Page 3530 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 September 2005
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intentions, such as when you keep the electorate in the dark about your design to close and demolish several schools in west Belconnen to make way for a mega school with its monolithic, faddish curriculum.
Given this arrogance and disregard for community opinion and given the travesty that is the current process that Mr Stanhope dares to call community consultation, one of the few avenues left for proper scrutiny of the government’s high-handed action is a select committee of the Assembly. To ensure some of semblance of independence it is necessary that the committee have equal representation of government, opposition and crossbench, unlike the current education committee. Otherwise, like the Assembly itself, its deliberations will be predestined to find in favour of the government, rather than the public interest.
I only ask that, for once, those present have the courage to remember that their first allegiance should be to the people of the ACT, rather than to their usual tribal instincts. It is absolutely vitally important that the people of the ACT, especially the people of west Belconnen—my electorate and the electorate of Mr Stanhope, Ms Porter and Mr Stefaniak—get a say in the educational future of their children and their neighbourhood. There is no way that his can be done in the current climate.
As Mr Stanhope, who vaunts public consultation, told the parents of Ginninderra district high school outside the Labor party conference at the end of July; “This is not a community consultation about whether your school will close. This is a consultation about how to close your school”. This is no way to treat the people of west Belconnen. This is no way to treat your and my electors. This is why this Assembly must institute a select committee to draw upon all the expertise within this Assembly and to do it in as unbiased a way as possible, so that we can come to this with an open mind. If we come to this with an open mind, then we may end up with a good educational outcome for the people of west Belconnen.
MR STANHOPE (Ginninderra—Chief Minister, Attorney-General, Minister for the Environment and Minister for Arts, Heritage and Indigenous Affairs, and Acting Minister for Education and Training) (11.00): Mrs Dunne suggested during her presentation that, if only we had taken her on trust, this could all have been avoided. That is a rather quaint notion that I would like to put to bed once and for all. This government will never take Mrs Dunne on trust. Perhaps we could put that rather quaint notion to one side before we actually get down to the debate. I think that the presentation that Mrs Dunne has just given in relation to this proposed committee, the silly and superfluous political stunt that it is, illustrates why it is that we did not take her on trust.
This particular motion, this idea, denies the comprehensive community consultation that the ACT government has engaged in on its proposal to build a state-of-the-art school, a $43 million investment in education, for the people of west Belconnen on the current site of Ginninderra district high school. A $43 million investment in public education in west Belconnen, the greatest single investment by any government at any time in the ACT for the people of west Belconnen, is at the heart of the government’s proposal. That is what we intend. The promise we make is that the new school at the Ginninderra district high school site will be the best school in the ACT, the best bar none, at a cost of $43 million. That is what we propose.
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