Page 1616 - Week 05 - Thursday, 8 May 2008
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money. Parents suspected that the economic argument in 2006 did not stack up. And Katy Gallagher has confirmed this just this week.
They said they would close no schools. Katy Gallagher ruled this out on 12 August 2004, on the cusp of the last election, when she said, through a spokesman, that during the next term of government “the government will not be closing schools”. On 2 April this year, Ms Gallagher confessed in the Assembly that she had in fact decided to break this promise just six weeks after the election. What a kick in the guts to the voters who took Labor on trust!
Labor’s closure of 23 public schools has been the biggest setback to public education since self-government. It has and will perpetuate the movement to the non-government sector. Labor has caused disruption and uncertainty in the government school system. Labor thinks schools are all about bricks and mortar. What it has ignored is the importance of the social mortar.
Whole communities have been dislocated by these school closures. Children have been separated from lifelong friends. Teachers have been involuntarily reassigned to new schools. And some families have had to sell homes or buy a second car to get access to a new school. Many of the schools which were closed were primary schools. These kids are often not able to safely walk to distant suburbs to get to a new school.
We understand what this means to people. Mum or dad has to get to work on time, sometimes across the other side of town, but they also have to drive in another direction to drop their kids off to school first. And schools do not usually take kids before 8.00 am. It is a real and awful stress now for many parents, caught between the pressure to get to work on time and the need to get their young kids to a new school in another suburb safely.
Fortunately, the door has not closed entirely on many of these broken communities. I have a plan to reopen schools closed by the Labor Party, where this is feasible and where there is strong community support. We will work with communities to determine the future of all closed schools, using criteria based on educational, social, financial, demographic and environmental factors.
The data and evidence used by a Canberra Liberal government to make decisions on the future of schools will all be made public. It is a solemn promise. It is different from the solemn promise made by Katy Gallagher that no schools would close in the next term of the Labor government. You misled the community and you need to admit it.
That is quite a contrast to the Stanhope government, which very cynically suppressed the review run by Labor Party identity Mr Michael Costello. Mr Barr’s consultation on schools was a sham that had little effect on decisions that had already been made. The secret basis on which schools were singled out was never released for public debate and challenge. This is a cowardly way to engage in a public debate or reform process. Labor thinks it can take this community for granted and get away with it.
They take teachers for granted too. For seven years they froze funding levels for teacher professional development. These school closures have brought disruptions and
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