Page 2961 - Week 10 - Thursday, 16 August 1990
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the fringes. It is a fundamental problem and it must be faced fairly and squarely by Government.
That is why we have grasped the nettle. That is why we have decided to carefully consider what is essential and what is not essential in our present provision of services and to ensure that we preserve what we consider to be the important elements of services in the Territory. I believe we consistently have been able to do that in light of that problem that I outlined.
I want to particularly respond to some comments by Mr Wood when he suggested that the Government has responded to some of the changes that have been suggested by the community in a way which reflects we have no confidence in our decision. He said, for example, that Dr Perkins was, and I quote, "teaching the Minister how to do his job".
I think that what Mr Wood is in fact trying to do is make a certain open-mindedness and fairness on the part of the Government in this process a sin. He is attempting to say that for the Government to do certain things that respond to those pressures from the community is a mistake and reprehensible. I am going to give examples of what I mean.
Mr Wood: You had not given thought to collecting the necessary data beforehand.
MR HUMPHRIES: That is not true, and I will come to that in a moment. For example, when this process started back in early May this year the Government set out a set of criteria for dealing with school closures - criteria which we believed ought to be the basis on which we proceed to choose which schools should close.
We did not pretend for one moment that we were inviting the community to agree or disagree with the notion of closing schools. We had made a decision, as a government, that that was an appropriate way of reducing the costs of providing education services without reducing quality. The criteria we put forward were discussed in the community, and as a result of those discussions we amended those criteria. We put out for a second period of public consultation an amended set of criteria with some quite significant changes in it. Mr Moore says that we will not allow people to express opinions. I suggest that that is just an example of where we did allow people to express opinions. It was fundamentally important that we did do that because we wanted to be absolutely sure that the views we were proceeding with in the community - particularly the criteria we were going to use for closing schools - were right and had the confidence, as far as they went, of that community. It was a sign of flexibility; it was not a sign of weakness. Similarly, when Dr Frances Perkins came forward and said that we had made fundamental mistakes and that our figures did not add up, rather than say, "Go away, we are going to ignore you", we said, "All right, you think we have got it wrong. We will face that question very fairly and squarely".
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