Page 2803 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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I think the biggest problem you have is that up until 13 April at least no-one was remotely thinking of doing anything like this. This is purely a result of the functional review and when you are cobbling together a budget, surely you would take note of more than just one document. I think that seems to be one of the fundamental flaws, not only with education, but perhaps with other areas in the budget as well. You have got the numbers. You can fundamentally do as you like. But have a good hard look at all these schools you have fingered for closing, because there is not much logic in a lot of it.
MR SMYTH (Brindabella) (3.14 am): Mr Speaker, the closure of 39 schools in the ACT seems to be a misguided overreaction to the financial problems that the government faces. No amount of chest beating and claims of courage and claims of leadership will, I think, persuade the community that the government is even vaguely close to getting it right on the educational needs of the ACT into the future. As others before me have pointed out and as Mr Stefaniak has just pointed out, if you look at the illogical way schools have been targeted for very weak reasons, I think the community has to their own satisfaction convinced themselves that this is a flawed process and the opposition is of the same opinion.
I will follow the line of logic that Mr Stefaniak used in relation to Tuggeranong. A school like Gilmore has a reasonably good attendance, has a reasonably good outcome, is a reasonably young building. All of these things that would seem to suggest you should keep it open apparently cannot save a school like Gilmore. We go to Kambah, which is quite a unique suburb in Canberra. It is the largest suburb in Canberra. It is four times the ordinary size of a suburb. And yet it is the only high school above Athllon Drive. But that school will close. There will still be four high schools below Athllon Drive but in time, if you are really serious about setting up a sustainable system, you would have thought that you would look at a geographic pattern as well as current attendance patterns to ensure that you have adequate coverage into the future.
They are just two examples of where this whole proposal is flawed. Other members have come forward and given their suggestions as to what has happened and what is wrong. But the problem for the community is that they can find no logic in the numbers—the three or four flimsy pages that have been put on the web site—to define the logic behind what the government is trying to do. So they will be very disappointed when over the next couple of days they come to realise that Mr Hargreaves, Mr Gentleman and Ms MacDonald have voted for schools to close. That is effectively what they have done. Despite all the posturing out there in the community and their saying, “We are very concerned and we are concerned about time frames,” when push came to shove, the three Labor members of Brindabella failed their community.
Mr Speaker, I will not labour the point. I think everybody knows our position on this side and we are not happy about this. But the problem here is that the community has not only had this thrown at them but they have had it thrown at them in such a way that when the decision is finally delivered in late December this year, they will be denied the time in which to take appropriate action to look after themselves and their families. This is because by that time the school communities will be shutting down. The ability to get on to potentially future schools for their children will be impossible for some weeks. It will be impossible to make new arrangements, whether it be for before or after school care, family day care or any other sort of care they wish to put in place. I think that is the
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