Page 4183 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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government agencies had got it wrong. This minister has not adequately explained why the figures were wrong. He spent a long time through the process actively deceiving the people of the ACT. There was, as I have said before, the myth of 18,000 versus 8,000.
Then there was the minister’s deplorable treatment of small schools with higher levels of students with disabilities. The minister took the general cost of children in the schools, added to that the very high cost of funding students with disabilities and then divided that by the number of students in the school so as to inflate the actual cost of the average cost per student. No-one in this debate says that we should not spend money caringly on students with disabilities, but no-one would accept this minister fudging the figures by adding those two figures together to artificially inflate the cost of educating able bodied students.
On the second night of consultation this minister admitted that that was the case and undertook to fix the figures. To this day he has failed to do so. He has refused to do so. He has been exposed as someone who is prepared to let a lie stand in the community, rather than have his theories about why he should close schools in any way gainsaid.
The minister said, “In addition to saving money, we are going to spend a whole lot more money.” There has been a constant contradiction which people in the community do not understand. They are asking why they are going through all this process to save this paltry amount of money. It was going to be $34 million over the life of the budget. Today we hear that it is $21 million over the life of the budget. Canberra families will suffer pain, anguish and five more years of upset, upheaval and chaos for a paltry $21 million out of a $1.6 billion budget. It is chickenfeed in the context of the overall budget.
If the minister wanted to save $21 million out of a $1.6 billion budget, he could go to the community and ask the community to work with him to find the savings. We would be able to do it. If the minister carefully read the submissions that he says he has adequately assessed in this consultation period, this 40-page summary of 380-odd submissions, and looked at the suggestions made by citizens of Canberra and people involved in school communities, he would easily be able to save that $21 million without the heartache and the upheaval that he has inflicted upon people.
If you change Lyons primary school, my local school, in the way you want to change it, you will save a paltry $500,000 in the outyears out of quite a substantial budget. The parents of Lyons made suggestions about how to save $500,000 in the budget, but those suggestions were ignored because it really was not about actually consulting with the community. It was about pushing through a whole lot of pet initiatives.
Let us look at some of the pet initiatives. The best one, of course, is the one that Ms Porter has been so pleased to talk about today, the P-2 model. It was a P-3 to 4 model. I always wondered about that because in the old days, in the 1950s when we did have infant schools, they used to be kindergarten, first grade and second grade. Mr Stefaniak went to an infant school and many of my childhood friends went to one as well. They disappeared off the face of the earth in the mid 1960s because of changes in demographics and changes in people’s working lives. It became too
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