Page 1610 - Week 06 - Thursday, 7 June 2007
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close 39 schools, adding to the closure of Ginninderra district high. Eventually they decided to close 22 schools—
Mr Seselja: Only 22.
MRS DUNNE: It is only 22. We have to be grateful for that. I take this opportunity to remind the Assembly and, through the Assembly, the people of the ACT of the extraordinarily principled stand taken by the Liberal opposition in relation to Towards 2020. School renewal is not brought about by wholesale plunder. We resisted wholesale plunder and we will stand with the people of the ACT in continuing to resist the wholesale plunder of the government school education system.
I think it is timely to remind the government and the people of the ACT of our principled response when we announced in December last year our proposals in relation to Towards 2020. They included the cancellation of restructures and closures scheduled for December 2008. We proposed that, immediately following the 2008 election, a Liberal government would cancel any scheduled school closures—there will not be many left by 2008—and any school restructures scheduled for that time. The P-2 early childhood schools at Isabella Plains, Lyons, Narrabundah and Southern Cross proposed by the Stanhope government would not go ahead unless the community agreed to them. As well, there would not be a restructuring of Melba high school and Copeland College without the agreement of the community.
In addition, we undertook to reinstate schools closed as a result of Towards 2020 where there is sufficient community support to do so, and we have set aside $10 million to a schools reinstatement fund for that purpose. Further, we are committed not to initiate the closure of any schools between 2008 and 2012 and to establish the future schools committee to monitor the health of government schools to ensure that we do not get into this dreadful situation again.
There are a whole lot of reasons for what was done last year, and one of the stated reasons was to address the drift to non-government schools. But there was nothing in that budget and there is nothing in this budget to explain why parents are driving past their local schools and passing up a virtually free service and paying—often at considerable hardship to their families—to send their children to non-government schools.
While we are talking about anniversaries, this week also marks one year since we read the proposition put forward in the Canberra Times by journalist and commentator Chris Uhlmann. He wrote:
Over the next three years the public sector will become a minority provider of Year 7-12 education. To put this in brutal economic terms, you have to worry about a free product that is losing market share to one that is quite expensive.
You do have to worry about it. Mr Barr claims to worry about it, and he has said so a number of times. He has said:
My objective in this process is to see that we address the drift of enrolment in public education and that we ensure that public education does not become a
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