Page 2276 - Week 07 - Wednesday, 16 August 2006
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He has not shirked from this, and his behaviour on all these occasions under really difficult circumstances has been admirable.
I do not think there is another person on that side of the chamber who could have done the job Mr Barr has done with such bearing and courtesy. He has sat through really hard meetings and has never once lost his cool. I do not think the Chief Minister would have sat through those meetings and not lost his cool, and I do not think Ms Gallagher would have. I commend the minister—and I have commended him on a number of occasions. I have said to people that he needs to be admired for the way he has approached this.
This minister is really the chump in this. Let us think about what has really happened here. Andrew Barr gets elected to the Assembly, he gets rocketed right into the ministry before the ink is dry on the declaration of the return because there is no-one else there to do the job. Let us think about it. Do you reckon that he filled a casual vacancy to come in here? He has no knowledge of what is going on in the department of education. Yes, his mum taught him the system; yes, he is a product of the system; yes, his brother teaches in the system; but he has no knowledge of his portfolio.
The first thing he does is not a minor restructure of his portfolio but a complete ripping apart of the major part of his portfolio. Do you reckon that was his idea? I do not think it was. I think we had Messrs Stanhope and Costello saying, “Your mission, Andrew, should you choose to accept it, is to go out and gut the school system, because we need to sell off the land.”
Mr Barr has been doing a manful job of sort of covering up the real reason, but the community is not fooled by this. Wherever you go, the community says, “Look, they just want to sell it off.” It was a parent who said to me, about Gilmore primary school, “Look at the panoramic views. Of course they want to sell it off, it is prime real estate.”
We saw this with the selling of Ginninderra district high school. Ms Gallagher at a meeting used almost exactly the same words that the Chief Minister used yesterday: “We have no plans to sell the school.” When you go through the FOI requests, there was somebody who had crunched the numbers, they had done the valuations. They worked out that, if they closed and sold off all the schools around and in relation to Ginninderra district high school, they would make $60 million. That is the reason they wanted to close Ginninderra district high.
Ms Gallagher: Has it been sold?
MRS DUNNE: No, not yet, because you haven’t got the kids out yet; you have to actually get the kids out. But it will be sold. Here we have a government that has overseen a lie, a government that, before the last election, allowed their spokesman to go out and say, “There will be no school closures.” No-one ever gainsaid that statement.
The minister, whose spokesman made that statement and who is walking out the door because she cannot stand the heat, oversaw that lie. She let that lie stay in the community. That lie was repeated to me in my office by the same official after the election: “There will be no school closures.” When I asked him why there were no consultation guidelines approved when the Education Act began in 2004, he said, “You do not need them because there will be no school closures.”
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