Page 3469 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
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We have the spectacle of the Chief Minister of the ACT crying poor. He has been doing that for a year now. To follow up his tactics, in his budget he has imposed quite severe taxes on the citizens of the ACT. He has placed a heavy imposition on ACT taxpayers. Surely this is not the time to be generous. Was this not a chance for the hard pressed ACT Government to gain some income? Here is a block of land that is, on various estimates, worth between $300,000 and $500,000. That is a large amount of money and I am sure the Treasury would be very keen to have that amount. But no, the opportunity has been missed.
We are going to sell off the land of the schools that have been closed. We had children from Weetangera here a moment ago. Their school land is going to be sold - maybe for that amount of money; hopefully, in terms of what the Government says, for more than that. So we are selling off that government land. We are selling off the heart, the energy and the work of many people over many years - getting income from the government land - and we are subsidising a well resourced private school. I want to repeat this: we are selling off government school sites and at the same time giving valuable land to that school. It is a clear demonstration of the different standards this Government has when dealing with government schools as against non-government schools. Those standards say, "Hit the government schools; help the private schools. Redistribute the resources from the government to the private".
I have heard the Chief Minister argue that he is following long established procedures. It is certainly true that there has, in the ACT, been a history of support for non-government schools by allowing them to acquire land for their schools free of charge. That is a generous policy. It does not apply, I believe, in most other places, but in the ACT it is one that the Labor Party supports. We will continue to support that policy. Let me make that very clear. For example, as new schools develop in Tuggeranong, we will continue to apply that policy that land be made available to them. And we will continue that into the future, at Gungahlin or elsewhere. That is a long established procedure. I recognise it.
There is also another long established procedure, and that has been that this particular area was not available for release to the Girls Grammar Junior School. That school has long sought this site. I do not have access to the records, but it goes back many, many years, over many governments - Labor and Liberal - at the Federal level. There have been many approaches and many attempts, and the long established procedure, Chief Minister, has been that that land is not available for the school.
I think it is reasonable to change the purpose of that lease, and I will not argue about that. Let the school claim it. But let it claim that land in competition with
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