Page 4182 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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after the final announcements were made yesterday, there have been no coherent reasons given why we have to have this so-called school renewal policy.
That is not to say that we believe that everything in the education department is rosy. We do not. We know that there are problems. Those problems are manifested by the fact that every year, for a variety of reasons, roughly one per cent of people leave the government education system. But we do not know what those reasons are. This minister has not been able to give a coherent reason to anyone at any meeting as to why we are having these school closures.
Today, yet again, we see the confusion that abounds in the Stanhope government. From the outset we have to remember that most of these approaches were brought about by the yet unpublished Costello report into ACT government finances. The Chief Minister, the previous minister and this minister have spent their time saying that we need to tighten our belts and spend less money on education in the ACT. In the first instance, in the pre softening up process—the minister repeated the figure over and again in this place—the government put out the preposterous figure, the unbelievable figure that a child in a small school costs $18,000 a year to educate, while children in larger fully subscribed schools cost $8,000 a year.
We have seen those figures. We have heard the minister repeat them time and again in this place and in the media and we have heard the Chief Minister repeat those figures. The opposition has made inquiries, at the estimates hearings and by looking at all the figures, which confirmed that that figure is untrue. At one point in the life of one school, the operational costs were $18,000 per student. There is hardly a school in the ACT, no matter how big and how well subscribed it is, where the operational costs per student are $8,000. These figures were just false. Almost every element of the figures put forward by this minister to provide a justification for this radical approach to school closures were proved to be false.
The minister keeps talking about capacity. This morning he said that we have a school system with a capacity for 55,000 students, and this morning the Chief Minister said that we only have 35,000 students. We may have built a school system that has a capacity for 55,000 students, but we do not have that number now because many of the vacant school properties are already let out. There is a myth that is being perpetuated in the community by this government that there are acres and acres of empty school buildings across the territory.
Mr Speaker, you visit the community and visit the schools. You know how many ancillary organisations there are in these so-called empty schools. Most of these places are occupied by community organisations, by ballet schools, by the department of education itself, by the Australian Electoral Commission and by organisations like the YWCA. Across the community people are using the empty spaces in schools. It is a myth perpetuated by this government that there are acres of empty buildings just running up costs across the territory.
Almost everything about this process is a myth. In addition to giving no cogent economic reasons, this government has produced incorrect occupancy figures. On almost every occasion when a school sought to have their occupancy figures re-evaluated by the government, they were changed. On almost every occasion the
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