Page 3000 - Week 08 - Thursday, 25 June 2009
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secretive government suddenly decided that the sky would fall if its functional review was exposed to the light of day. So it continued to close schools, depending upon the secret information in the functional review. There was no honesty, no openness and no accountability.
Madam Assistant Speaker Burch, as you were not here at the time, I think it is reasonable to give a bit of an exposition on how the school closures process epitomised the failure of openness, honesty and accountability of the Stanhope government. Of the schools that were listed for closure, there was a range of information, published on websites and made available to the schools, that pointed to the reasons why the government wanted to close those schools. There was not a school on that list where the information provided by the government was not challenged and eventually corrected by the Stanhope government.
The information on which they had made their decisions was faulty from the outset. There was constant challenging of the information, and much of it had to be reviewed. There was other information which, despite recommendations of the estimates committee at the time and elsewhere, the government steadfastly refused to review and update to take account of things that had been overlooked. The community was constantly asking for more accurate information, and the government failed to provide it.
Then, of course, there was the incapacity of the Stanhope government to provide full reasoning for why they closed their schools which, in one case, resulted in a challenge to the Supreme Court, which has now concluded, and the signal failure of me and other members of the community to obtain information under the Freedom of Information Act. I suppose one good outcome of that failure is that we now are starting to see reform of the Freedom of Information Act, which stemmed directly from the abuses of the Stanhope government when they issued conclusive certificates over thousands of pages of documents, just blanket certificates.
Moving on from schools, we see issues like the Grassby statue, a project that was supposed to symbolise the richness and the integration of our multicultural society but instead did little else than cause deep division in the community. We had one minister, Minister Hargreaves, espousing its virtues and then we had the Chief Minister saying that it was probably not the most red-hot decision ever made by this government. Let alone the fact that there was no community consultation on the statue, it is not even clear whether Mr Hargreaves consulted with his cabinet colleagues. There was certainly no openness, no honesty and no accountability there and there was certainly no honesty in the dealings with the McKay family.
While on the subject of Mr Hargreaves, let me remind you about the closure of the Griffith library and the now famous conclusion about consultation when he said, “We did not consult youse because we knew what youse were going to say.”
Mr Hargreaves: That is not what I said at all.
MRS DUNNE: I reckon if we went to the Hansard office and listened to the tape—the inflection may not be quite right—I think that the general information was pretty much spot-on.
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