Page 3257 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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a conversation that I offered to have with Mr Barr a long time ago when all this was just starting to be mooted and in which he said, “Yes, yes, yes. It might be good.” But it did not happen. So here we are! It is limited.
I am very much looking forward to hearing what the government says it will do next in this process. I am very sorry that it did not take into account all these things. We have no more information now, except for a serendipitous article that happened to appear in a planning journal. We have got publicly on the table exactly what we had in June on the website. I do not think it is good enough.
MR SESELJA (Molonglo) (5.25): Before going into the substantive parts of the bill, I would like to pick up on some of the things that Mr Corbell and Mr Barr had to say. I am never quite sure of Mr Corbell’s position on school closures.
Mr Mulcahy: It depends on whether you are at the conference or in the Assembly.
MR SESELJA: I think it does depend on whether he is at a Labor Party conference or in the Assembly. The position does change. I could have sworn that at the Labor Party conference Mr Corbell put up his hand to support a moratorium on school closures. He did support it then. How long ago was that? It was a couple of months ago. A lot has changed. When Mr Corbell was in opposition, he had this to say:
My question is to the Minister for Education. Does the Minister agree that forcing young children to walk long distances to school away from their local neighbourhood is both unsafe and unwise? Does the Minister agree also that parent participation and local community involvement in schooling is facilitated by our system of neighbourhood schools and could be undermined by wholesale closure?
I assume that at the time he asked that question he—
Mrs Dunne: Had his fingers crossed as well.
MR SESELJA: Maybe he had his fingers crossed or maybe what he was getting at was that he actually did not support wholesale closures. I can only take it from that that he did not. Things have changed. Things have changed even since the Labor Party conference, it would seem, because we have had a different position put and different votes by people such as Mr Corbell, Mr Gentleman and Mr Berry at the conference, compared to in the Assembly.
At the end, we had Mr Corbell giving us the standard line in saying, “What would you do? If you had gone to the election promising not to close any schools and had deceived the people of the ACT, if you had promised at the election not to close any schools and decided and announced soon after the election that you were going to gut the education system, what would you do? What would the Liberal Party do?” I have to answer again that we would not deceive the people of the ACT at an election in the way that the Labor Party did. We would not have said publicly that there would be no school closures and then turned around 18 months later and announced the closure of 40 schools, a gutting of the public education system in the ACT. That argument is wearing a bit thin. It is a “what would you do if you were as bad as us?” argument. We are not, we would not be and it
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