Page 4249 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
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Mr Humphries said at one stage that there would be no consultation other than on the criteria for school closures. No-one who understood the system could possibly have made such a statement. As it turned out, of course, there was consultation. Might I say that there was a great deal of consultation right up to last weekend, right up to Saturday when there was a succession of people flowing through the Minister,s office. He had to concede the point. The Minister did not know and did not think that social consequences were involved. It was not until the impact of school closures was brought home to him by the community and this parliament insisted that there be some look at it that belatedly the Interim Territory Planning Authority and its social planners were brought into the exercise to make their comments. They were recognised after the event, after announcements and not before the announcement that schools would close.
Any reasonable planning arrangement should be based on good information, but the information was not known in March, it is not fully known even now, and every bit of information that we do have today has been dragged out laboriously bit by bit as we have sought answers to our questions. The Minister did not know, early on, and did not even think about gathering information about costs and savings. He said, "We will find that out when we know what schools are going to close", but that is a rather strange way to proceed in planning matters. Eventually the Hudson report was commissioned to get him out of the very deep hole that he had dug for himself in his ignorance of the social factors and the costs of closures.
Fundamental, of course, to any education planning should be the prime educational considerations. I believe that you should not start a procedure of change in education unless at the top of your priority list you have a clear knowledge of what you want to achieve for the children in our schools. From time to time Mr Humphries did say that he was aiming to maintain educational quality. But never was that elaborated; never were we told how that was to be achieved.
If we need further evidence that this whole debacle has been caused by inadequate planning, we need only think back to a radio interview I heard last Friday. It was a clear day after the report had come down and Mr Humphries had not then read the Hudson report; he had read the recommendations only. I recall a similar conversation, this time in the ABC studios, a clear day after the preschool report had been brought down and Mr Humphries said that he had not yet read the report. I do not think you can plan without attention to detail, and we see the lack of it in front of us.
Nowhere has Mr Humphries ever been on top of the detail and, as I have outlined, I do not think he has been on top of the educational philosophies right through. I believe
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