Page 4495 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
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and then reject the very clear recommendation that it was entirely possible and open to Government to proceed to close some schools at the end of this school year.
That is the position of the Government, in essence. We take the issues raised in the Hudson report. We intend to act on those issues and we intend to address problems as they have been identified; but we also intend to proceed with a course of action which Mr Hudson himself recommends, and that is the closure of a certain number of schools and the putting in place of other mechanisms that will see certain savings made in the longer term.
MR MOORE: I have a supplementary question, Mr Speaker. Consider that this is a motion of the Belconnen regional boards. It is a very major part of the education community that previously has not been involved in the school closure issues and they are drawing attention to advice that was deficient and so forth. Are you not prepared to consider that perhaps it is appropriate to extend the time of any of the schools, particularly, perhaps, the Cook school? Could it be given a similar opportunity to Lyons because of the difficulties in that particular situation of moving into the Macquarie school, with the Independent Living Centre?
MR HUMPHRIES: The fact is, Mr Speaker, that the Belconnen regional boards have been involved in this process. They have been a part of the ongoing debate between the community and the Government and the school sector, in particular. It is quite wrong to suggest that they have not had some role to play already in this matter. I think, with respect, however, that a comment on the Hudson report at this stage of that kind is not fully based on the evidence put forward in the report. It relies selectively on some information that comes from that report and ignores other information.
I should make it clear, when Mr Moore refers to Lyons being given an opportunity, that the opportunity is not generated by a desire to sit back and leave the Lyons school on tenterhooks for a long period. The opportunity, as Mr Moore puts it, is in fact a period allowed for by Government to accommodate the possibility that the school at South Curtin will not be ready to receive students from Lyons. There is no similar reason why that should need to be the case in respect of Cook and Macquarie schools. I fully expect that at the beginning of term 1 of 1991 Macquarie school will be ready to receive those extra pupils. So, to characterise it as some kind of opportunity for Lyons is not the case. It is not an opportunity; it is an adjustment to the reality of the timeframe available in this case.
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