Page 2802 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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amalgamated into Melba. Flynn has a very vibrant primary school. That is slated to close. Charnwood is right and, of course, there is no school in Dunlop. Between Evatt and Charnwood, we will have two schools closing there. Again, there will be two suburbs in a row without a school.
Let us look at some of those schools: I will just take Giralang as an example. There is world famous architectural design at Giralang. It is a school that 70 per cent of the kids in the suburb actually go to. It is a school where kids actually walk to school because the suburb is planned that way. It is a suburb that looks like it might lose their doctor and, indeed, the shopping centre basically is no more. So that suburb has certainly has been hit. But when you look at that particular school, the fact is that 70 per cent of kids in the suburb go there. Most of them walk there. It is nice and safe to walk there.
Mr Stanhope: How much spare capacity in that school, Bill?
MR STEFANIAK: There is not as much as you would probably think, Chief Minister. I am glad you chirp up there because one of the core things in your plan is that the spare capacity is quite simply wrong in many instances because of when that spare capacity was determined and just what has happened since then in these particular schools. If you go through some of these schools you will see quite clearly that what you have been told is spare capacity is just not that at all.
Then you go to a school like Hall. It is doing a magnificent job trying to save itself. It is probably the oldest continuous school in the ACT. Tharwa, of course, goes back to 1899, but I think there was a gap there in terms of when it was operating. Hall goes back to 1911 and continuously has operated since then. Yes, I know all the arguments about a lot of people coming from interstate. But all those people from interstate have to be accommodated elsewhere in the ACT system and that is what they have all been told.
If you have got a school there that is vibrant, that also has heritage factors, that is the hub of its village and that has demonstrated a great capacity as to why it should stay open, why would you close a school like that? It is historic, it provides excellent educational programs, and it has a very recent run of great successes. I think they have a national or international champion in mathematics at that school. There are some fantastic programs there in the heart of a thriving community plus all those historic and heritage aspects as well.
There is not much logic to this. There is very little logic just looking at those schools I have mentioned. You tell me where the logic is there. I think one of your fundamental problems here, which I would urge you now to consider because you are going to pass your budget, is that you need to have a very good hard look at these schools and make your consultation period, which you have to do by statute, something other than a sham. Have a good hard look at all of these schools.
Mr Stanhope: That is what we are doing, Bill.
MR STEFANIAK: I doubt it. The school community has no confidence in that, Jon. I am just encouraging you to do so, because in so many of these instances—I am just naming some of my electorate north of Ginninderra Drive—there is no real logic why they have been fingered to close.
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