Page 4172 - Week 14 - Thursday, 25 October 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
basis as questions have been raised in this parliament and the community. Perhaps that sound planning has been one of the problems that Mr Humphries has belatedly discovered. Canberra is so well planned, he has discovered, as time has gone on, that to remove some of that infrastructure is to cause serious damage.
The situation in Canberra is different from that in other cities. Schools in Canberra, for the most part - not always the schools in the earliest days - do not sit out in splendid isolation, as they do in most other parts of Australia. Let me quote from a planning document from the Interim Territory Planning Authority when it was, rather late in the piece, asked to comment by the Minister and the department of education. That document makes a very clear statement and an important one. I quote:
Primary schools comprise the basic building block of most Canberra suburbs. The primary schools are located to optimise safety, access, social interaction and residential amenity. This approach ensures equitable access to primary schools for all children.
That is very sound advice from the city's planners. It is unfortunate that the advice was not accepted.
Mr Jensen: Which one was that again, Bill?
MR WOOD: I quoted it to you, Mr Jensen. The Government has ignored Canberra being a planned city, and it ignores the advice that it belatedly sought when planning its closures.
Mr Humphries: That is not correct.
MR WOOD: You pay attention. Mr Moore and my colleague Mr Connolly might correct me if I am wrong, but I recall that in the Estimates Committee hearing the chief education officer, the bureaucratic head of the ministry, Dr Willmot, said that it was on 18 July that they first made contact with the planners. You might check that date for me - I am relying on my memory - but it was some time about then. It was so far down the track, yet only at that stage was there some thought to consult the planners. That information should have been available to Mr Humphries before he gave any real consideration to which schools were to close or even that schools ought to close.
I have something to say about that report of the Interim Territory Planning Authority. It was based on a premise: if schools were to close, which ones should they be? It was not necessarily a statement from the authority that certain schools ought to close. Bear in mind the very heavily emphasised "if". The planning authority reported subsequently that its analysis supports the closure of Cook and Holder primary schools.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .