Page 1622 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 19 May 1993
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Mr Cornwell: How are you going to pay for it?
MR WOOD: It is not particularly related to the size. That is the question that you are asking: How do you pay for it? That is your total focus. That is the point I am making. You cannot get beyond that cost factor. If you want to ask a question about how you pay for it, look at the ACT as a whole, draw up your figures and see what the average size of a school in Canberra is. It is very much in excess of what you find in the States, and so it should be. We do not have the large country areas that they have. If you take it on a State by State basis, our small schools - if you like to call some of them relatively small - taken across this system, are larger in size and more cost efficient than the average for the States. That is the fact of life; that is the case. Our schools are not small by Australian standards. I know that it is reasonable that we look at the ACT context. So the MPI is a reasonable one in terms of effectively utilising resources. My argument today is that that is exactly what we do. We are utilising them. Ms Ellis will go into that in some detail. Those schools are well and truly used.
The other point I want to make here is that this is, I think, having a damaging effect on the schools. I am constantly approached by people. I am getting phone calls and letters saying, "Are schools going to close?". It is the agenda that the Liberal Party is running that is raising that concern in people's minds. It is the case that the Government sets the agenda, but when they hear this constantly in the media - the media will rapidly pick up anything to do with schools - they start to wonder. That is destabilising for the schools. It does not help the schools one bit in getting on with that important work that I mentioned.
If, for nothing else, I welcome the opportunity today to stand up and to say again that we are not into closing schools. We make our decisions based on educational issues. I get around our schools a lot and I encourage other members to do so. You come back to me and tell me which school you would close. Go to a school and say that it is not working, the programs are poor, the kids are not achieving and there is dissatisfaction. You tell me a school that is not working educationally. I will want to do something to fix that education program. They are the criteria that might be considered. Our schools are all going very well indeed, as Mrs Carnell indicated in her speech earlier, and as Mr Cornwell said. You show me what school in this community deserves to be closed. I do not know of one. Surely, that is the factor that we ought to be looking at. Sure, we will be looking at efficiencies. We have an education budget to live within and it is getting tighter and tighter. We all know that. Sure, we have to live with it. But we have successfully managed that in the last few years and we will successfully manage it in the future. The cries of Mr Cornwell and others, I think, are not doing anything to help that process or the continuation of the good works in our schools.
MR DE DOMENICO (4.03): Madam Speaker, I am delighted that Mr Wood did gear his remarks to the wording of the MPI which is, "The need to rationalise school facilities in order to maximise the education dollar". There is one thing on which I need to disagree with Mr Wood. I believe that Mr Cornwell did not concentrate on the financial aspects of the whole thing. I think that not to bring up the financial aspects, Madam Speaker, would be to ignore a large part of the issue anyway. It is not just Mr Cornwell or the Liberal Party that has made comments along the lines of the financial aspects.
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