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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 1998 Week 8 Hansard (28 October) . . Page.. 2328 ..

MR KAINE (continuing):

One, of course, is the fact that because the preschool is not there people will tend to take their children elsewhere, even if it is inconvenient. When the time comes to consider reopening, those children will have gone elsewhere and the demand will be even lower than it might have been this year. Suspension is tantamount to closure because it is self-fulfilling. Once the doors are closed, even if the committee has the energy and the will to remain in place and continue to lobby and agitate, I suspect that the school will close.

I know that the Minister is concerned about priorities and where the money is spent. I can understand his concern about that. The Government does not have an inexhaustible supply of money, but the fact is that decisions about priorities are being made by governments constantly. They are being made at the government level; they are being made at departmental level. They are made daily. It begins when a budget is put forward. The Government and the administration make decisions about their expenditure priorities and those decisions become a budget. But the budget is not a fixed, concrete thing. It is a dynamic thing that changes as the year goes by, because crises of one nature or another, large or small, occur unforeseen and money has to be found. Money is moved about within the budget to meet these new requirements. That means that something that the Government expected to spend money on when it put its budget forward cannot be done. As I said, that is done at all levels. The Government's decision-making processes are dynamic, and they have to be. That is nothing new.

We have seen governments conjure up money by changing their priorities all the time, for all kinds of things. One that readily springs to mind is the futsal slab down by the lake. That was not in the budget, but money was found nevertheless, virtually overnight. It is unreasonable for a government to say, "We do not have the money". The money can be found by the reallocation of priorities. We have many a demonstration of the fact that that is done constantly.

In this case - and this is why I support the motion - there appears to have been a quite arbitrary and inflexible approach to the decision-making. Although we are talking about human beings, and small ones at that, the Government seems to have demonstrated gross insensitivity. The whole matter has been reduced to a formula, to some magic number. I think the number is 16 or 17. The Minister refers to the criteria. We have reached the stage where, when we are talking about children's education, particularly at the crucial age of these preschool children, we work to a formula. They do not consider the children. There is a formula, and if you do not meet the formula you are outside of it.

We know that even though the formula is there, and the magic number is there, it is not always applied. We know that there are other preschools at this moment where the student body is below the magic number. So the Government does have a discretion, and it exercises it. Yet in this case there has been no sensitivity, no flexibility, no exercise of discretion, but an arbitrary decision saying, "You do not meet the numbers, so you close". I see nothing fair or equitable in that. I think that Mr Berry has demonstrated that the formula, the magic number, in this case is irrelevant anyway. Because we passed another magic point, 1 October or 30 September, the matter is no longer up for consideration.

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