Page 2180 - Week 07 - Thursday, 6 June 1991
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MR WOOD: Yes, when the budget comes down. But you still do not understand that, if you are making such radical decisions to close a quarter of the education structure, this information - - -
Mr Humphries: What? Who has told you that?
MR WOOD: That is right; you go and check your figures. To make such a massive change you need to know beforehand the full implications and all the ramifications.
Mr Kaine: This is part of the nip and tuck theory.
MR WOOD: Well, let me do a bit of maths. There are about 100 schools in this system, and he was going to close up to 25 of them.
Mr Kaine: He never said that he was going to close up to 25.
MR WOOD: I see. Well, that is news to me; I cannot read and I cannot hear. "Up to 25", he said, and if 25 is not a quarter of 100 I do not know what is. But that is thoroughly consistent with your knowledge of mathematics and the figures on that side of the parliament.
Further, there was no effort and no ability to provide documentation for this change. There was no philosophical groundwork laid. There was simply the statement - and an important one, I concede - "We have to do it; we cannot afford anything else". Of course, the decisions were progressively reversed as the community revolted. Mr Kaine, let me tell you again - you have been told before in this Assembly: We did not whip up the community; we did not whip up the Cook and Lyons communities and others. I can tell you: They did not need to be whipped up. They are very active groups, as were the Weetangera and Higgins groups. We did not whip them up. I will tell you what we did, which you could not do; we listened to them. We heard what they were saying. And, as your own Liberal Party says, that is something that you cannot do. We heard them and we responded, as we continue to do, to what they are saying.
Mr Humphries never learnt, and this Government does not seem to know, that decisions, while sometimes not hard to make, very often are difficult to implement; and the processes to do so often take a great deal more care, thought, attention and time than you may have taken in making the decision. If Mr Humphries had had some background in administration, he would have known that, to bring in such a radical and destructive change, he had a lot of work to do beforehand. Indeed, the Education Department had long ago - some six or seven years ago - established procedures by which schools would be closed if it was considered they needed to be, but these were ignored. Perhaps they are in the archives; I do not know.
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