Page 3258 - Week 10 - Wednesday, 18 October 2006
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needs to be seen in that context whenever we have this debate that everything that is said in future by this government will have to be taken with a grain of salt.
In that vein, Mr Barr talked about courage and accountability. I hope I am not misquoting him; he can interject if I am. I think he used those two words. It does need to be said that it is not a courageous decision to say after the election, having said that you were not going to close any schools, “We are now going to close lots of schools and we are going to do so well before the next election.” That is not courageous and it is not accountable because you are not taking it to the people at an election and saying, “This is our policy. This is what we are going to do.” You are announcing it 18 months after the election. You are doing your best to get all the schools closed well before the next election so that you can minimise the political damage. That is not courageous and it is not making yourself accountable in the true sense.
Turning to the bill, we are debating this bill about school closures for one main reason: that this government broke its word. It breached faith with the electorate. After going to the election, it gained a majority based in part on its promise not to close any schools.
Mrs Dunne: “And you mustn’t fear a majority Stanhope government.”
MR SESELJA: We heard from the Chief Minister that we should not fear a Stanhope majority government. Of course, we know now that not to be true, that people should have feared a majority Stanhope government. But it is about integrity.
Let us look at the Labor Party’s platform. Ms Gallagher always says that the statement that the government would not close schools was just a statement by a staffer. Of course, it was never corrected by the education minister. It was never corrected. It was taken to the election. A look through their platform should give you a bit of an idea on that. It should tell you what they stand for and what they are planning to do in the next term. Is there anything in it about gutting the education system? Is there anything in it about closing 40 schools? The only mention of school closures is the one on preschools, which states, “We have kept preschools with low enrolments open for families to access when the Liberals would have closed them.”
Their only dialogue with the people of the ACT on school closures prior to the election was, firstly, when they said, “Trust us; we are not going to close any schools,” and, “Those Liberals would close the schools and would close preschools, not us.” How many preschools are on the list? There are 20 or 22. We are again debating this matter because it is a fundamental issue of integrity. It is an issue of saying one thing and doing another, saying one thing to get elected and doing the complete opposite after the election. That is what we have seen from this government. The community has been misled; clearly it has.
I turn to the timing and the haste of this decision. We had the announcement by the government that it was thinking of closing 39 schools and we have had since then the haste to do so, which is part of what this bill goes to. What is the reason for such haste? Having come to the epiphany suddenly after the election of the need to close 40 schools, they are not going to sit back for a while and think about the best way of achieving this renewal of the education system. They are going to do it as quickly as they can.
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