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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2001 Week 8 Hansard (7 August) . . Page.. 2431 ..
MR BERRY (continuing):
principle for crass electoral reasons is a demonstration of a desperate government unable to come up with any sensible and cohesive idea about how to address an important social problem.
The social problems that you see with young people who do not reach their full potential in schools could easily have been addressed with a proper allocation of this money, and they weren't. It is very difficult for me to understand why anybody could stand up and defend this government's position on the allocation of this funding to free school buses, but I found one. That was Mrs Burke.
Mrs Burke put out a press release headed "ALP needs to focus on students at risk-not school bus plan". Well, that is what we are focusing on. That is where we want the money to go.
This was the most curious of press releases. I have to say, Mrs Burke, I did not find much love in this press release. I found it hard-hitting and uncharacteristic of you. I must admit that I came to the conclusion that it was probably written in somebody else's office, because I do not believe that your office is capable of such venom. It strikes me that this might have been written somewhere else. If this was written in your office then I must admit I have underestimated the usual warm glow of love and affection which flows from that edifice. Mrs Burke, I recommend that in future you write your own press releases because I do not believe that you would write anything like this.
I wrote to you and said this:
Dear Ms Burke,
You berate me for having a plan to use the free school bus money to help kids.
As I told you yesterday, my heart is in this. I want the free school bus money to be spent in schools to help young people in need of support. I have seen this need over the length of the Inquiry into Adolescents and Young People at Risk of not Achieving Satisfactory Education and Training Outcomes.
I acknowledge your uncharacteristically strident defence of this discredited free school bus scheme but I think you missed something in your press release.
The most important thing that you missed in the press release is how you thought the $27 million to be spent on free school buses will help these kids in need. Mr Speaker, I think that says it all. Here we had $27 million that could have gone to kids in need. These are easily identified issues. They have been around for a long time, and they are not something that we didn't know the basics of. This inquiry has uncovered and catalogued a range of issues which are of extreme importance to the community. I merely make the point, Mr Speaker, that the money that was put into free school buses could have been better spent and we would have got better social outcomes out of it. I am not quite sure what Mr Moore's version of social capital means, but we might even have built a bit of social justice out there in the community with the proper expenditure of this money in our schools.
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