Page 1006 - Week 04 - Tuesday, 19 March 1991
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The actions around the Weston Creek Health Centre are typical of the poor planning that characterises this Government. It is sadly consistent with the poor planning that accompanied their school closures and the whole host of other measures that they undertake. It seems that the Government cannot look one step ahead of what it intends to do. The changes around the former South Curtin school involve the most expensive alternatives that could have been undertaken. This is from a government that supposedly is setting out to make these changes to save money, yet nothing is more directly opposed to that. If you look at the Macquarie school and the South Curtin school, the options they have undertaken are the most expensive; yet we have Mr Humphries time after time talking about the need to save money. It just does not add up. It makes no sense at all.
I want to make one point as an aside, I suppose, from the major debate. I note that Mr Humphries argued that the actions of protestors and the pickets around the school cost the Government money. He was using them as an excuse to explain why it cost more to get the North Curtin children into the new Curtin school. Again that is not the case and again it is the poor planning of the Minister that is responsible.
The additional cost was incurred as a result of overtime and bonuses that were paid in order to complete, if only roughly, the necessary work to have students in on the first day of the school year. It was due to the overtime. What caused that overtime was nothing more than the planning of the Minister. No action at all took place at that school until the last possible moment. Nothing changed during the six or seven weeks of the school holidays; the pickets were there, surely, but nothing changed.
If these changes were to go ahead - and, of course, we did not want them to proceed - surely any sensible administrator, any sensible Minister, would have said, "Let us do it the minute school closes down for the holidays. We have the whole six or seven weeks to do it and we can do it in that time". But, of course, in the typical style of this Government, it was all left to the very last minute. For that reason they paid a much higher price for it than they would otherwise have had to do.
At the same time I understand that bonuses were paid to workers to encourage them to stay there, and that a transport firm was brought up from the coast somewhere at considerable cost and turned around again. There was no benefit from the money that was paid. The changes, all the work that had to go on around South Curtin school, with the delay that occurred at the same time, really did impose that additional cost that the Minister was talking about. It was due to the desperation that the Government had that those children at North Curtin should not return to their
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