Page 2807 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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for this. I note that Mr Hargreaves is nodding, so I am sure he will shortly tell us that none of it has gone into landfill and that all of it has found a useful home. We will wait to hear what the government has to say and we will see whether or not this needs to be taken further.
I also understand that the minister responsible for managing the school sites undertook to fence the schools that had been closed in order to provide some security and protect them from vandalism. We now know that there are a number of sites that have been vandalised and, to the best of my knowledge, no fences have appeared to protect these valuable government assets. If they are to be reused—if the decision, based on what the community wants and what the government can afford, is for them to be reused—and if they have been vandalised, all we are doing is adding to the cost and making it more difficult for them to be reused in the future. Why isn’t the Stanhope government acting to protect these public assets to the best of its ability? The minister might like to detail for the Assembly, when he jumps to his feet, how many sites have been vandalised, what the estimated cost of the vandalism is and whether the sites will be restored.
We on this side of the house, at least, are aware of a number of existing schools expressing interest in taking over various sites of the closed schools. Unfortunately, the government seems to have a closed mind on this issue. I think it is unfortunate that it does. If there are to be viable alternative options then we believe the community should be given those options. Clearly, the community is interested in those options. Schools like Burgmann College in Gungahlin and Radford College in Belconnen have enormous waiting lists of students wanting to attend these schools. We know that other schools like Blue Gum and Emmaus are still looking for homes and would very much like to gain access to some of these excess properties.
If the Canberra community wish these schools to remain as schools, they should be able to have their way. If the government does not want to use them then the community will. Indeed, in my electorate of Brindabella, the Tharwa community would love to get their school back; they would love to be able to get control of that building and use it for what it was designed for and what it was heritage listed for in terms of its school heritage value. Given the changes to the Education Act and the government’s intransigence on this issue, it would appear that this is not likely to be considered as a viable option. That is a shame. We should not have a closed mind on this. The Stanhope government talks about access, equity and fairness for all but that appears only to be in the context of when it suits the government and when it meets the government’s requirements.
I do not believe that is a clever strategy by the Stanhope government. If the facilities could be used by other schools, that seems to be a sensible use of resources. However, the Chief Minister and his colleagues have chosen to force these other schools to go out and invest in greenfield sites while former school facilities lie idle. I would have thought that the minister, who, in March this year, said that climate change was one of the most pressing matters to confront us this century, if not the most pressing matter, would have done some quick sums and asked, “What’s the environmental impact of knocking down an old school, perhaps recycling some of it and sending the rest to landfill, balanced against the environmental cost of building a new school?” There
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