Page 4529 - Week 15 - Thursday, 22 November 1990
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
was Mr Humphries who requested that Mr Weston actually put that submission to him, which he did personally, and, as Mr Humphries said he has since had no reply.
It is not that particular submission that we are concerned about; it is all the others that have not had any acknowledgment. Whether or not they have had an acknowledgment is not the critical thing. The question is how much notice has been taken of all the work that people have put in. I would suggest that it is very, very little.
The other factor, in terms of education wearing the brunt, is that we have had the Minister arguing, "Well, there is $7.5m. It has gone across to bussing and, therefore, does not come into it, and that changes the whole thing". It changes it by, perhaps, about 3 to 4 per cent. Even if you take that into account, you still find that education is wearing the brunt of this Government's attack. That is the case. No matter which way you look at it, that is what they are doing.
As Ministers go, I feel a little bit sorry for Mr Humphries. It seems that he is the only one that cannot manage to get his area looked after. One cannot help wondering to what extent he has been set up.
The other fact that comes into a reply from Mr Humphries is the notion that the P and C council had put their proposition on Saturday, and, therefore, they had only 48 hours to reply, which made it absolutely impossible for the Government, with all its resources, to reply. The Hudson report was available to the P and C only a couple of days before that. With no resources but their own community efforts, basically, they were able to come up with a sensible, rational, reasonable option, where no schools had to close, and there were still savings to be made. They were able to do that by Saturday.
They had to make sure that they had got the agreement of the whole council, and they were still able to come up with that on Saturday.
Mr Humphries: They did not do that.
MR MOORE: You just said that they did.
Mr Humphries: Get the agreement of the whole council? No, they did not.
MR MOORE: The council executive. They came up with the options. They had the power to do that because of the room that the whole council had given them. They were, thankfully and appropriately, within their normal operating systems because they were able to come up with that within about 48 hours. With all your resources, you were not able to respond to that in any satisfactory way in 48 hours because you were bloody-minded. You had lost sight of what
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .