Page 3475 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
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Canberra, and the people of Canberra will throw you out on it at the next election. But if there was one way of pouring kerosene on to the fire of community resentment on the school closure issue, it would be to give away this prime piece of real estate to one of the wealthiest private schools in Canberra.
This decision of the Government is breathtaking in its audacity. It is breathtaking in its double standards. I have previously said in debate in this place that I respect the political courage of the Education Minister, Mr Humphries, in the fact that he has been prepared to confront meetings of parents and students and debate and present the Government's case on school closures. I think it is a fundamentally wrong case, but I respect Mr Humphries' political courage in going out and meeting his opponents and detractors and putting his case to them.
I wonder how any member of this Government will now be able to go out and face the community and the parents whose schools you are closing and say, "We have to close your school; we have to throw your kids out of their school; we have to make you disrupt your lives and go through different methods of transport to get to school; we have to flog off the site to raise some money; but we can give away a half a million dollar block of land to Canberra Girls Grammar School", which, as I said before, is one of the wealthiest schools in Canberra.
That, of course, is not merely my assertion. Mr Kaine was attempting to draw some spurious comparisons here with some other schools in Canberra and saying to us, "How do we draw a line; how can we distinguish between non-government schools, one to the other?". Of course, the answer to that is simple. This Government today - like our Government when in office and when it returns to office - has always distinguished between the funding needs of different non-government schools. For example, the Marist school at Pearce that Mr Kaine referred to presently receives about $3 in recurrent government funding from this Government to every dollar that goes to Canberra Girls Grammar School. The funding system for non-government schools recognises the different needs of differing non-government schools.
It is a pathetic reflection on this Government that, in attempting to dodge this issue, the best it has been able to come up with is to throw back at the Labor Party that we are in some way opposed to state aid. It is a pathetic attempt to reopen old sectarian wounds from the 1950s. It is a pathetic attempt which will be rejected by the community because the community knows that your decision to close government schools is wrong. They know that; they are convinced of that.
You have spent the last three or four months out there in the community trying futilely to convince people - but putting a fair bit of effort into it, I will concede - that we have to close schools because of the dire economic
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