Page 4001 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
those days. I suppose for me the issue is that I believe people voted for the Stanhope government with no idea that this was in their program—and perhaps it was not.
I just want to take us back to the 2010 process, which was apparently in progress, and to remind people here that other states have had similar problems—changing demographics, less money for public education as a result of the federal government’s policies—but they have tackled them in different ways. I want to remind people—I have told you here before, but I do not think the minister was listening, just as he is not now—of what happened in Victoria. I am not saying it is the best state in the world but the Victorian government did this one right. They got people together on the regional level—in the ACT I suspect you would go for the areas that are currently education department regions—and said, “We have got to save this much money; we have got these problems.” They put people together and solutions were come up with that did involve some school closures, but they were owned by the community.
The ACT Greens are not saying that no schools should close; they are saying that the right schools should close—and only with the right processes. It is just shameful that the government closed Ginninderra high. I remember those debates. Ms Gallagher was the minister then and she staunchly defended that decision to close Ginninderra high. I am not saying it was not the right decision, but the process was abysmal and they know it was abysmal. I talked to people at Ginninderra high at the time and the principal told me some of the problems that students from Ginninderra high were having at the school. But was there any evaluation of that process? None whatsoever. So the same mistakes were multiplied 30 times in the announcements that were made in the 2012. You would think that they would learn, wouldn’t you, especially when something had such an adverse local impact as the closure of Ginninderra high, and the fact that students were just willy-nilly meant to make their own way to other high schools?
Today when I was walking in Civic a parent from Cook primary school recognised me. He approached me and said, “What can we do?” Their school closes at the end of this year. They have done everything they can. They engaged in the consultations last year. I would like inverted commas put around that word “consultation” as it applied to school closures. They worked hard, they put hours and hours of voluntary labour into their submissions. They did it cynically but also in good faith, if you can say that, because Cook school was threatened for closure by another government; I think a Liberal one. They came out of that, I believe, because there was an election.
That is why this policy has to be taken to an election. I fear the speed with which this consultation on the fate of closed schools is occurring, because I fear that the government are trying to cross all the t’s so that the issues are wrapped up and the decisions are irreversible by the time they go to the next election. I think that is false. I think it is wrong. The only thing people have got in a democratic process, given the consultation was farcical, is the election. It is wrong to ensure that these decisions cannot be reversed.
I went to nearly every consultation on the school closures about a month ago. I talked to parents and I watched the consultants at work. I heard what people had to say, and in almost every case people wanted to make sure that whatever happened to their schools they were still available to be reopened under a more enlightened government
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .