Page 3261 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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term we may have to look at school closures and amalgamations. When he had the courage to say that, the spokesman for the then minister pilloried him. The minister at the time pilloried him: “How dare he say that! If you vote for the Liberals you will have school closures.” The only reference to school closures in the policy that the government took to the last election was the one that it would not close schools, in this case preschools, like the Liberals did.
The one thing said before the last election was “trust us”. We had the Chief Minister saying that the people of the ACT had nothing to fear from a majority Stanhope government. The people of the ACT had lots to fear. There has been a complete breakdown of trust between the people and the government, which is a shameful situation for any government to find itself in, and there has been a complete breaking of the bond of truth between the government and the people: “Trust us. We will not close schools. There will be no schools closed in the next term of the Stanhope government.” That is what the official said.
But, 40 schools listed for closure later, we are in the situation today where we are debating whether there should be a better process. Yes, Mr Speaker, this is about process. This is about the Towards 2020 policy for which the government has said once again today there will be no cost-benefit analysis. This is about ensuring that the process of this cobbled-together policy is not hastily pushed through without understanding the ramifications.
In question time yesterday the Chief Minister referred to the impact on the cost of housing of shifting the levers on stamp duty and things like that. Those are little levers compared to the enormity of taking out nearly a quarter of the schools in the ACT. If you shift the levers that much, there will be unintended consequences. This minister used those words today. There will be unintended consequences. We know that. We just do not know what they will be. We do not know who will be adversely affected by this situation. We can guess, but we do not know because there has been no scientific method applied to this matter.
What we have here is a minister who, under pressure, came up with a policy to assuage his colleagues. They have not had the sense or the honour to measure this policy to see whether it will work. If at the end of the day we had had a scientific method applied to this matter, if we had had some consultation, real consultation that was not pushed through in a process whereby people were trying to keep their schools open, maintain a dialogue about whether their schools should be open, closed, amalgamated, truncated, expanded or whatever, and at the same time were having to make arrangements for their children for next year, perhaps we would have had a better dialogue. Perhaps we would have a community that could come to the conclusion that some of these schools should close.
Confronted with the fact that some of these schools have been announced for closure in mid-December, people will have to make arrangements for their children next year by the beginning of February. I want to see this minister and all of his officials on deck every working day between the day he makes that announcement and the beginning of term 1 to make sure that every parent and every child affected by this proposal will have a proper transition, that they will be looked after, that the disabled children in this town who will be adversely affected by the decisions will have their every need met, because
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