Page 3961 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 23 November 1993
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It is happening everywhere and schools will close in Canberra in the future, that is an inevitability.
So here we have the Chief Minister saying one thing - that the neighbourhood school concept will be protected - and Mr Wood, correctly, I believe, identifying the fact that there is an inevitability about the closure of schools. So, please, Ms Follett, do not talk to me and criticise me about the fact that I am prepared to put people before bricks and mortar, because it is very obvious that the Government is simply playing around once again, avoiding the real issues and refusing to face the facts.
Ms Follett made the point that in the longer term there was an education plan from 1994 to 1998. However, again at the Estimates Committee, her Minister for Education indicated that there would be further cuts in teachers. At page 196 he said that these cuts would take place over the next few years. I fail to see how we can have a proper education plan beginning in 1994, which is only next year, if we are going to cut even more teachers from that time.
Mr Wood: All the more reason to plan, for heaven's sake.
MR CORNWELL: I did not catch that interjection, Mr Wood, but I would be happy to acknowledge it if you would like to raise your voice. There is the question that the quality in classrooms will not suffer. Again this is Ms Follett's statement. I find that very difficult to believe. It has been demonstrated already by other speakers that you cannot cut 37 per cent of the 80 teachers out of colleges, that you cannot cut 37 per cent of the 80 teachers out of high schools and you cannot cut 26 per cent of the 80 teachers out of primary schools, without something happening to the quality of education. How on earth do you imagine that the quality of education can be even maintained, far less improved, if you are going to make cuts at that level?
Finally, as again an example of this confusion that the Government has, Mr Wood today, when he spoke in response to Mr Moore's question about where the cuts are to be made in schools, made this statement - and I wrote down his comments: "We do not impose that level of control upon our schools". Well, how come we find at page 291 of the Estimates Committee transcript that Mr Wood advised us that, far from imposing this level of control upon schools and telling them where they should make their cuts and where they should not, quite categorically there were no cuts to be made in the supplementary area? Yet this is a Government that does not impose any level of control upon schools in terms of cuts to education. I repeat what appears on page 291:
They cannot do it in a supplementary area. They are not free in the way that you indicated to the committee to make their own decisions ...
So we are not cutting any supplementary area; we are cutting it only in the mainstream area. What effect do you think that is going to have not only upon the mainstream area but also upon the supplementary area in schools? If you cut it simply in the mainstream area there must be an effect. I would suggest that the result of that will be to increase the pressures in the supplementary areas. It is inevitable in places like reading recovery and learning assistance and the like.
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