Page 2929 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 October 1992
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very avidly to protect her local school at that time. Walking out there today and seeing parents from Cook and Lyons, I noticed a sense of deja vu. I must admit that it is a very interesting feeling. It brings back the old days of the Assembly under the Alliance Government, and, boy, am I glad it is not here too often.
We are really looking at a person who was not just miffed; he was terribly miffed that what he had tried to do was not done. Whether you agree with him or disagree with him is not pertinent here. The pertinent point is that he was miffed and the new Minister said, "We are going to undo the work that you have done". I can understand somebody being miffed, but Dr Willmot had to understand - I think to a certain extent he never understood - that he had to answer to an elected government. When he first came in and took over the Schools Authority at the time, he was the one who moved the authority away from being a parental organisation to being a departmental organisation. I think that that is a point.
Mr Humphries: Have you an axe to grind against Dr Willmot?
MR MOORE: There is an interjection from Mr Humphries; do I have an axe to grind with Dr Willmot? I have no personal axe to grind with Dr Willmot, but I can see things here. The question is: Who has an axe to grind? Why would somebody have written and made available, somehow or another, this document, if they did not have an axe to grind? Of course he had an axe to grind, because he was wrong. Do I have an axe to grind with Dr Willmot personally? No. Do I have an axe to grind with the way Dr Willmot operated? Yes, I do. That is the point here. He is the person that you are relying on for your evidence for this motion, and that is why I am not going to support it.
I think it is important to point out that when those schools were reopened it was with my enthusiastic support. I remember that prior to the time that the Labor Government went into office I took time out to have a discussion with Ms Follett and to tell her that one of my highest priorities - not that it mattered very much; she was going into government - one of the things that I considered very important, should the Alliance Government fall, was the reopening of those schools. Indeed, I mentioned that the reopening of the Royal Canberra Hospital was also one of my high priorities. It is very important for us to understand that we are dealing with nothing more than a senior public servant who is extremely miffed by a change of government and by having his agenda thwarted.
MR DE DOMENICO (4.06): Madam Speaker, I want to get back to the issue at hand. It is not about school closures, and it is not about education. It is about whether two Ministers, one the Chief Minister and the other the Minister for Education and Training, misled this Assembly and the people of the ACT. On the one hand we are asked to accept that all of a sudden, with hindsight, people did not know about an $890,000 estimate, and all of a sudden they can cut away $200,000 and absorb it into another budget. They hide it away somewhere and then go forward to the community and say, "Hey, listen, it is not going to cost $890,000; it is going to cost $500,000 or perhaps $600,000, and the money that is going to be used to reopen these two schools is not going to be taken away from all the rest of the education budget. Nothing else is going to suffer. We can do it right because we are good; we are the paragons of virtue and it is better under Labor". What humbug!
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