Page 4154 - Week 11 - Thursday, 17 Sept 2009
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It is obvious from all of the submissions and all of the evidence that there are a number of lessons that can be learned from this process—extensive lessons. There are some dissenting comments that have been provided. Reading Ms Burch’s comments, I am somewhat surprised by the extent of those, because throughout the process there was broad agreement, and certainly there has been between the opposition and the crossbench, on the bulk of the findings in the report.
I will go through some of the highlights in the report today. I would like to go into more detail but, obviously, I do not have time. But the first lesson that needs to be learnt from this is that if you are going to close 23 schools, if you are going to have a whole shake-up of the education system, then it is probably a good idea to take that to an election. But what you do not do is say, “No, we are not going to close any schools,” and then six weeks later start a process of closing 23 schools and wonder why there would be some doom and gloom in the community, why there would be some expressions of distrust and disillusionment with the government.
That is the first finding. If you go to key finding No 1 in the report, you will see there:
The Committee finds that there had been no prior indication that a substantial change to the ACT education system was required with the result that such extensive reforms were not expected or well understood by the ACT community.
It was the first mistake that the government made and everything thereafter compounded that mistake. And the recommendation that flows out of that in the report, recommendation 8, is that if you are going to do it again, if you are going to have mass school closures, you had better take it to an election; you had better not go to an election saying, “No, no school closures,” and then come back and close them.
The other aspect is that this was clearly linked to the budgetary position. We would like to know more about the functional review—we have been denied it—but we know that the ACT’s budget position was dire and that they needed to close a bunch of schools. A lot of the information released under freedom of information shows that their investigations were about how much can be got from each school site and so on.
What then happened was that the budget position came back into the black, largely through the efforts, I must admit, of the Howard government and the GST revenue. As a result, what happened was that the school closures were linked to budgetary measures. Then what has happened subsequently is the government has tried to stick on this whole “it is about educational reform” afterwards, but the cat was out of the bag. A lot of the process then has been flawed by trying to bolt on educational reform to what was clearly just an effort to make budgetary savings.
The evidence base that was used to support this flawed process was also found to be inconsistent and the statistics used, the evidence used, across a range of issues—and I refer you to key finding 5—was flawed; the demographic analysis was inadequate; it did not look far enough; and it did not look in sufficient detail into particular suburbs and particular areas. Ms Bresnan has already commented on the social impact in detail.
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