Page 3861 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 16 October 1991
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I want to say this to the Canberra Grammar School and the Canberra Girls Grammar School - I have been involved with those schools personally and directly for over 20 years: If you do not fight for those Anglican families at the economic margin, you do not deserve to exist. You have to fight for those families at the margin.
So, these schools, whether they be level 1 or level 3 or level 10, need to have the kind of financing which ensures places in those schools not merely for those with solid family incomes but also for families at the margin. That is what I am pleading for. I reject this label of "well-off" schools. Of course, there are some people who are "well off" in the non-government system and the government system. Some families are well off; many, however, are living in a sacrificial mode on behalf of their children.
We in the Rally are very aware of this. On the fifth floor, four of our staff are in jobs in order to keep their children in either Catholic or Anglican schools. That is four people in one small staff. Those are the people we are fighting for. Any move which makes those schools more expensive makes it more and more difficult for families on the margin to make a legitimate free choice. The more you cut back on the Canberra Grammar School, the Girls Grammar School and the AME School, the more difficult then it will be. They will have to put the fees up; people at the margin will have to leave or they will have to find funds from elsewhere.
I am not opposing the obligations of families to make financial sacrifices. Indeed, it may be morally beneficial for families to make those sacrifices. It could be that one of the greatest benefits of the non-government school system is that people do make those sacrifices and that is deep in their hearts. Maybe "well-off" families should be making even greater sacrifices on behalf of other families. But it is not for our Government to play down the possibility of the marginal families to get into these schools with freedom of choice.
I am therefore pleading with you, Mr Wood, and with your party to drop a narrow ideological perspective. That is what it is. It is not a broad-based ideological perspective; it is a very narrow one, which has a certain number of cliches and labels, which says, "Look at that well-off school, rich school. Look at all those wealthy people". What you should be thinking about, Mr Wood, is the families on the margin. Go upstairs and talk to our four staff members and see to what degree they could afford to have their children in the Catholic and Anglican schools they are in unless they had a second job in their families.
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