Page 3237 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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six weeks. As I have said before, when this minister became the minister he was taken to the Chief Minister’s office and told, I have no doubt, but these were probably not the exact words, “Andrew, your mission, should you choose to accept it, is to save us some money in the school system and, while you are at it, I want you to close some schools, and it needs to be a big number, because I am a courageous man.”
The period from that day until the budget announcement on 6 June was about six weeks. Yes, there was a big press conference on that day, as the minister says, but none of the members here was privy to that press conference because it was in the budget lock-up. It was very hard on the day to get information about what was proposed. In fact, I did not manage to obtain information until quite late in the evening, probably close to 6 o’clock, through having a generous journalist give me a copy of his documentation so that I could photocopy it. That was a situation where they knew that they were in trouble, they knew that they were doing the wrong thing, and they wanted to cover up what was happening as much as possible for as long as possible.
We have had that constantly since then. We have had faulty documentation. We have had bad figures which the minister says that he will fix but now will not fix. We have had a whole range of information being brought into question by members of the community who probably know their schools better than the officials who visit them from time to time. The parents at the schools that my children attend, especially those really active in the P&C association and the school boards, know more about their schools than the officials who work in Manning Clark House.
That is a sign of the fact that this government does not own the schools; The people of Canberra own the schools, and the people who have the biggest stake are the people who send their children to the schools, the people who are involved in the school communities, the people who raise the money. All of these people have been, essentially, excluded because of the paucity of information and the poor quality of information. If we are going to produce targets that bring about more efficiencies in the ACT education system—as I have said before, I do not know of any person who does not think that we can obtain better efficiencies and perhaps some schools should change or close—and if we are going to act on those targets and make changes to the government schooling system, the owners of the system, not the operators, must be given the information necessary for them to understand what is happening and why.
The problem is that the Stanhope government is having difficulty selling its preposterous program. Dr Foskey is quite right in highlighting the number of occasions on which the members of the Stanhope government, both in government and in opposition, have spoken about the necessity for high quality cost-benefit analyses and the number of times that the Chief Minister has stood in this place and said that he would only formulate policy on an evidence basis, that we would have evidence-based policy.
Mr Seselja: This was cobbled together.
MRS DUNNE: Mr Seselja is quite right. This is not evidence-based policy. This is cobbled-together policy, policy brought together on the fly. We have to look at the real costs associated with closing schools; we have to look at what they are. That is not just how much money will be spent or saved in the education budget; we have to look at the costs associated with running extra buses, changing the bus timetables, and the costs
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