Page 4255 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
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MR HUMPHRIES: They cannot call him a dry Liberal. He is not that. He made it clear that he was not that. I think that in his report you can see a clear strain of advice, a clear strain of the view which is shared, not just by this Alliance Government in the ACT but, in fact, by governments all over this country. I will not live in the past any more, as Mrs Grassby accuses me of doing. I will live in the future. And the future of many education systems in this country is for schools to close. That is the sad but inevitable reality. I have to confess that I do not have any joy in being part of that process. It gives me no satisfaction at all to receive personal abuse from the parents of pupils at schools which are closing; but I have to say that I strongly stand by such a course of action if the alternative is the alternative chosen by many other systems in this country, and that is to sack teachers or to reduce the quality of resources available to schools in our various public education systems. That is a course of action which this Government has rejected, and I am proud of the fact that it has rejected that.
MR MOORE (4.07): Mr Deputy Speaker, it is interesting to note that Mr Hudson entitled his consultation A Community Divided?, because that is exactly what this Alliance Government has provided us with - a divided community. But it is not a community divided down the middle; it is a community clearly divided - community on one side; Alliance Government on the other side. The Alliance Government - - -
Mr Humphries: Forty per cent of people approved of our decisions. Remember the opinion poll?
MR MOORE: Mr Humphries interjects that 40 per cent of people approved of their decisions. I think it is appropriate for Mr Humphries to go back and look carefully at that poll and look at how the question was asked and so on. On Sunday, I understand, the Alliance Government had a retreat to worry about its image, and that image, of course, is a tarnished image. The reason it is a tarnished image is that its members set about this exercise of school closures in entirely the wrong way. And they have continued to do so and they have continued backing down as more and more things have come to light. As more and more evidence has come to light the fallacious nature of their decisions and the evidence upon which they have based them has been made clear.
If I can just digress a little to respond to Mr Humphries talking about criteria for success, he talks about teacher satisfaction, student satisfaction and things like that. I think it is time that Mr Humphries went and started to listen - not talk to, but listen - to some teachers and some of the principals and try to determine what teacher morale is like in this system. Whilst we might have a 96 per cent retention rate, which is wonderful, I think that Mr Humphries ought to begin to realise just how low morale is. I think he would also find that parental satisfaction
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