Page 4523 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
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The Minister may respond and indicate whether the Hudson report will be given any greater consideration than it has been given, and whether the expenditure of that money and time will bring some more detailed response in this Assembly.
The Minister has often criticised people in this house for picking and choosing from the Hudson report. That is something he has done himself, of course. That is inevitably the case with any report, but I think that there is a great deal in that report that requires further consideration. Mr Hudson has raised some very good points.
Mr Collaery: Hence the task force.
MR WOOD: The task force does not cover the whole range of what Mr Hudson was talking about.
Mr Kaine: You have not seen the terms of reference. How can you say that?
MR WOOD: I have seen what you Ministers put out, and it does not say a great deal. Mr Humphries, I think that you owe it to Mr Hudson to come back into this chamber and give a fairly detailed Government response to that report and to have some further debate in this chamber about that report.
MR HUMPHRIES (Minister for Health, Education and the Arts) (4.28): I am happy to answer the questions that have been posed. First of all, let me go back to Mr Moore's comments. He made reference to the submission from Mr Jim Weston. That might be a bad example. I do not know. The fact is that I have had something like 4,000 pieces of correspondence on the question of schools, either submissions or letters. That probably does not include the telephone calls. There have been 4,000 written pieces of correspondence. I am afraid I do not think it indicates a lack of efficiency on the part of my office if one of those pieces of correspondence cannot be identified and located.
I do not have a record of Mr Weston's submission. I did meet with Mr Weston on at least one occasion. I had a meeting with him and another constituent, I think, on a Saturday afternoon, for about half an hour. We talked about the issues affecting his school and the system generally. It is not fair to say that I have not given Mr Weston a reasonable portion of my time and effort, or of the department's time and effort. I do apologise to Mr Weston if I have not responded to his submission as yet. I can assure him that an enormous amount of manpower has been employed in the department in responding to letters, submissions, telephone calls and, of course, public meetings, and the various ways in which the community has debated this issue.
Mr Moore also made the accusation that we now have a bureaucratic education system. I want to reject that assertion quite emphatically. This system remains a highly
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