Page 4375 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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other. Indeed, as I read into Hudson, I believe that he raised enough questions about Lyons Primary School to suggest that there are very good grounds for keeping it open. In fact, Lyons Primary School will stay open. It will never close because the reality of the situation is that South Curtin school will not be worked upon. The union ban will prevent any work there.
The tenants - the great number of tenants at that school - will not be able to be relocated and at the end of first term next year the Minister will make an announcement that the children at Lyons Primary School will stay on for another term. At the end of term 2 we will have a similar announcement simply because it is quite impossible to have South Curtin school ready for any students. It will not work out. There is no way that that can happen. Apart from that sheer reality, Lyons has a very good case. It is clear, and Hudson made the point, as the Interim Territory Planning Authority did, that it is - - - (Quorum formed)
It is clear that Lyons has a social disadvantage because of the way the suburb has been structured, with large numbers of fairly low cost houses and multi-unit buildings. For a whole variety of reasons it is clearly identified as such. Accordingly, it, more than many other suburbs, needs its local school. There is also a great debacle emerging about buses supposedly to take students from Lyons to South Curtin. Hudson, who did not like to bus government school children across boundaries and recognised the cost attached to busing, recommended a proposal for a mini-bus of some sort and a shuttle service. The parents showed that to be no great sense, showing that it took a very considerable amount of time to do that with a small bus. So it is simply not feasible. I think I recall the Minister saying that that probably was not an option.
Well, what is the option? I did hear - perhaps I am wrong - that someone was proposing a banana bus, an articulated bus. That could do no more than run down the main street. It certainly could not even negotiate a park within a school or drive through. So that is not an option. The problem of busing those children, now accepted, presumably - nobody has said that those young children, up to grade 3, should not be bussed - is one that you will not be able to get over. People are reluctant to provide for routine bus services; so how do you get out of that one? All people say that they have to be bussed and you will not overcome that problem.
Then, with Lyons, there is the problem of costs. Figure 5.1 in supplementary budget information paper No. 3, in a sense, was used as evidence against Lyons Primary School. Yet, the figures in that, as we found out in the Estimates Committee and as Hudson also pointed out, when attributed to Lyons and other schools were quite wrong. Hackett is a school, too, that suffered quite severely through the use of incorrect figures. In total sum those figures are not major; but when you are comparing costs, and when the
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