Page 2812 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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what on earth he wanted us to address. The actual topic of the MPI is “The management of closed schools in the ACT.” Half of his speech was on management of disposal of unwanted furniture and equipment. It was only in the last little bit that he started to talk about the actual management process, the community consultation process and that sort of stuff.
I would say to him that, if he wants to have these sorts of discussions—and I have no problem in engaging in them at all—if he can be a little more specific about the bits that he wants to include in the MPI, that would make it clearer. Mr Smyth has been a member here for exactly the same length of time that I have. He would know that MPI discussions are exactly 60 minutes long. If the idea is to have information put to the public because it is a matter of public importance, he should give people who have information an opportunity to put it on the table. If he is going to be obtuse about it then the quality of public information will be lacking; it will be lessened.
We heard from my colleague that some of the furniture was destined to go overseas. He said that. If Mr Smyth was interested in further information on that, had the topic of this MPI been clearer about that part of his interest, we would have been delighted to talk about that, because that is an important issue and it is part of our process. I have to say that we were doing that during the time when I was a public servant under Gary Humphries.
DR FOSKEY (Molonglo) (4.36): The management of closed schools in the ACT is the latest chapter in a sorry saga that began with the budget last year. What we have seen, I believe, is a failed process in terms of so-called consultation about which schools would be closed and which schools would be turned into fragments of schools. It was a very bad process, followed up by another process which cannot be good because of the roots from which it originated. As Mr Hargreaves has pointed out, there are many ways a topic like the management of closed schools could go. I was a little uncertain myself; however, I am just going to take the topic where I believe it needs to go.
There are a lot of issues around this. The first one was pointed out most clearly when Mr Hargreaves talked about “letting” the people of Tharwa use the kitchen of their old school and “letting” the people at Hall have access for a few days to some other part of their school. I think this is where we come to the fundamental problem of this whole process—people actually thought these schools were their schools, they thought they were the community’s schools. So they are actually experiencing this process, this closing of their schools, when they still do not understand what the good reasons were for the closures. They do not agree that the reasons that the government has given are good reasons. They are experiencing this as a theft of some kind, certainly a theft of community amenity and, in a way, a theft from the value of their children’s education.
So when people go along to the consultations conducted, I am sure, in good faith by the consultants and get told that the one option that they cannot consider is the one that they most want—which is to see their schools reopened—to them that theft is confirmed. I think it does not hurt the government to try and understand how people actually feel out there. It is not enough to say, “These people are wrong” or, “They
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