Page 2925 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 20 September 2006
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raised in an opinion piece some time ago about political integrity being important in this debate. We have to go back to prior to the last election, when the ACT Labor Party went to the electorate promising to close no schools, promising that there would be no school closures under this government. We had a spokesperson for Katy Gallagher in the Canberra Times on 12 August saying there will be no school closures.
We look at the ACT Stanhope Labor education policy going into the 2004 election. Remember this is an election when we were told not to fear a Stanhope majority government. I am looking for the part where it says, “We will gut the education system.” I am looking for the part where it says, “We will close 40 schools.” It is not there. All we had was a spokesperson for the education minister saying, “We will not close schools.” That was all they said about school closures.
They talk about preschool education. This is how they back up what Katy Gallagher said. This is Labor’s commitment to public education and preschools: we have kept preschools with low enrolments open for families to access when the Liberals would have closed them. It is the Liberals! How many preschools are closing? Twenty-two preschools! We had the Labor Party going to the last election saying, “We are not going to close any schools. The Liberals would have closed all the preschools. You can be sure of that.”
What do we have from the Labor Party after the election? Forty school closures. There is not a word of it in their education policy. There is a flat denial when they are asked about it in the media; it is the Liberals who would have closed them. “We have kept them open. Trust us. Trust the Labor Party.” That is what they said. This is an absolute sham. Look at the other bits. They promised to cut CIT fees for year 12 students. Have they done that? I think it is still $1,000 in up-front fees. No, they have not done that either.
This education policy, which was a major part of the Labor Party’s platform for the 2004 election, at which they got a majority, is a sham. The people of the ACT were deceived. They were misled. We are now seeing the true colours of this government. When the Chief Minister said, “Do not fear a majority Labor government,” no-one could have known how wrong he was and how much of a deception of the people of the ACT that was.
There is a lot of talk here about consultation. Mr Barr talks about his 550,000-odd meetings that he has had with various officials and the like, but it needs to be said that, in our democratic system, there is only one real, proper, complete consultation and that is called an election. At the election, they did not consult with the people. They withheld what they were going to do. They withheld their true plans for the ACT education system because they could not bear to face the electorate on the basis of gutting the education system and closing 40 schools.
People all across my electorate have been deceived by the ACT Labor Party. The people of Rivett were deceived; the people of Dickson were deceived. I have had parents from Gungahlin who send their kids to the Woden Special School, which is going to merge, coming to see me. They were deceived. The people of Weston Creek were deceived. We have a government that talks about integrity. It tries to take the high moral ground on this issue and say, “We are making the hard decisions. We are making the hard decisions for the good of the community.” Yet they could not bring themselves to be honest with the
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