Page 4094 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 13 December 2006
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there will be an end to the stand-alone college system, without any justification. There is nothing in any of the research that has been done to justify it.
The previous minister rightly implemented a review into the college system because it had been operating for 30 years. What did that review say? It said that there were some problems with transition and some problems around the edges that needed to be fixed, but that none of the problems were insurmountable and that there should be no changes to the structure of the government college system because it was a system that worked. We should be looking at the issues of transition between various sectors and fixing those problems, but not undoing the great good of 30 years of educational practice in the college system.
We have a tyro minister who was brought in with his mission impossible task set for him by Mr Stanhope and Mr Costello: “You have to do something to cut the spending in the department of education.” He sat down with his group of advisers and a few public servants and said, “Well, what do we do? We have got to do something.” Eventually they came up with something, and then they decided that therefore they had to do this. You have to wonder about people who get to this situation. Look at the proposal that this minister has come up with. “We will cut a little bit here and we will shave a little bit there.”
It reminds me of the Press Club luncheon that was given before the 2001 election, when the then aspiring Treasurer, Mr Quinlan, said, “We will cut and shave.” What we are doing here is cutting and shaving. A few years after the Press Club luncheon, when he became the Treasurer, Mr Quinlan became more emboldened; he said, “We’ll squeeze you till you bleed, but we won’t kill you.” This is what this minister is doing. He has taken a few leaves out of the lesson book of his mentor; perhaps they should be put back. Mr Temporary Deputy Speaker, you have to wonder about the sort of person who says—
MR SPEAKER: No, I am the permanent one.
MRS DUNNE: Sorry, Mr Speaker. Your return is welcome, Mr Speaker. You have to wonder about the kind of mind of people who say, as the minister said here today, “People are leaving the education system. If we do not do anything we will soon be a minority system”—I am glad the minister has caught up with that—“and if we do not do anything we will soon be just a safety net system. I know: we will reinvent the school system and we will change the definition of ‘high school’. That is what will make the change.” You only really make sense of this by seeing it as either an act of panic or some kind of risk aversion.
Let us look at how things work in other circumstances. Let us look at how things work in business. What would you do? If you were in business and you started to lose market share, what would you do? There are two options. There is the visionary option: you go out and do market research, find out why you are losing market share and change and redevelop your products. You retain staff, you retrain your staff, you improve your marketing and you make a better product. Or you panic and you focus on cutting costs. You stop marketing and research, you close down outlets and you hold a fire sale. Today, Andrew Barr held the education fire sale.
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