Page 856 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 2 May 2007
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The Chief Minister, in his manifesto of openness and accountability, promised that Labor would not “draft its budget behind closed doors or in isolation from the community”. He said:
Openness is one of our core values. We understand that we cannot construct a budget or a program of government without responding to community needs. While we will seek to lead the debate about those needs, and an order of priority, we will not leave the community behind.
Labor promised “ample time for submissions from the community, peak organisations, government departments and agencies, and Assembly committees”.
Let me take last year’s budget. What happened there? The community was delivered a staggering blow through the announcement of the closure of 39 schools and preschools. It was a decision that was a fait accompli. It was then followed by several months of effective sham consultation after the fact, leading to the closure of schools last December. The community had no idea that was coming. As late as, I think, 13 April last year, the minister at the time, Ms Gallagher, indicated that there would be some forums in relation to where schools would be going; then on 6 June we had this absolute bomb blast. So much for consultation; so much for openness. They were the activities of a very arrogant government.
The decision was apparently based on the functional review of government services led by Michael Costello. The government and the Chief Minister have consistently refused to make this study public despite the fact that it was paid for by taxpayers and the fact that it carried so much weight. The government entirely failed to convince the community that there was any considered rationale for the closure of the schools. Parents in the affected school communities complained that there seemed to be no logic or even any factual basis as to why some of these schools were selected for axing and why others survived.
The functional review canvassed all areas of public spending, but the Chief Minister pledged that the opposition would never see the document. Because the document remains a secret, we can only speculate that the data it used to make its decisions on schools, for example, was flawed and inaccurate, as claimed by educational experts, who we have seen trotting out all manner of material over the last 12 months. Indeed, Mr Stanhope described the opposition’s request to see the document under FOI as “a waste of time”. He said that releasing it would undermine the government’s ability to obtain frank advice from public servants. He said:
Those providing advice would start to censor themselves. They would dull the edges … modify their language, hedge their arguments and governments would be the losers of such a dilution in frankness.
Again, so much for openness; so much for transparency in government. What does the government have to fear in making clear the basis of its decision making on such crucial issues?
This is a long way from the core values Mr Stanhope was so keen to advertise for Labor as an alternative government back in 2001. Why on earth, if they wanted to live
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