Page 3557 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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on a lack of knowledge. That is what Mrs Dunne seeks to point out: if you had the evidence as to why there is a drift from the government to the non-government sector in the ACT, you would put it on the table. But the government has not done the work.
We quizzed the minister during the estimates process and asked, “Have you done exit surveys, have you spoken to parents, have you done anything at all to try and find out why people are leaving the government system in droves?” And the answer was no. They basically just have not done it. We discovered, as we probed, that individual schools do exit surveys as to why people leave. But had this information ever been collated? No, it had not, because the government were not interested.
This minister has been sold a pup. Let us face it: he is the third education minister. Mr Corbell as an education minister was more interested in planning, so nothing happened in education for the first year of the Stanhope government. Then we had Ms Gallagher. I can remember talking to Ms Gallagher at the estimates hearing and we said, “Are you the minister for all schools?” and she said, “No, I am the minister for government schools.” So there was a clear statement of this government’s intention. This minister will go down in history as the minister for closing schools. That will be his sole achievement. And by doing that he is dismantling one of the ACT’s greatest assets.
At a lunch the other day, Dawson Ruhl, who is the CEO of Marymead, got up and said that, for every dollar we spend on educating young people before the age of five, we save $17 in later life. Yet this is a government that is going to shut 20 preschools. It is not shutting them on the basis of knowledge. We have said: “Please wait until February and get the initial cut of the census, and you will know what is going to happen; you will have an idea, a fair dinkum idea based on fact not on rumour.” But, no, it is hell-bent in its arrogant way on shutting schools because it has come to the decision that 39 schools have to go.
You only have to look through the eight points that the minister has put forward in his amendment to know that there is no thought, process or plan behind this. And that is all that Mrs Dunne is asking for in her motion: do the work before you do the damage. But the Stanhope government is going to do the damage because of its financial ineptitude and mismanagement of the budget. It is now trying to balance something, and school children, their future and our communities are simply balancing items for a government of ineptitude and mismanagement. This is a government that has got its priorities so wrong that it is spending half a million dollars on statues of Al Grassby, who was not even a Canberra member of parliament.
Mrs Dunne: I think it was $70,000.
MR SMYTH: Okay, so it is only $70,000—it is not half a million—but I think all the refurb over there is about half a million dollars. But it does not matter; they have got their priorities wrong. The government’s priorities are wrong and the community know it—arboretums, prisons and statues to Al Grassby but shutting 39 schools—and all when the government are running around this country with a program to entice people to come to Canberra: “Come to Canberra because we have got a new prison. Come to Canberra because we are going to have 6,500 dead trees on the top of a hill. Come to Canberra because we are shutting 39 schools. That is a good reason to come
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