Page 1854 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 7 June 2006
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we have this list of 39 preschools and schools which you have unilaterally decided to close without any community consultation at all.
Mrs Dunne’s document is a very good blueprint for a community consultation process. I am not surprised that you are going to vote against this legislation. Indeed, it is hardly surprising when you have announced a huge sum—25 per cent, I think one of the media outlets described it—of preschools and schools within the ACT which will be affected. It is a huge slab, I suppose, for our community simply to comprehend and come to grips with. And it has been announced without, it would seem, any attempts at consultation.
If you are now going to consult, you are consulting after the event. You are consulting probably just on programs you might move and how the administration of these closures can take effect, rather than consulting with the community to see whether in fact that is the best model, whether in fact that is the best idea and whether in fact that is the best way forward.
We on this side accept the need for amalgamations and some school closures, but we see it as absolutely essential, as far as you can, to take the community with you. You need to have a decent consultation model. Most of the time you are dealing with people that are quite reasonable. I hark back to the Melba and Spence example. You will be able to take the vast majority of the community with you. You can do that by proper consultation.
But you are certainly not going to do that and you are certainly going to cause a lot of angst by simply saying, “This is what we are doing.” Effectively, there will be no consultation. Consultation after the event is not real consultation. Obviously, at the end of the day, you can do what you like; you have the numbers. But that does not mean it is right; it does not mean you are approaching it in the right way.
I believe what Mrs Dunne has on the table is, as far as you can put anything like this down on paper and conceptualise it, the best way forward for proper consultation. It allows for a real engagement of school communities. Her amendments have also allowed for consultation for at least six months before the event, not after the event, not after the decision is made, and her bill is worthy of support.
MR PRATT (Brindabella) (3.55): I rise to support Mrs Dunne’s proposed legislation on this issue of school closures. Educating our young, perhaps after community safety, is the most important duty of government. It is our community’s future.
Government members interjecting—
MR PRATT: Lives first, and then the nurturing and education of children. Lives first, I know, is a very, very strange concept for Labor to get across; you will have to bear it, won’t you? Therefore, the educating of our young, the nurturing of our youth, the development of that next generation of our community, is a very high priority and is fundamentally important to the way government behaves and the way it carries out its duties.
But education has to be cost-effective. We want government to deliver excellent standards of education. But at times there will be a need for cost-effective decisions to be taken. That is why the opposition, certainly in the last four years, have never said that we
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