Page 4000 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
grades in a school where she was appreciated and recognised, into a great big school, where she disappeared, and she has dropped out of school.” The number of children from Ginninderra district high who have dropped out of school or who are failing in their grades is a significant concern to me and it is a significant concern to their parents.
This is all on the back of a minister and the minister’s adviser who said, “We will not close schools in the next term. Even though the school age population is closing, we wouldn’t need to be looking at it,” said the spokesman, “during Ms Gallagher’s time in politics.” And then they went on to say, “But if the government was to close schools, it would only do so with the support of the community.” So the position before the 2004 election was: no, over Ms Gallagher’s dead body, and if we really have to do it we will have the community with us. Then some time in 2005 the position changed almost entirely in relation to Ginninderra district high school, and then there was a complete throwing out of that and a complete throwing out of any real and meaningful community consultation about the Towards 2020 process. The consultation was a sham: for six months schools, school communities, children, parents, grandparents and businesses in the area were put through hell, sometimes for no reason but other times only to find out that their school was going to close.
We have talked about the figures already today. Mr Barr had a lot to say about the figures and how in some way we had a farcical approach to economics. Then he went on to say that because they were closing schools the Stanhope government had managed to turn around their budget problems simply on the back of closing schools. Yet by his own admission in his own budget papers in 2006 the savings were minuscule—$2 million in the first year, rising to $8 million in the last year of the budget. This is why we said at the outset that we opposed this wholesale closing of schools because the disruption it caused was not merited by the minuscule savings. As Mr Stefaniak has constantly said, it is very hard to save money from closing schools, which is why it was only ever done as a last resort.
Yes, there are always better ways of doing it. We learnt from our mistakes. We put together a consultation process which would have been much better and we had the decency to be honest with the community, to say that when the problems arose we would have to face them head-on, unlike the previous minister for education and her staff, who consistently and regularly misled the community and put together a whole fabric of circumstances. They said it would not happen in the life of this Assembly, not in the political life of the minister involved and, if it did, they would consult with the community. This is the same official who told me in my office, and who told the parents and the citizens association, there was no need to put the school closure consultation document back in the Education Act because there would be no school closures.
This is a government, led by Jon Stanhope, that has consistently misled the community over the status of school closures. It cannot be trusted, and this is why we must move this amendment today and put on the record for all of the community to see clearly that this is a government that misleads the community.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (5.24): I will certainly be supporting the amendment. I was not in the Assembly to witness the words of the former minister. I was not an MLA in
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .