Page 4518 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
schools originally targeted to remain open. I must say that I am delighted about that, and I am very pleased that they have finally seen sense.
The trouble is that in the process they have lost sight of the goal they originally started with. The goal they originally started with was to save money. In fact, they could have capitalised on the process. By the time we got to respond to Mr Hudson's report, I recall that the P and C council had put out a further suggestion, option E, which was methods of saving which they put out - - -
Mr Humphries: At the last minute.
MR MOORE: At the last minute, granted. Option E related to the compromises that they were prepared to make to save money. At that point, I believe, there could have been great capital made of the exercise. Instead of it being left as a totally negative exercise, the Government had the opportunity to turn around and say that this exercise was really about saving money. If the Government had said, "Look, how are we going to save money?", the Government would never have got them to compromise to say, "We are prepared to give a bit of land" - that is true - but it could have said, "Here is the opportunity; we will let you keep your schools open provided we can see other ways of saving the money". There have been a myriad of suggestions on how that could have been achieved; but, instead, we had a bloody-minded approach from a Government that has taken the education issue out of context and did not retain the planning context of the decision. Having taken what has clearly been shown to be bad advice, they continued on, in spite of the demonstrations and in spite of the fact that Mr Hudson, of course, relied on many of the same people for his advice as, indeed, had the Government.
As I pointed out the other day, that advice lacks credibility and it is the credibility, unfortunately, of the education ministry itself. It is likely that it is going to take them a long time to recover from that lack of credibility.
I mentioned to the Minister earlier that I would raise this matter. On 21 September I wrote to the Minister, asking him for a copy of his reply to one Mr Jim Weston, who had put in a submission on the school closures. The particular submission is not the issue in point. However, it raises the matter that Mr Weston has never had a reply, in spite of his request and in spite of a number of requests from me.
The real concern is: how many people who put in submissions received any kind of response? How much attention was paid to the submissions that were put in by the community right through the whole process of consultation and negotiation? Clearly, the information that has been received through the Estimates Committee and other areas indicates that the original set of submissions
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .