Page 4258 - Week 15 - Tuesday, 20 November 1990
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misinformation, you ought to have explored those options more. Some of those options provided for a situation where you could still make some savings but at the same time retain the schools, and without cutting teacher numbers.
The alternatives, as far as the Minister is concerned, are either we close schools or we have to cut teachers. Those are scare tactics and they have fooled nobody. The alternatives have been presented to you time and time again, and those are the alternatives that you could easily respond to. Even if they had not been, let us make it quite clear which ministry suffered the cuts thanks to the budget of this Alliance Government. Education and health were the only areas to suffer cuts in real terms. In fact, if you are looking at general areas, there is actually some indication that the area of TAFE was also one to suffer real cuts. That is a reflection of the values of the Alliance Government, not their decision making process, and that is why they have no credibility.
DR KINLOCH (4.17): Mr Deputy Speaker, it is easy to be critical as indeed I, on many occasions, have been critical. I understand that the role of the Labor Party and Mr Moore is to be critical in this instance; that is their job. This is not to say, however, that there are acres of faults in every direction and oceans of disaster. That is not only an exaggeration but an unreasonable level of criticism about our school system. So, I want to stress here many of the excellent developments of the past year, many of which I have seen at first hand.
Let us look, first of all, at the day-to-day continuation of our excellent system in school after school across the system. We have splendid preschools - and this was the year of the preschool task force, a task force undertaken as a consultative arrangement with many of the leaders of the preschool community. We can also see scores of thriving primary and secondary schools, and I have visited many of those. We certainly see - and Mr Moore has spoken about this on other occasions and I know he agrees with me - excellent colleges. They are some of the best schools of their kind in Australia, and they continue.
I have also especially noted special schools of distinction, for example, Cranleigh, and special programs for young people who have recently arrived in Australia, especially in the former Ainslie Infants School and Higgins Primary School. I hope they continue and thrive. There have also been some new developments and the continuation of recent initiatives. I note the welcoming of the first group of fee paying overseas students, especially in our colleges. To be fair about that, that began under the Federal Government and went on through the Follett Government and then to the Kaine Government. I want to say, though, that there was a continuation of excellence in a number of areas for which our Government was responsible.
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