Page 2499 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 7 August 1991
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Mr Humphries: When was that?
MR WOOD: That meeting was on 15 August last year.
Mr Humphries: They have changed their minds since then.
MR WOOD: Yes, indeed, they have. There has been some moderation of the view since then; that I do not deny. What the Follett Government has done is to go back to a sensible timeframe.
Mr Humphries: That is not what the community wants.
MR WOOD: You have to sustain your arguments. The Cabinet has decided, as Mrs Nolan quoted, that there shall be no acceleration of the consolidation, and that is an eminently sensible decision. Why, I wonder, did Mr Humphries suddenly accelerate that process? Here we had a large part of the community saying, "This is too quick, Minister". But Mr Humphries accelerated the process, and he did it, quite simply, to get it off the election agenda for February next year, so that it was all signed, sealed and delivered before that. He did not want it around then. Now the community view has moderated, and I do not disclaim that there is a strong element in Weston Creek that says, "Yes, let us proceed with this".
Mr Humphries: And that was what I responded to.
MR WOOD: I will come to that. You applied a sweetener to the process. You said, "We will offer you $2m and we will do this, that and everything else". But part of that process - and this points to the nonsense of your decision - was to put in, I think, seven transportable classrooms in one year to accommodate the overcrowding and then in the next year to pull most of them out again as the numbers diminished.
Mr Duby: That is the whole point of temporary classrooms. They are temporary.
MR WOOD: Yes. There was no requirement to do that so rapidly. We could well have had the consolidation proceeding in 1993 without that number of demountables. Think of the money that could have been saved as a result. That was part of the sweetening that went on to get it off the agenda.
Mr Humphries: They asked for them.
MR WOOD: Yes, I do not question that; but does putting in demountables one year to cater for the overcrowding and pulling them out the next year, when you have a perfectly good campus that could take those students, sound like good government? Is that good decision making? I make it quite clear that it is not. The Labor Party is listening to the community.
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