Page 3567 - Week 11 - Wednesday, 15 November 2006
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for him by the department, a set piece speech and he came in and gave it almost as if he had not read the motion that was originally moved.
The motion that was originally moved and my amendment to Mr Barr’s amendment, which will certainly get up, are there so that we as a community can understand what is happening in our schooling system. Every person in this town is interested in education because they have just finished themselves, they have children in the system or they have grandchildren in the system, and they want it to be the best. We have had all of the fallacious arguments that the Labor Party likes to throw up so that it can pull them down. There is always the fallacious argument that the opposition does not want to spend the money. It is not that we do not want to spend the money. It is that we want to spend it wisely and this minister does not know whether he is spending it wisely. If he does not know whether he is spending it wisely, he may be sending good money after bad.
Mr Barr has said that the $90 million of capital injection is to address the drift to the non-government school system. I do not know whether, by building a new assembly hall at Chapman primary school, the children in Weston Creek are going to be more likely to attend a government school over a non-government school, and neither does this minister. He does not know whether spending the money at Chapman primary school is a good investment or not. Ms Porter is sitting there saying, “What about all the schools in my electorate?” I do not know and she does not know whether what they propose to spend the money on will actually address the problem. That is why I say they run the risk of putting good money after bad. We do not say, “Do not spend the money.” We say, “Inform yourself first.”
The motion moved by me was a simple motion that this minister could have embraced—he might have won some kudos in the community for doing so—by actually going out and understanding how the community is operating, why people are choosing non-government schools and why there are waiting lists at non-government schools and there are other schools which are quite empty. Some of those reasons are important and imponderable. This minister gave some reasons that he had thought and some of them would not cost very much money to address. Some of it is about infrastructure. We have admitted that the infrastructure has been run down. Some of it needs a complete refurbishment. Some of it needs maintenance.
What we have here is the minister saying that he is going to invest some of that $90 million to address the drift to non-government schools on fixing a roof. That is maintenance money. That is one example. Another example is that he is going to build car parks at Campbell high school so that people can drive to school. He is environmentally concerned about the fabric of the infrastructure and the thermal mass at Harrison school and the west Belconnen school, but at the same time the people of the inner north will have to drive to school and he will build more car parks so that they can.
Is that a good investment? Are car parks at Campbell high school a means of stemming the drift to non-government schools? By building car parks at Campbell high school, will people go to Campbell high school rather than Daramalan? He does not know. I do not know. No one in this room knows. But he is prepared to spend money without the evidence. Mr Mulcahy has basically said it all. We have got a
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