Page 4190 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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swamped by a much larger school. It is a matter of horses for courses: it suits some people but not all. You have restricted choice very much. Yes, Mr Barr, I have closed a few schools, but is Charnwood really the best you can do? It probably is the best you could do, because all the other ones certainly had a very lengthy consultation period—indeed, a model for how to consult which we have tried to put back into this Assembly but which you have rejected and which the P&C and the AEU have ticked off as a model for how to take a community with you if you have to make changes.
Mr Stanhope: You got the collywobbles, mate, and pulled out. You couldn’t carry through. You didn’t have the courage.
MR STEFANIAK: Mr Stanhope, it is nonsense to talk about courage. What a load of baloney! It was the Labor opposition which stymied any attempts at change in the past, which objected to every single change to the school system, every single school closure. You accepted a couple of amalgamations. I am not too sure if you criticised Stirling and Canberra colleges becoming the Canberra college, with the Phillip campus and the Stirling campus. You may have accepted that one. But I can distinctly remember when we had preschools down to about 11 or 12 children and you would object to a single preschool closing. We tried to take the community with us. We actually had a decent model. We would suspend the operations of preschools to see if they could get their enrolments back. Indeed, that happened at Lyons. The model which we introduced seems to have stood the test of time in terms of being accepted by the practitioners in the system.
Mr Barr, you deserve to be censured simply because of the absolute dog’s breakfast you have made of your own figures as justification, such as figures showing that a school should have an occupancy rate of 400 and only had 180 when the capacity rate was far less. I think that school communities have shown the error in those figures in this six-month campaign. For example, Cook is a bit over 90 per cent full, because it has been a small school since about 1992 and there are other very good uses for that particular building. Obviously, that has worked fairly well, but you have closed it.
Turning to some of the other concerns of school communities, I was talking today to some people from Flynn, as was Mr Speaker, I think, and they said that they would understand it if their numbers were lower than those of lots of other schools, but a lot of the schools that have stayed open have lower numbers than theirs. They have quite a large number of kids, about 180, but, more importantly, they had about 73 seeking to enrol, all of them in the younger years. There seems to have been a baby boom in the area around Flynn and regrowth of the suburb and they are really scratching their heads, and probably gnashing teeth as well because they are very upset, as they just cannot comprehend why you would close their school. I wonder whether you have read their submission. Mrs Dunne and I have received a copy of the full submission and I doubt very much that it has been properly considered.
We have had some other absolutely amazing decisions. I have mentioned small schools. I mentioned history yesterday and I will refer to it again. I was most concerned to hear what was said on radio this morning by some people from Hall, which is in my electorate. They are really concerned about the effect on the local community there. It is a big village. It is almost a small country town, one of two
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