Page 4256 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
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at this stage is something very different from what was reported. What he was talking about was parental satisfaction in their own schools. Of course, there was great parental satisfaction in their own schools, and then the Alliance Government and the education Minister set about destroying the things that the parents were satisfied with. The problem is not just that this Minister was determined to make a standard Liberal response on education and that he was trying to out-Metherell Dr Metherell, but that, in fact, his decisions were based on very faulty advice.
One thing that is most interesting as far as this goes is that the Minister has not been able to recognise when that advice has been faulty, and the result of this is not just a lack of credibility for him and for his Government but a growing lack of credibility for the education ministry as a whole. In the Estimates Committee, with reference to section 2.13 on accountability and misleading evidence - and I will talk about that when we discuss the Estimates Committee this evening - it was clear that the committee had formed the view that one senior public servant had misled the committee and that senior public servant was, as was reported in the Canberra Times, in the area of education. It was misleading of the committee in a matter to do with planning and a matter to do with the planning of school closures. It is clear that that ministry is now getting even less credibility, because nobody is coming clean; information that ought be readily available as to how the decisions were made is not being made available, because every time any piece of information is made available it becomes very, very clear that it is shonky, that something is wrong with it.
Because of the awkwardness of time, we were not able to seek information concerning one particular set of items through the Estimates Committee. In fact, I wrote personally to Mr Humphries and asked him would he please provide as a matter of urgency information on school closures that dealt with items identified as the agenda for the joint party room meeting on 27 July 1990, when the decision was first made on school closures. It included groups of schools for consideration under two options, enrolment patterns and surplus capacities, bases for recommendations, details of financial implications, implications for special education units, implications for tenants, revised priority enrolment areas, disadvantages of small schools - notice, not advantages of small schools, just disadvantages - recommendations, and maps of regions with priority enrolment areas.
I got a response back from the Minister, who is interested in openness. This is the response, dated 12 November, that I received on 13 November from Mr Humphries:
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