Page 3633 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 16 October 1990
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Government expenditure; in other words, doing better with less money. None of us can get away from that imperative. We all have to face up to it. We all have to deal with that basic problem. Those opposite did not deal with it; they did not have to deal with it apparently because they did not consider themselves in a position of permanency to have to do it. We do; we are taking the hard decisions and we will stand by those decisions.
Declining numbers of students in most areas in the ACT mean that there is considerable surplus space within our public school system. I know that in interjections during question time those opposite pooh-poohed the idea that there is any surplus space in ACT government schools. They suggest that this is just not true. I will remind them of how we worked out the size of that surplus space. We took the surplus space calculated in each individual school in the ACT and added them together and got a figure representing the total surplus space in the system. This was how we calculated it. It was not just an approximation. It was an exact calculation based on adding together the surplus space in each government school.
Government schools themselves indicated what that surplus space was. They told the Government, as they told the previous Government, what the surplus space in their schools was or is. If those opposite say that we are wrong; that there are not, as the Chief Minister said, 13,000 surplus spaces in our system, tell us which schools have made the wrong calculations. Tell us which schools have given inaccurate figures on their surplus spaces and, if no schools have given inaccurate figures, tell us then how we have made an error in adding up those surplus spaces, because the sums, when added up, come to something in excess of 13,000. They do; whichever way you add them up they come to more than 13,000 places and I think that, before the Opposition next raises this question in this place, it ought to justify and prove where it is the Government has made a mistake, because it has not.
I think it is inevitable, Mr Speaker, that some people will be inconvenienced by school closures. I do not hesitate to say that the Government deeply regrets this; but to readjust to our new circumstances, circumstances that are considerably different to our circumstances in the past, will require difficult decisions. I refuse to accept the criticism of those opposite, the harping, whingeing criticism of those opposite, until they tell us and the community what they would do in the same circumstances, until they spell out their solution to the same problems. I say again, as I have said many times before, that they have not done so, they are incapable of doing so and until they do so they should be held in the contempt that we on this side of the chamber hold them in. On this matter they have a total and utter lack of credibility which gives them no basis to rise in this place to make these statements.
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