Page 2507 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 7 August 1991
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MR DUBY: The people I am referring to are the parents and citizens involved with the two high schools in question. As Mr Humphries said, the arrangements we put in place to amalgamate as of the start of the 1992 school year were at the specific request of that community. In addition, all through this year, in terms of the parents and citizens bulletin that goes out to the students at all the schools and to the feeder schools for those high schools, all the parents have been involved.
There have been numerous meetings. Meetings were held on 8 May and on 24 July and a special meeting for the whole community was held on 15 May. On each occasion the proposal was overwhelmingly endorsed. Each of those meetings was open to the public and advice on all meetings was provided via newsletters and special notices sent home with the schoolchildren. Advice regarding the 15 May meeting was sent to each of the feeder schools in the area. The result of those meetings was also reflected in the schools' newsletters. On all of those occasions the meetings have overwhelmingly asked that the amalgamation proceed and that it proceed quickly - in other words, at the start of the 1992 school year.
What do we have as a result of the change in government? We have this Labor ideology that anything that involves changing the sacred cow of the Canberra school system somehow has to be resisted. It is really remarkable. If you were looking down at Canberra from above, you would imagine that the supposed conservative side was the Labor side. They are the ones who want to keep everything just the way it is, who do not want to change. They do not want to change anything for the better. Not only that, they are also going back to some of the bad old practices, as we have seen with the Ainslie tip.
More to the point, though, is the difficulty that the people of Weston Creek are finding. Perhaps they can understand that, whilst their wish is to have the amalgamation start in 1992, it will not be proceeded with by the Government. They can understand that maybe it will start at the beginning of 1993. But the most important thing, Mr Berry and Mr Wood, is that they need to know with certainty when this amalgamation will occur. The demographic figures indicate that an amalgamation is inevitable. People can see that. We have the charts which indicate that the school population of Weston Creek is continually declining and that an amalgamation at some stage is going to have to be entered into. Why can you not provide people with certainty as to when it will happen so that they can plan for their children who are currently in grade 6, grade 5, et cetera?
The simple fact is that people need to know. People like certainty. When will this Government do a bit of governing? When will they let the people know what their plans are? We have already seen examples of this: The Government have not the guts to declare, for example,
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