Page 2928 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 August 1990
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the incompetence of health and education administration in the ACT.
I will deal with education matters and you will not be surprised to learn that Mr Berry will be dealing with health matters. I do so on behalf of the Opposition but, more than that, I am speaking on behalf of the community that is dismayed and outraged at the actions of the Minister for Education - actions taken with the support, albeit reluctantly on some occasions, of his Government colleagues.
There was a time when I believed that the best Ministers were those who came to their ministerial job without any background of employment in that field. I do not believe that farmers, for example, make the best agriculture Ministers, or that educators - and there is a message here perhaps - make the best education Ministers, or indeed that lawyers make the best Attorneys-General. Too often people of that nature bring to their administration a background of interest, understandable interest, that hinders objective assessment of their new job. If a member without particular experience comes into an entirely new portfolio he can be entirely successful if he masters the complexities and the understanding necessary in that administration.
It is essential that a relative newcomer to a field work very hard to understand that field he comes to. This is the first failure of the education Minister - the first disastrous failure of Mr Humphries. He has simply never learned to understand; he has never set out to understand the ACT education system, or to value that system. It has been a very carefully constructed system; it is not some system that has arisen haphazardly over the years.
More than that, I do not think there was ever a thought in Mr Humphries' head that he needed to understand the system. This man, who aspires to be a senator - and the sooner he has a go at that the better - had so little judgment and so little wisdom that he could not conceive that he should understand the system that he had in his hands. Mr Humphries, let me tell you that this is a very carefully planned system. It is probably totally different to that in which you were educated. You had to get on top of it, you had to understand the system, to work out its philosophies and what it was all about. And you did not do that.
That was bad enough. But it was compounded by the fact that three months after coming to the office of Minister for Education, without any knowledge of it, the education Minister was proposing dramatic changes to the system - fundamental changes to this much valued system. He proposed to change a proven and philosophically sound system, an excellent system, with no serious thought as to what that system was setting out to do. That he did this in terms not ever expressed at an election is a display of
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