Page 3781 - Week 12 - Wednesday, 22 November 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
That is a not-so-subtle statement: vote for us and your preschool will not close; vote for the Libs and they will close; those dreadful Liberals will close them. The policy talks about increased hours for preschools. There is absolutely nothing—not a word in there—about closing down preschools. In 2008, at the next election, the government will not be able to look the people of Canberra in the eye.
Two years ago, when they went to the election and 18 months before they whipped up this proposal, they had an education policy that specifically implied that the Liberals would close preschools. The message was that you can trust the Labor Party to keep schools open. Public statements by spokesmen for the minister for education reinforced that message. They said, “Trust us and not those nasty Liberals. They will close the preschools. We will keep them open.” The people who send their kids to Causeway preschool, Chifley preschool, Gilmore preschool, Hackett preschool, Hall preschool, Higgins preschool, Holt, Macarthur, Melba, Rivett and many others trusted this government. They trusted the Labor Party, and that is why, once again, we are discussing school closures.
Mr Barr sighs and says, “It is another attempt to derail our 2020 policy.” He is almost annoyed that Mrs Dunne would bother to bring this motion forward. Well, we will continue to raise this matter and we will continue to remind the ACT community of the betrayal of trust by this mob, the ACT Labor Party in this place, who put forward policies and expect people to vote for them at the next election on the basis of those policies.
I am sure that one of the things that the Labor Party would claim to have stood for over recent years is education. They would say, “We are the party for education. You can trust us on education. We are the ones to vote for if you want a solid public education system. Those other ratbags do not know about public education.”
On that key area of trust—perhaps it is no surprise—the latest polling shows that federal Labor has consistently lost ground on education. This immense breach of trust by the ACT Labor Party will result in people never being able to trust them again. The Labor Party might say, “How many votes are there in 22 preschools?” I do not know. It is probably not a deal breaker. It may well not be. But we are talking about perhaps hundreds of parents who will be very disappointed with these decisions, hundreds of parents who have put in the hours, the volunteer hours, put in their own money, attended fundraisers and all sorts of things to build up their local preschool with the expectation that this mob would not close it down.
The government promised that they would not close schools down in the next term. We have seen them breach that promise. We have seen them breach it in education generally and on the issue of school closures. But nowhere is that breach of faith and breach of trust more evident and more significant than to the young families of Canberra sending their kids to their local preschools which now face the prospect of closures—closures that we were assured by this mob, the ACT Labor Party, would never happen.
MS GALLAGHER (Molonglo—Minister for Health, Minister for Disability and Community Services and Minister for Women) (3.53): I thank Mrs Dunne for the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .