Page 636 - Week 02 - Thursday, 6 March 2008
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Everyone wants a good education for their children and education is an issue confronting Canberra’s young families. All of us, especially young families, want the best education system we can get for our children. Some people opt for private education; others opt for public education; some opt for a bit of both. For generations public education has been the mainstay, the certain future, the constant, for our nation’s children.
But what has the Stanhope Labor government done to the public education system in the ACT? Instead of providing certainty in our public system, the government has introduced uncertainty. How would a young family respond to an atmosphere of uncertainty? Some of them respond by sending their children to private schools. There is an exodus, and a continuing exodus, from the ACT’s public schools to the ACT’s private schools. Some of that is from choice, but some of that is out of absolute desperation and some of it is very much out of uncertainty. Why is this so? It is because the government has done a number of things, but first and foremost what comes to mind is that this government has closed schools against promises not to.
We have had a few questions over the last few weeks about this. This issue will never go away. What really rankles with a lot of people is that the government have closed schools in a most covert manner, with no public consultation, against promises to consult. Despite what the government might like to say, everyone, I think, in Canberra had the impression before the last election that this government were not going to close schools this term. That was made quite clear, despite how the government might squirm about it. Even after the election, there were not any signs that they were going to. In fact, even as late as, I think, 10 April 2006 the then minister Katy Gallagher put out a fairly bland thing about improvements for the school system. Nothing was said about closures.
Then, of course, we had the Costello report, which, naturally, this government will not release. On 6 June, on D-day 2006, it was announced that 39 schools, I think it was, were to be closed. There was no consultation as to which ones. That was wound back to 23 schools. But what an incredibly arrogant way of doing things. If the government were really concerned, they could have flagged that we had a problem, taken the community into their confidence, sat down with the community and worked out, “Okay, we have to close some schools; which ones will they be?” Instead, they put the cart before the horse in a most covert and arrogant way, and now we have had some 23 schools closed.
Yet when this government were in opposition, when previous governments might have attempted to close a handful of schools or preschools, they said things such as: “You can’t do that because how are the kids going to walk school? They’ve got to cross a main public street.” They could not give a stuff about that now. We have had a large number of schools close and there are a large number of streets that children will certainly have to cross—and that means absolutely nothing now to this government. So there is a great element in this government of hypocrisy, of double standards and of saying things completely different from what they would have said only a short number of years ago.
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