Page 2816 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
50, this was a testament to people because it was essentially a secret meeting. Some of those people who turned up were in fact challenged. “Why are you here? You have not registered.” This is the problem: people feel that they are unwelcome. Nowhere does it say, “You can’t come unless you register.” Mr Speaker, I did not register for the Tuesday meeting because, quite frankly, I did not have time, and I suppose no-one is likely to say to the local member, “I’m sorry, Mrs Dunne, you’re not registered, so out of here.” But why is it that people are being confronted, that they are told that they are not welcome because they have not given the secret password? This is what this is about. The people of Canberra are sick to death of it; they are sick to death of being told, “Well, you can talk about things in this very narrow way.”
They came to this meeting the other day and they were essentially told that they could talk about these four generic options. They could add other ones to them, but only within very narrow bounds. For instance, people at the community meeting I went to expressed almost universally a requirement, a demand, that these facilities and lands stay in possession of the community, that they not be sold off. We can talk about whether or not other school sites were sold off, and it may or may not have been a mistake, but we are talking about the here and the now of the experiences that we have had as a result of selling off land in the past. If people say that was a mistake, it may well be, and we can have a discussion about this, but we are talking about the here and the now. Here and now my constituents are saying, “Do not sell this land. Keep it in the possession of the community. Do not alienate it from the community, because one day the community may want it back for the purpose for which it is already there or for some other purpose.”
The clear message is that there may be a time in the future when we actually need to reopen schools. If we need to reopen schools, those schools should be there. In the meantime the clear message out of the meeting at the Australian Institute of Sport was that if we cannot have a government school there, we want a non-government school to be able to use it for an educational purpose. That message was there, and those at the meeting wanted to know why the government had ruled this out. The simple answer is ideology; they hate non-government schools because they only think about government schools. As Mr Seselja said the other day, the Liberal Party in this place is the only party that has an interest in both government and non-government schools.
This Liberal Party is the only party which will stand up for both sectors while Andrew Barr and John Hargreaves want to drive them into the ground. While they are driving the non-government schools into the ground, what they are trying to do is obliterate all memory of those schools. I have been working around the place saying to people that what is actually happening here is like what the Romans did to the Carthaginians. John Hargreaves is the person who is charged with the job of sowing our school sites with salt so that there is no memory of them in the past.
An example of the Andrew Barr-Jon Stanhope approach to obliterating memory is the Flynn plaque fiasco that Mr Smyth touched on before. What an absolute outrage! Mr Barr tried to justify himself and told us in this place and in estimates hearings things like: “The plaque was damaged while it was being removed. It was damaged to an extent that it was unrepairable.” We were told that this plaque was damaged to an extent that it was unrepairable. Mr Speaker, I attended the recommissioning of the
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .