Page 2814 - Week 09 - Thursday, 27 September 2007
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Mr Barr: I get on very well with Morag. That’s a very unfair accusation.
DR FOSKEY: I said “perhaps they have”. The school has been told that there is further temporary space available and it is very nearby. Another tenancy has been vacated, and the location suits many organisations. I am referring to the letter I got from Mr Hargreaves. Apparently there is a list for access to these premises, and you are placed on that list in chronological order. It disturbs me, and I hope that I am wrong—Mr Hargreaves wrote the letter, and he can respond later on perhaps—that the only criteria for being considered to be able to use these government-owned facilities is whether you appear on the list. Sometimes there are other issues that need to be brought up to the front, and the Blue Gum community school is such a case. It is a school which exists and which needs space just to keep going, not just to expand, and I would like to see a little bit more thought about education aspects of the kinds of decisions that are made.
We do have a number of community organisations lobbying for access to these school sites. I am sure that there are many, many people with a bit of an investment in schools not being opened on these unused school sites. However, to me, these sites were schools; they were built as schools and will involve quite a lot of adaptation for community organisations. By all means, where they are in surplus I want to see community organisations having a first go at them. But they were built as schools, and I would like to see schools being prioritised on their merits for access to these sites. That does not mean every school that applies has to be given a site, but just to rule them out altogether is something I do not understand. It has not been properly explained to me why that decision was made, but it is certainly limiting the consultations that are occurring about the future of school sites.
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (4.46): This is a very important matter, and it is a really top-of-mind issue for many people in the community, especially this week, because it is this week that the small process of public consultation is taking place over the future of school sites. I think that we have to start just a little bit before that. There is public consultation going on at the moment which is being fairly radically truncated by a whole lot of things, some of which have been put down to ensuring that Mr Hargreaves’s department goes through the right procedures, the procurement procedures. As a result of that, we have quite a truncated consultation process on what to do with future sites.
The threshold question has never been addressed in that: who owns those school sites? Having had the opportunity to attend one of the two meetings that have already taken place—and I will go back to those meetings again—the very strong sentiment expressed at the large, well-attended meeting that I was at at the Australian Institute of Sport on Tuesday night was that these are the community’s sites. These do not belong to the government; the current Stanhope government is nothing more than the custodian of those sites. The views strongly expressed are that the community demands to be heard. As I was leaving the other night a number of people said to me, “Well, that was probably a waste of time and no-one in the government will probably listen to what we have to say. But at least we have to go through the motions. We have to put out here the things that we want to say so that we do at least know what the government has ignored of what we had to say.”
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