Page 3897 - Week 12 - Thursday, 23 November 2006
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In addition to that, they will be going from a perfectly designed suburb with aid for walking about and a very legible suburb for walking about. They will have to cross two major roads, one of which does not have any pedestrian traffic management on it. So children attending school will have to travel a considerable distance from Giralang, and if they travel on foot they will confront considerable problems, unless, of course, the government is going to spend some of its $90 million on traffic management on Maribyrnong Avenue.
I suppose this is at the heart of what Dr Foskey was talking about. People are trying to build up their neighbourhoods and make them a place where there is social cohesion, where there is social capital. The programs of the previous Liberal government in relation to social capital, and especially the schools as communities program, have gone a long way to building up those sorts of levels of cohesion in the suburb. Developments in the last few years have been brought about by a whole lot of exigencies. In the case of my daughter’s school, one of the reasons why they introduced the walking school bus was the location of the school and the propensity for parents to drop children off on the way to school. There was too much traffic congestion. It became, and still is, profoundly unsafe around the school early in the morning and so we tried to alleviate this problem by encouraging as many children as possible to walk or ride to school rather than have their parents drop them off. That has been successful, but there are still problems there.
People have adopted this approach for a variety of reasons, some of them because of their concern about peak oil production. Like global warming, people come to the realisation gradually, and we should not be absolutely alarmist. People talk about us achieving our peak oil production and there are various views that we have already achieved it or that we might do it in the next 10 to 13 years. But what that means is that when we reach peak oil production—not that oil will suddenly run out; that is certainly not the case—it becomes increasingly more difficult and therefore more expensive to extract oil and that will drive up the cost of transport.
We need to look for better ways of transporting ourselves and find alternatives. One alternative is to not travel so far, which is why the neighbourhood school becomes an important element in an environmentally sustainable and conscious community. We talk about greenhouse gas emissions, and perhaps all of us who travel long distances to send our children to school expend too many greenhouse gas emissions getting them there. My family is as guilty as anybody else’s in that regard, but it is something that as a community we may have to look at.
The process of looking at this has not been enhanced in any way by the approach of the Stanhope government on school closures. The debate that we had earlier today about the Griffith library is significant. The government think it is fine to close the Griffith library and that all those people who once walked to the Griffith library can now get in their car and drive to Civic—or Woden if they are Italian or want to access the Italian collection. They can burn up a whole lot of fossil fuels and emit greenhouse gas, and then when they get to Civic or Woden they can pay to park, if they can find somewhere to park. And this is all in the aim of building the community in a sustainable way.
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