Page 3236 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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clear measures as to how to achieve particular goals. The goals are for the most part, as I have said on a number of occasions, quite amorphous. There is no means of measuring beforehand whether the stated path that this minister wants to take will bring about the results that this minister claims that he wants to achieve.
Mr Speaker, only an ideologue or someone who is afraid of perhaps coming across inconvenient information would shy away from testing their policy proposal through a cost-benefit analysis or similar instrument. I have often said here that the Towards 2020 proposal is something that somebody could do perhaps in relation to curbing expenditure in education, but I have questioned, and many of the people that I deal with on a regular basis in relation to school closures question, whether it is the right something.
The Chief Minister often talks about “the brave decisions that this government has made in the interests of public education”. They certainly are brave decisions. No-one will deny that. They could be, in the Sir Humphrey sense, courageous decisions, but we still do not know whether they are the right decisions. And then there are the questions about whether the Stanhope government was courageous enough to tell the truth before the last election when it allowed an official to say quite publicly in the paper that there would be no school closures in the life of the next Stanhope government. As we have pointed out often, that may have been a mistake on the part of the official. He may not have been given permission to say that, but that was never corrected. He was never gainsaid by any member of the government. The minister at the time never corrected her official and the Chief Minister never corrected it when the debate about school closures was raging before the 2004 election.
It is true that most of us in this place recognise that there may be changes and efficiencies necessary in ACT government schooling and we might like to set some targets for reaching efficiencies in ACT government schooling, but I think that one of the things that have been overlooked by the ACT government is that they do not own ACT government schooling. They are the administrators. Dr Foskey touched on that before. These are the people who actually run the system, but they do not own it.
I have spent a lot of time visiting schools, visiting community groups and standing at shopping centres since this proposal was announced, and even the people who are most vehemently opposed to particular school closures or to the whole policy do not shy away from the fact that there may be a case to be made for closing particular schools. I do not know that there is one person in this community who thinks that we should never close a government school, not one person. The people in this community object to the means by which this government has undertaken the process and the fact that it has done so in an underhanded way that has been lacking in information.
People keep coming up against simple things. Has there been a risk analysis done? No, there has been no risk analysis. What risks would children who used to walk to school along bicycle paths face when they have to ride their bikes from one suburb to another, traversing major arterial roads where there are no crossings? Have we taken those things into account? Do we want to have repeats of deaths of schoolchildren on the way to school because of bad traffic management? Have these things been taken into account?
There are many things that need to be taken into account when you make a major policy shift, any major policy shift, and it is not something that you would do in the space of
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