Page 1620 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 19 May 1993
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We will work together with the staff, students, community and the unions to achieve the efficiencies and restructuring that must take place.
It is with this positive spirit, and not, I trust, just empty rhetoric on the part of the Chief Minister, that I commend this matter of public importance, Madam Speaker, namely, "The need to rationalise school facilities in order to maximise the education dollar".
MR WOOD (Minister for Education and Training, Minister for the Arts and Minister for the Environment, Land and Planning) (3.51): Madam Speaker, obviously the Assembly does not share Mr Cornwell's concerns. They have heard it all before and are not impressed. Nevertheless, for the record, I will respond.
Mr De Domenico: Not too many have come back in since, Mr Wood.
MR WOOD: Well, let us see. I freely concede that this is a fairly well-worn debate that Mr Cornwell keeps pushing. He said that I did not give much respect to those surplus spaces figures, and nor do I. Our schools are not made of Lego. You do not pull out bits and put them somewhere else. You cannot do that. They are not like that. You cannot go into one room and take a bit out of a corner because there are 27 children there instead of the 30 that it is planned for. You cannot do things that way. The concept of surplus spaces is not one that I think has enormous use. It simply allows Mr Cornwell, as I think his predecessors did, some time ago, to do a bit of division and decide how many schools they want to close. Mr Cornwell should talk more directly about that, since that is what he is really on about.
There is a basic difference between the Liberal Party and the Labor Party on this matter. The Liberals go to a school and they see a building. They see bricks, tiles and windows and they see grounds. For them it is real estate. When I go to a school I see the students, I see their activity, I see the work that they are doing with their teachers and their community; I see the program, I see the life, I see the schooling that is carried on within those premises. That is what you have to do. You have to look at what happens in those buildings and on those fields. That is what a school is all about. You cannot put a money value to this. That is a basic conceptual difference between the Liberal Party and the Labor Party that enables Mr Cornwell to say, "We have too many spaces".
I listened carefully to his speech and he focused predominantly on issues financial. The Grants Commission had identified overspending of $18m, he said, and we have to attack that. Certainly we have to budget. We have to live within our budget. But I look at schools in a totally different context. The Labor Government makes decisions on schools bearing in mind what happens in schools. We make educational decisions. Mr Cornwell would have us make purely financial decisions. Granted, he did spend some time, probably about a minute, talking about programs. Maybe some schools could not have programs, he said, if they did not have enough students and teachers. So he did spend a little bit of time on programs. But the whole thrust of what he was saying simply related to those financial matters. I just want to mention, since I noted it here, a comment about team sport. We have not abandoned team sport at primary school level. We have, along with a number of other States who have already sunk the system, withdrawn from interstate competition in most of the
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