguments of the Minister, yet he persists.
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