Page 1963 - Week 06 - Thursday, 8 June 2006
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and making it considerably worse, had collapsed. The Liberal-led alliance government was faced with a crisis, a crisis not of their making, and they had to make very hard decisions. One of those decisions was to close schools.
What do we have now? We have a government that has been in power for five years, five good years economically, with windfall gains, as has been outlined by my colleagues, in their own revenue and a whole lot of things going in their favour: a building boom and a greatly increased GST revenue that has superseded all projections. Yet, astonishingly, the government is telling us that it has fallen on hard times and, as a result, things must go in public education.
What the government really should be saying is that it has, in fact, recklessly jumped on the hard times head first and has been given the necessary push by its economic mismanagement. Throughout the five-year period we have been assured that there has been no problem. In the lead-up to the last election we were categorically assured that this government would not be closing schools—that big lie!
Now, all of a sudden, someone has thought to check the bank balance. There were no unexpected costs, no new revelations, not even the excuse that there was less in the kitty than the last government said. Well, actually there was. The trouble is the last government was a Stanhope government. The only thing that remains unchanged since the last exercise in school closures is that this time it is not brought about by economic need; it is brought about by economic mismanagement.
One thing that has not changed is the rhetoric. It was interesting to read some of the debates and some of things that were said back in 1990 when my mentor, Gary Humphries, was in the situation of having to close schools because there literally was no money. It is very interesting to hear the rhetoric. I have been sitting here today and over the last little while thinking what must it be like when you are a new minister for education and you do not know very much about teaching, which is not to say that the minister does not have other great attributes. I imagine they are rubbing their hands together with glee in the department of education. They are saying, “Minister, we know how you can save money. Never mind the fact that we will be spending nearly 10 times as much to make the money. Minister, we can arrest the decline in public education. Never mind the overwhelming disruption that we will experience in the meantime.”
Let us have a look at what has occurred. Last year we had the closure of Ginninderra district high school. Then there was the one big school, just like the one big union, and that was the preferred model under the then minister Katy Gallagher. But we all know that Mr Barr was never going to be a wobbly, so we now have a complete smorgasbord of alternatives. We have got middle schools, K-12 schools, P-3 schools, 5-8 schools, 7-12 schools and probably a few more combinations that I have overlooked so far. We have all of that and we are pretending that we are going to save money.
Those of us who have been teachers and parents know what parents, not bureaucrats, find attractive in schools. It is not experimentation. There is no combination of year groups and subject groups that is really going to be a turn-on to parents. What parents want is quality education, reliable infrastructure, fair assessment, stability, comprehensible feedback and commitment. Dispute the rhetoric in Mr Barr’s agenda,
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