Page 3478 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 19 September 1990
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seized the opportunity while there is a conservative government running this town to grab this land. People in the community - ordinary people in Canberra, who could never dream of being able to afford to send their children to Canberra Church of England Girls Grammar School, fine school that it is - are having their schools shut down, their community gutted, and at the same time they see what you are up to.
As I said before, if there was one way of pouring kerosene on to the flames of community resentment, this incompetent Alliance Government has found it. The outrage that the people in the community have been exhibiting at your school closures policy is nothing compared to the outrage they will show now they know that there is one rule for them - that their schools have to close because of budgetary constraints - but another rule for others, who get a half a million dollar piece of real estate just given to them. It is an appalling decision which will haunt your Government until February of 1992.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (3.38): I commented in the MPI discussion yesterday that the Opposition was dredging the bottom of the barrel to find things to supposedly whack the Government around the head with, and I find that, once again, members of the Opposition are delving even deeper into the barrel to try to find some vestige of an argument to run in this place. I think most people recognise this for what it is, and that is, once again, an attempt to win a few cheap votes by relying on the ignorance of people out in the community about the way in which these procedures occur.
There is no question at all that there are some people who will hear news reports or read the reports in the Canberra Times or other newspapers and say, "Isn't it awful? The Government is giving land away to some rich non-government schools and it is selling off some public schools". What they do not realise, of course, is the background and the history of these events and the way in which the Opposition, the Labor Party - the chief critic of the Government in this matter - has in fact engaged in exactly the same practice itself when in government. And I have got no doubt that they will do so again, whenever they are next in government. Hopefully that will not be in the near future.
As I have said, it is rich hypocrisy on the part of those opposite to criticise the practice of giving land to those schools which demonstrate the capacity to use it productively. I do not think for one moment it is possible to argue that that land is not going to be very valuable and well used by the school. There is no question of the school gaining any commercial benefit from that land. There is no question of the particular school concerned taking the land and then selling it off for housing development in a few years time. There is no question of that. We all know that if that land were ever surrendered
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