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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1995 Week 8 Hansard (25 October) . . Page.. 1992 ..

MR BERRY: They have made the promise to keep the school open. Mr Stefaniak says that he is committed to quality education for kids. They have now committed themselves to the provision of this supplementation. You cannot expect the community's wishes to be put in place in a realistic way without providing that supplementation. It would be an abandonment of those young people who sit behind me. I think it would be a great shame if this Government continued to treat those people the way they have treated them thus far. They have treated them with contempt. It cannot be allowed to continue. They are going to oppose this motion. This motion must survive in the interests of quality education at Charnwood High School.

MR HUMPHRIES (Attorney-General) (11.30): Mr Speaker, you can almost see the vote bandwagon passing along Ginninderra Drive and Mr Berry and Ms McRae sprinting after it and saying, "Yes, yes, wait for us; we want to get on this bandwagon. We are on board. We are your heroes. We will save the day". It really is quite sad to see this naked grab at votes going on in this place by the members for Ginninderra from the Labor Party - Ms McRae and Mr Berry. What they are doing is nothing more nor less - - -

Members interjected.

MR SPEAKER: Order! Mr Humphries has the floor.

MR HUMPHRIES: Mr Speaker, in light of their demonstrated record in respect of a school in exactly the same position last year, Griffith Primary School, you can see that their stand today is nothing less than naked hypocrisy and naked vote getting. They are after the votes of gullible people in the Ginninderra electorate. That is all that they are after. I wonder what they think this debate that they have had today in this place does for the confidence of parents thinking about what to do with their children presently attending, or perhaps about to attend, Charnwood High School. What does it do for them, I wonder? Not very much, I would suspect.

Mr Speaker, there is a fundamental unfairness in the approach that the Labor Party has taken in this motion today. That unfairness is that they are talking about only a single school whose supplementation has been withdrawn. As the Minister for Education indicated in his remarks, this is not the only school whose supplementation is not to be continued. There are a number of schools in that position. Why have our noble members concerned about those schools not come forward to defend those other schools as well, schools which are facing up to the implications of having to manage their resources and their future on the same basis as every other school in the Territory whose allocation of resources is linked to the number of students they have in that school? Why is it that they have not picked up those cases? Because, Mr Speaker, there are no votes in it. I think members of the community will recognise that completely naked opportunism.

Let us look at the case of Holder High School for one moment. Those opposite admonished the Alliance Government at the time that the decision was made to amalgamate. Amalgamating two high schools is an option which Ms McRae says is totally unacceptable. They admonished the proposal to amalgamate Holder High School and Weston Creek High School back in the early 1990s, but when they resumed

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