Page 3966 - Week 13 - Tuesday, 23 November 1993
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If Mr Moore was complacent - I do not know whether he was or he was not - he had very good grounds to be complacent, and those grounds, Madam Speaker, were that Mr Wood, Ms Follett and other members of the Government had made it perfectly clear that this Government was the protector of public education; that this Government was going to make sure that public education was looked after; that this Government, for example, would protect and would defend class sizes in the ACT. In fact, they went even further and said that this Government would be reducing class sizes; it would be giving us smaller classes to give more contact between teachers and pupils. That was the promise of the smiling Chief Minister opposite. That was what she said to the people of the ACT. If Mr Moore was complacent about that, he made the mistake, clearly, of relying on the promise of this Chief Minister and her Minister for Education; but, of course, that was not what transpired.
Madam Speaker, let us cast our minds back to about two-and-a-half years ago, to the last days of the Alliance Government and to the rhetoric that was being used then by this Labor Party, then in opposition, about the situation of education and about the need for education cuts. Yes, Attorney-General, I can guess that quote as well. I referred to the debate on 6 June 1991 and looked at what people were saying then about education and I saw how applicable those comments were in 1993. Here is what was said by someone who now is a Government member:
This community and this Opposition have no confidence in this intransigent and uncommunicative Government. They are rather familiar words. It is an arrogant Government. It is one that does not listen to the people. To compound that, this Government is incompetent. They have taken one of our treasured possessions, the education system, and inflicted severe damage on it. This is due to their incompetence, of course, and to a number of other factors. They have an ill-defined philosophy on education.
Who said that? None other than the present Minister for Education, Mr Bill Wood. Mr Wood promised in almost as many words that public education was safe under this Government; that people who supported it back into office would have nothing to fear from this Follett Labor Government on the question on public education. Madam Speaker, in this process they traded on people's expectations and their fears. They traded on the expectation that they would think Labor would be better for public education than would anybody else.
What happened, Madam Speaker? This Government rode into office on the back of its promises to reopen a number of government schools - not all of them, I might say, but some of them - to reopen Royal Canberra Hospital, which it did not deliver on, and that education was going to be secure under it. I ask you, Madam Speaker, to consider this question: If the parents who so vehemently protested school closures in 1991 had been offered a choice between the closure of some schools and the loss of teachers throughout the education system, what would they have chosen? What would this Government have chosen in an abstract situation without any promises having been made previously? What would it have decided to do if it had a free choice in this matter? We know the answer to that question. We know the answer because we have seen it in Labor Party policy. The most important thing about our education system is the quality of teaching that goes on in our classrooms. Therefore, the most important asset you can protect is the quality and the number of teachers you
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