Page 2943 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 October 1992
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Madam Speaker, the Liberals are obviously speculating about what happened behind the scenes regarding the reopening of Cook and Lyons primary schools once the Alliance Government was ejected from office. The incoming Labor Government had given a commitment to the community about the reopening of the two schools and set about enabling that to happen. It frankly does not surprise me that the department, and in particular the secretary, Eric Willmot, did not want this to occur.
Madam Speaker, I do not believe that Ms Follett and Mr Wood misled the Assembly with regard to the reopening of these two schools. They presented the facts as they were and they are. It is entirely reasonable that the moneys originally included in the bid that were in fact for future cyclical maintenance were later removed from the final costings as correctly quoted by Ms Follett and Mr Wood. All public schools in the ACT operate with a recurrent budget. A separate budget is kept for all public schools for cyclical maintenance. I urge members to reject this censure motion, which I believe has no substance whatsoever. On a personal note, I hope that this Assembly and this Territory never face the spectre of wholesale school closures in the future.
MR STEVENSON (4.55): I think the debate has shown that there is an acknowledgment by everybody here that budget estimates for particular areas can be inflated or reduced to fit a particular position rather than to mirror actual costs. It is acknowledged by the Chief Minister and the Minister for Education, Mr Wood, that they received a figure of $890,000-odd. Mr Wood then asked for that figure to be allowed. A couple of days later, another figure was presented to the Minister, in a letter by Mr Willmot, which did not include maintenance costs. That drastically reduced the initial estimates. We get now to the situation of whether or not those maintenance costs were relevant. We need to look at the actual maintenance expenditures for Cook and Lyons schools. As Mr Wood read out earlier, they were some $25,000-odd and $9,000 - a total of about $35,000. So, we did have $35,000 spent on maintaining the two schools. Whether they were maintained as they should have been or not is open to conjecture. I certainly do not know.
I am told that the principle of maintenance is one of priority. There is a particular sum - let us take $2m as an example - and the various priorities for school maintenance are taken from that amount. We know that some $35,000 was taken from that amount for Cook and Lyons primary schools. It was stated by Mr Wood in a letter to the Chief Minister:
Both you and I are on record as having stated that the cost of reopening Cook and Lyons Primary Schools will not be borne by other schools in the public system ...
A question can be asked about that maintenance money. If an amount of money went to Cook and Lyons primary schools, as indeed it did - some $35,000 - that obviously was borne by other schools because they did not get it. That shows that the statement that the other schools would not bear any of the costs of reopening the Cook and Lyons primary schools was not quite accurate.
We know that the Chief Minister, in answer to a question in the Assembly, said that the sum would be in the order of $500,000. Mr Wood added $100,000, so that was $600,000. We know that the actual cost was $657,000 plus the $35,000-odd for maintenance that was taken out of the maintenance budget. I understand that no extra amount was put into the maintenance budget after Cook and Lyons primary
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