Page 2482 - Week 12 - Tuesday, 14 November 1989
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
institutions, then Australian and international ones.
Why the cultural cringe, especially coming from a Minister who is the Minister for Education as well as the Minister responsible for the Office of Industry and Development? Why do we not look at what we have in the ACT? Firstly, we have ACT research institutions, headed perhaps by the Australian National University which is recognised worldwide as a leading research university. There is no need for us to bow, as we have in this paper, to New South Wales education.
If you go to secondary education, similarly it is very easy to argue that the ACT secondary colleges in particular are much more research oriented than the New South Wales education concept leading to an end of year exam. So I think there is a special question to be asked there.
Further on page 12 is the implication of a third university for Canberra. That is absolutely ridiculous. That, by the way, is emphasised again on page 57, where the paper says:
The ACT considers that education, as developed in the ACT Vision, has commercial potential in its own right as well as being the fundamental enabling factor for the MFP. The latter attribute will, of itself, produce synergies with all other MFP activities.
We already have two, or potentially two, excellent universities - the "potential" applies, by the way, to the CAE becoming a university - and I think the concept of presenting a third university, a private university, is absolute nonsense. Whatever we do here ought to be tied in with the current universities that we have.
I then look at a comment on planning, on page 33, where it says:
The ACT has been planned and developed as a series of distinct new towns linked by high speed peripheral roads ...
I am very pleased to see that included in the physical features of the ACT as a planned city. The concept that another decentralised town should become part of the ACT is, I think, excellent. I would emphasise here that, to ensure that the ACT plan works, and works as it ought, we should be ensuring that the working areas are retained in the new decentralised town, if that is what we are attempting here. Looking at the plan, I think the Jerrabomberra estate is more likely to be an extension of one of the existing towns, a centralised area, from Narrabundah.
Then we go on to transport. I do not know whether we are just writing things up or whether we are being offered a
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .