Page 4254 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 21 September 2011
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MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Order!
MRS DUNNE: Oh, we had experts. This principal was an expert.
MR ASSISTANT SPEAKER: Mrs Dunne, firstly your microphone works fine. Ms Hunter, would you please stop the interjections. Mrs Dunne, you have the floor.
MRS DUNNE: The principal of Lanyon high school, Mr Assistant Speaker, is an expert. We pay him to be an expert and he took an approach, a community-based approach. I can remember the number of times I have been lectured in this place by Greens who say that it takes a village to raise a child. The principal of Lanyon high school essentially took up that principle and went to his community and said: “I have got a problem. Can you help me deal with this problem?” We had the thought police come in over the top of him and tell him that he could not do it.
Everyone in the community on the Labor side, the Greens and the human rights commissioner criticised the principal for doing his job, for trying to engage with the community to ensure that the children in that community got a reasonable start in life, to ensure that the kids who were supposed to be in school were in school. He tried to bring the community with him and he was slapped down. He was slapped down by Ms Hunter, he was slapped down by the government—the people who were supposed to be supporting him—and he was slapped down by the agents of the government in the form of the human rights commission.
We have Ms Hunter saying today that we will never legislate to allow discrimination against young people. We do it every day. Young people cannot buy cigarettes. We have legislation for entrapment of people who might sell cigarettes to young people. Young people cannot buy alcohol. Young people cannot do a whole range of things. They cannot vote. They cannot join the Army. There are a range of things that they cannot do. We discriminate all the time.
We discriminate about young people when we say that they must go to school. It is all discrimination. What we have here is Mr Seselja being the only person in this debate who has made a practical suggestion about how we might assist the principal of Lanyon high school and other principals. Again, we are being slapped down by the government. We are being slapped down by the Greens.
Actually, it has obviously got under Ms Hunter’s skin. There is an appeal to practicality; there is an appeal to common sense. But common sense leaves the room when Ms Hunter and Mr Corbell get together on this one. It obviously gets under their skin because all she can do is criticise a line from Mr Seselja’s press release. She wants to criticise it as a three word slogan. The fact is that what is going to happen today is that Mr Corbell and Ms Hunter together are going to entrench the right to wag.
Mr Corbell talked at length about how indefensible this was, how impossible it was for the government to support this. His words were—actually, I have lost his words; I will have to go from memory. His words were high flown and high minded but he did
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