Page 2801 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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I think she spent a little too long in the education department. The language just becomes more and more flowery. She continued:
That does not mean they choose the non-government sector. What we do see and you see in the statistics is that they will make one choice at one point in time for their students and a difference choice at another point in time.
What profound wisdom; what powerful intellectual comment that is. The fact of the matter is, Mr Deputy Speaker, that the basis of this whole change is on very uncertain ground. It has been implemented without regard to the underlying factors that are causing the abandonment of the ACT public education system at a rapid rate. Until this territory government addresses that issue and presents credible research, it is not surprising that large numbers of people in the community are unhappy. It is not surprising that a large number of members of the Labor Party—people who might identify with the public education system, people in the teaching area—are in fact at odds with this decision.
MR SPEAKER: The member’s time has expired.
MR STEFANIAK (Ginninderra—Leader of the Opposition) (3.07 am): A hell of a lot has been said about this topic over the last few weeks; so I will try to say something that has not been said much to date. Obviously this budget is going to pass. You have got the numbers. And it would seem even from statements today that we have two views coming out of the Labor Party. You are also in a statutory consultation period now, even though it seems you just dumped this on the table on 6 June without advising even the AEU or without talking to anyone in the system.
However, you are now going through what we say is a sham consultation. It is something you actually have to do by statute. People in the school system simply do not know what is going to happen. Are they to believe, perhaps, like some members of the Labor Party have said today—like Mr Berry has said today—that obviously not all these schools are going to close? I note that the Chief Minister has indicated, “Well, that is not necessarily so. We would expect all 39, or something very close to that number, to close”. We will wait and see. That just adds to the community angst in relation to this.
I am just going to spend a few minutes pointing to the illogicality of your 2020 plan and the schools you have actually fingered for closure. I think it lends a lot of credence to the argument that this was a document cobbled together at some stage after 13 April when we had the 2010 proposal, which Ms Gallagher so enthusiastically supported. This is a document that was cobbled together in a few weeks. It was nine different computations simply cobbled together. It was a series of ideas cobbled together.
When you look at the schools, for example, north of Ginninderra Drive that have been fingered to close, you see that there is not much logic in a lot of this. If you close all those schools, you are going to have some big gaps there. Let us look at Kaleen. You have two schools there. They are not fingered to close. But Giralang, right next door, is. McKellar does not have a primary school there. It never has had. So before you get to Evatt you will have two suburbs without schools. Evatt has two schools. We then go next door—Melba and the Mt Rogers campus. Of course, Spence already has closed. That
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