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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (7 August) . . Page.. 2430 ..

MR BERRY (continuing):

We know that the government's decision to put $27 million into free school buses will mean that 75 per cent of all students will miss out, mostly in the government sector, but also a large number of kids in the non-government sector as well. There will be no benefit for them. It is plain to even the uninitiated that a better allocation of this funding would have gone to deal with the issues which confront young people within our education system, not just in the government system but also in the non-government system as well.

That is why Labor has decided to redirect funding from this vote grabbing, vote seeking election promise which died before the last election and was resurrected by this government for election purposes. We have said that we would redirect that funding back into schools where it would help young people as described in this report and as dealt with by way of the recommendations of the report.

Mr Speaker, there has been strong evidence given to other committees of this Assembly to suggest that the priorities of the government are wrong. I do not need to go into them. Members on the government side would be painfully aware of the evidence that was put before the committee, and those who do not support the way the government has allocated its funding are refreshed by the support that they get from witnesses before committees in this place about the government's misdirected funding in this case.

It is impossible to support the government's free school bus program against the background of the issues which have been turned up by this report. It is just impossible to support this funding priority when you see the difficulties which could be addressed if that funding was turned into our schools. How can this government, blush free, go to the electorate and say, "This was an election promise, so now we are going to honour that election promise"? It was an election promise that was long dead. It was not resurrected at the last election. It goes back to 1995.

It seems to me that the Liberals opposite were seeing themselves in desperate straits and needed something to grab a few votes for themselves. They tried to prey upon the sensitivities of the hip pocket nerve, the most base of aims, to achieve a few votes out there in the community, notwithstanding the difficulties that they knew about in our schools. Nobody can hide from the fact that these problems have been around for a long time, and if the government have not seen them they have been asleep. If the Liberal Party have not seen them they have been asleep. When they ignored those problems when there was such a significant amount of money available which could have been put into schools but instead put it into buses which will only support about 25 per cent of students, it is not hard to come to the conclusion that the government's priorities are misdirected.

Mr Speaker, I feel gratified by the level of support out there in the community which the Labor Party and others who support our position on school buses are getting on this issue. There is no doubt that when this was first announced people would say, "Well, it's hard to oppose that." But when you sit down and think about the fundamentals, it is not so hard at all. In fact, it is easy to oppose this ridiculous free school bus plan, especially when we are in an era where everybody out there is promoting education as a fundamental. It is the number one issue in our community if we are to progress. It is the number one issue in society if we are to progress. To abandon this important

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