Page 3114 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 12 September 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Mr Wood: I am going to be very quiet today, you see; very polite. I should have followed you, not preceded you.
MR HUMPHRIES: You should have, yes. This is the Mr Wood who claims to be able to chair an objective inquiry. Mr Wood claimed on 14 August in this Assembly:
Now you know what schools you want to close but you have to put it off until the budget.
Here is a brave statement:
I predict that when the budget comes down very little information will be contained in it because you do not want to give up the evidence.
Now we have here on the table a document of 59 pages crammed full of facts and figures on the costs and the savings arising out of school closures - plenty of information; tons of information. I argue that it is more than Mr Wood could possibly argue for. And I think that Mr Wood would clearly have to acknowledge, if he was being fair about this, that the Government has put plenty of information on this subject on the table. Mr Wood has not, unfortunately, kept out of the debate in the last few weeks on other subjects. He said, for example - - -
Mr Berry: Government for dodgy figures.
MR HUMPHRIES: Now Mr Berry interjects, "dodgy figures". Mr Berry needs to prove that those are dodgy figures. Let Mr Berry show where those figures are dodgy. Let Mr Berry come up with the evidence. When he comes up with the evidence we will see what it says. In the debate in the Assembly on 16 August, Mr Wood said this:
In particular in this current budget that you are framing for the financial year 1990-91, you will have no savings out of school closures. You will have no savings, so what is all this talk about? You are not going to achieve what you set out to achieve.
Now Mr Wood is basing his assumptions again on a particular premise, and that premise is that for some reason you do not impute into this process of calculation the capital gains to be made from the sale of school sites; you do not impute the capital gains from the sale of the schools.
Now, a member opposite interjects about real estate. I might remind the member opposite, although he was not here at the time, so he probably would not know, that his predecessor, Mr Paul Whalan, made plans while in government to produce some savings, to produce some capital gains, out of the sale of disused school sites. Mr Whalan tabled policy plan variations, changed policy plan variations, to permit the sale of partial or whole school sites - the Fisher school, the Watson school, the high school at Woden
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .