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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1997 Week 5 Hansard (13 May) . . Page.. 1323 ..

MR MOORE (continuing):

Assembly we have consultation in which we listen to each other and take into account each other's views and then vote in entirely different ways. Why is that? It is because there is a whole series of different perceptions underneath the final decision-making. We have different values. We represent perhaps different constituencies that have different understandings.

In this case, with my own experience as a teacher for 17 years and dealing in a number of those years with alternative education, although not specifically of the style at SWOW, I shared with the Minister some major concerns about what was going on in the school. The question for the Minister was what to do about this. On one hand, students were in danger of getting not only a poor education but also, according to the affidavits, a harmful education. On the other hand, would closing the school down immediately have caused greater harm?

The decision the Minister had to make was what the least harmful way to deal with the students was. As it turned out, he had a different view on it - and I presume his department had a different view on it - from that held by the board of SWOW and some of its students. In many ways, it was a quagmire. There is no doubt that the consultation process could have been improved significantly, there is no doubt that those issues were tackled squarely by the Social Policy Committee in its report and there is no doubt that the committee's findings have been largely repeated by the report of the Ombudsman.

The question becomes: Is this enough to censure the Minister, because clearly the consultation process was not good enough? For me, it is not enough because, when you take that consultation process in the context of the other information that the Minister had available to him and you read the information that he has now tabled in affidavit form, you realise what a quagmire it was and what difficult decisions were put before this Minister. In some ways it is very easy to sit back on the outside and say, "You should have had a better consultation process. You were not fair to the community. You misled the Assembly". When I look at the evidence before me - the evidence put by Ms Tucker and the response by Mr Stefaniak - I do not believe that the community or the Assembly was misled.

It seems to me that the motion before us is for censure of the Minister in relation to his handling of the consultation review process about the future of the School Without Walls. The board of the School Without Walls wanted the review process to be carried out by the board of the School Without Walls, the board that had not taken action to deal with the issues that were before the Minister - the inadequacy of the education program, their responsibility for ensuring that the eight key learning areas were covered, their responsibility for ensuring that their students were safe from sexual harassment and their responsibility for ensuring that the students were receiving an appropriate education.

Many fantastic things went on at SWOW over the years of its existence. I do not want this speech to be construed as my saying that everything at SWOW was terrible and awful and always had been. On the contrary, over many years, I was a great supporter of the education that was going on at SWOW. Mr Wood would know that when he was Minister for Education we had discussions on a number of occasions about SWOW and its existence. Indeed, I was very supportive of Mr Wood in seeking to modify some of the things that were going on at SWOW.

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