Page 3848 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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The Labor Party, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker, is playing one sector of the community off against another, in a way which it accused the Alliance Government of having done last year. It is playing off what it calls the rich part of the non-government sector against the poor part. Mr Wood put his finger on the button very cleverly yesterday when he said, "Of course, if I had extended these cuts to the whole non-government sector, there would have been 10 times as many people out there today" - that is, yesterday - "protesting against the Government's actions". That is what it is all about; there are more votes in saving that larger non-government part of the sector than there are in saving the three schools whose funding has been most severely cut.
Let us forget this notion that it is socially just to be proceeding against the so-called rich schools. Many parents - I know many of them - who send their children to those schools are not rich. It is a travesty to describe them as rich. They work hard and save hard to get their kids to those schools because they want a better education for their children and they believe that they can provide that at those schools. That is why they send their children to them. Saying that those parents are rich shows gross disrespect for them. That is a gross distortion of the facts.
Mr Connolly: We have never said that they are rich parents; we have said that they are rich schools.
MR HUMPHRIES: Here is the distinction - they are not really rich parents; they are rich schools. They may be rich schools with poor parents sending their children to them, who cannot afford to pay any more, who already pay as much as they can in many cases. That is a good enough argument, it seems to me, for this Government to review the drastic and unwarranted nature of its attack on those schools.
Let us be clear, Madam Temporary Deputy Speaker: This Government's decision flies in the face of its own promises last year, which it inherited from the Federal Government and which it said it would not break, which it said it would uphold. The difficult thing about this budget decision is not so much that it is going to remove the cushioning - that in certain circumstances might be justified - but that they have done it so quickly, without consultation and without justification to the schools concerned.
They have said to those schools, "You have had a promise you have been relying upon, and you have planned for it. You have made commitments on the basis of what you expected to get from the ACT Government, based on those Commonwealth promises which we, the Labor Government, renewed. You have
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