Page 4093 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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spend $185 million over four years in capital injection and write-off of school buildings, up to $20 million for IT and another $10 million for transitional services and additional maintenance.
In addition to that, today we find that in the next budget cycle we will see another $54 million for what I suspect is an unsought—except by the education union—and unwelcome superschool on the Kambah site. That will have implications for schools not listed in this program. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, you need to be aware that schools in your constituency that are currently not listed for closure will be impacted on by this. It will be impossible for Urambi primary school and preschool to continue to operate in the shadow of the superschool that Mr Barr proposes to build in Kambah—in the same way that it was impossible for the Higgins and Holt schools to continue after the ill thought out proposal for a west Belconnen school.
Everything about this proposal is based on dodgy assumptions. There were the capacity figures. I do not know of a school that, in the course of this process, did not have its capacity figures reviewed, and have them reviewed down. The capacity figures seem to have been worked out on the basis that every space that was surrounded by walls in a school was a teaching space—so IT areas, art rooms and libraries suddenly became classrooms and had a notional amount added to them.
We also have to see that in much of this we have not taken into account the other costs that will be eaten up in this process. There are the costs of portables. And there is the sleight of hand achievement of savings by transferring costs like transport to parents and to the Department of Territory and Municipal Services. There has been no serious discussion about asset sales. This is something that the minister and the government have skirted around. Perhaps some would say that there would be an upside if some of the assets were sold to the benefit of the community.
All of these things are predicated on the fact that this economic rationalist minister is about making sound financial decisions. But economic rationalists are not about just cutting spending; they are about cutting unproductive spending. I do not know that there is anyone in this house or in this community who would think that expenditure on education was unproductive spending. Besides, as I have said before, these are not difficult times. The Chief Minister said only yesterday on radio, and again today, that the economy is booming—that we have record low unemployment and that the economy is going gangbusters. The ACT is a top jurisdiction for income and it is a community that cares about education.
What are all the changes that the minister has brought forward over this disastrous six months about? Some of them have elements of public service hobbyhorses. There are some members of the public service who are not imbued with the history and development of education in the ACT, who have come late into the department of education and who are still scratching their heads a bit about why we have the unique education system that we do. I still come across bureaucrats who say, “Well, it would be all right if we did not have these senior colleges.” The senior college is the jewel in the crown of the ACT government education system. With the Melba amalgamations, we are already seeing the signs that this will be the beginning of the end of the stand-alone college system. It may not be too bad in the short term, but in the long term
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