Page 4008 - Week 13 - Wednesday, 5 December 2007
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that drift. Have we seen the change? Have we seen an improvement? Have we seen a turning of the tide? We have not.
I suspect that what the minister wants to do is to see more people go to the non-government school system, because in the short term it saves him money. But in the long term it will cost this community dearly. If Cook primary school and Village Creek primary school close, some of those children will go to the non-government school system and will probably never return into the government school system—because of the folly of this minister and the government that he belongs to. That is what happened when Flynn primary school closed last year; many of those children were lost forever from the government school system. This is happening over and over again.
Dr Foskey asked what public schools were for. Mr Barr still has not satisfactorily answered that. They are not there for providing a service to the community in the community where the people live. But he did recognise something, and it needs to be restated: out of his own mouth this minister said that one of the schools that he proposes to close in a fortnight’s time should be a model for the rest of the ACT system. Then he turned around and closed it.
Mr Barr: Yes, and it will be, in the identical building at Macquarie, 800 metres down the road.
MR DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order, Mr Barr!
MRS DUNNE: He is proposing to close it, irrespective of the impact that that will have on the community in which it is situated—a community that has vibrant businesses that depend upon the school, a community that is centred around the school, a community that is structured so that when people walk they pass the school. This is how Canberra was planned. The minister may not like it, and some of the newer suburbs may not be like this, but places like Cook and the area around Village Creek primary school are places where people naturally walk because that is the way the suburbs were structured. That is the way Flynn was structured. That is the way many of the other places were structured. That is why we had schools in the middle of communities—so that everyone could get to them.
Things may have changed but they have not changed so substantially that viable schools like Cook need to close at this stage. They had good enrolments; they had prospects for continuing high enrolments. In his own words, Cook primary school is a great school: it has a P-6 model with excellent IT, classroom and playground facilities, and the rest of the ACT system should be modelled on it. But he still wants to close it.
For the most part, we cannot tell what the condition of most of these schools is. There is some information out there but, when I tried to obtain this information from the ACT government, I got a letter from their FOI section saying, “Well, yes, you can have it, Mrs Dunne, but there is no public interest in this information becoming available, so we will charge you $1,200 for the process.”
This is a government that needs to be held to account. This is a government that needs to admit that it got it wrong last year when it decided to close Cook primary school
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