Page 3632 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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Safety will not be destroyed by removing some schools. That is the fact of life. As I said, it is true that any responsible parent or school would want to raise the issue of safety with children. Of course, schools have ongoing programs to alert students to safety measures and I have no doubt at all that they will continue. I think it is irresponsible of those opposite to alarm people into thinking that these things are changing totally and necessarily for the worst and that the problems that the whole Territory, as a community, is encountering with a change to a different funding base cannot be met through discussion and debate in a rational way.
I notice also that those opposite call for some assessment or inquiry into social impact when, in fact, no assessment or inquiry of any kind was proposed last year when the then Government suggested that we should be closing preschools. It is obvious to me, Mr Speaker, that preschool students are particularly susceptible to poor traffic arrangements. They are particularly susceptible to the dangers of main roads, and yet those opposite proposed not one thing to address the social impact of putting more preschool children on the road. Why is it that this Government has to justify its actions in this way, and not the previous Government? There is no explanation, obviously. I hope that those opposite will get up and explain why it is that this was the case.
I think it is also important to note that those opposite, as citizens or as senior members of the Australian Labor Party, to my knowledge made no call on the Federal Labor Government to conduct some social impact inquiry or study when schools were closed at the end of 1988.
Ms Follett: Yes, we did. You are wrong about that.
MR HUMPHRIES: I would like to see the evidence of that, Ms Follett. You will have a chance to speak in this debate and I would urge you strongly to rise and table in this place the press release that you issued, or that someone in your party issued, calling for social impact studies to be done by the Federal Government when it closed schools in 1988. You will say, of course, "Oh, there were backroom assertions made and we urged our colleagues to do the right thing", et cetera; but the fact of life is that the written evidence does not exist and I think that no attempt whatsoever was made to produce this kind of evidence. You will have your chance to table it, Ms Follett, and I suggest that you do.
As I have said many times before in this debate, we cannot get away from the financial impact of the changing circumstances of the ACT, and the purpose of the Government's schools reshaping program is, in fact, to maintain the high quality of educational services despite the need to obtain significant real reductions in ACT
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