Page 4192 - Week 13 - Thursday, 14 December 2006
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but my points and my censure motion, if it were able to be done, would apply to everyone on the government benches.
In a way, I admire Mr Barr’s ability to carry through with such sangfroid or cold blood—and there I was apologising for my accent, not for people’s ability to understand the word. I have to admire the poise with which he has travelled through this process. I know that, given the way that things work in this place and in politics in general, that is considered an asset.
But what we had here was a phoney consultation process which ensured that submissions made contesting government thinking were obscured for as long as possible, the denial by the minister of the injustice of judging a school’s capacity on the basis of a number of temporary classrooms that are stored on site for the convenience of the government, and a minister who will not consider the impact of a school closure on its community in making the decision, who is not prepared to invest in alternative strategies to support schools and communities that are dwindling, who uses inaccurate or extreme costing figures as a way of casting all small schools in a bad light, who is unable to provide the pedagogical thinking to support the whole-scale reorganisation of the public education system, who has not conducted research on the drift from public to non-government schools, who has not conducted a risk assessment of the whole proposal, nor any comprehensive social or environmental impact analyses.
This is a minister who has not looked specifically at the impact of these closures on kids with a disability or kids living with disadvantage, who has not been prepared even to slow the process down in order to make it achieve the level of change manageable for the department and for the parents, the students and the teachers involved, who has not been prepared to release the functional review of the ACT budget on which the claims of overfunding are based, who has not been prepared to work in partnership with the work force or the parents, who has paid no regard to the ACT government’s own expert advisory groups, including the Community Inclusion Board and the Government Schools Education Council, and who would not even declare in his media releases the schools and preschools that were being closed down.
I am quite sure—I can actually tell from the speeches that have been given today and yesterday—that Mr Barr has learned from the process. I am quite sure that he has learned a lot about running a public education system, about the difficulties of schools and the concerns that teachers have about these processes, but we will never hear him say those things. We will not hear Mr Barr say that the data was wrong or that he has listened to people and taken their ideas on board, because today I asked him a very specific question about specific schools and a specific area and he gave a prepared answer which was a generic response to a question he must have known he was going to get and he did not answer my question about why it was decided that Giralang would stay open and Cook would not. I support Giralang staying open, but do not understand why Giralang could stay open and Cook could not.
I do not understand why Flynn had to close. I do understand more from the government’s own reasoning why Hall had to close, because it was fairly inevitable all along that it was going to close. We heard about the New South Wales students who go there. We cannot service them, apparently, unless they merge into a bigger
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