Page 3121 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 12 September 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
in their objections to the Government action, and they have the opportunity to hear the sort of nonsense that gets spread around about school closures and these sorts of trite suggestions that Mr Humphries makes about it.
What we deal with here, more than anything, is credibility. The Alliance Government lacks credibility. The Government as a whole lacks credibility on this schools issue - more than anything. A suggestion by Mr Humphries that he now puts out a single person to run an inquiry will not work because you do not have the credibility in order to carry that and to be able to convince people. One of the things that Mr Wood drew attention to earlier was that at least the committees in this Assembly have some credibility, and that, therefore, is a far better way to go about it.
Mr Humphries: You do not know who we are appointing yet, Michael. How can you say that?
MR MOORE: I agree. The fact that you are appointing a single person, and that the reporting date is going to be very, very soon, indicates that it will lack credibility because Canberra people recognise that it has been a general practice for all governments to attempt to appoint people when they expect a certain outcome. I can say that now because I have no idea who the person is that you are suggesting for it, and that is the way it is going to be seen. That is the way it is going to be seen by the community.
Mr Humphries: You support it by saying so. It is a shameful suggestion, Michael Moore, and you should withdraw it.
MR MOORE: It is a shameful suggestion that I can say that we do not even know who it is going to be and so then take it that way. Every time that I make some criticism of some area, you suggest that it is a shameful suggestion of people, because people are always perfect. Let it be a shameful consideration - then that is what it is. I can tell you that it will have no credibility. Whoever it is, it will have no credibility whatsoever, because it will be perceived to be a person appointed in order to get what you want in just the same way that the Priorities Review Board was appointed and the people on that were selected because of their own approach to the general political matters.
Now, I could go through a series of arguments about this, all of which I have prepared, but I feel that it is appropriate just to take that point and to make one other point, since Mr Humphries brought up the preschool task force - that is that I have been informed that the Fisher preschool is one of the preschools that have now been nominated to close under what they call the cluster model. That will be the next step of the Government's decimation of the neighbourhoods. This is about neighbourhoods and about the planning principles in Canberra that the members of the Rally in the parliament seem to have forgotten -
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .