Page 4159 - Week 11 - Thursday, 17 Sept 2009
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but they pitted community against community. This became a fight between communities as to which school would remain and which school would close. And it has been a sorry saga. It has been handled terribly by this government. It has gone to the heart of their integrity regarding how they can be trusted at future elections. But it also goes to the heart of how they treat communities.
They make judgements, and it is an easy judgement electorally for them to make on Hall or Tharwa. That is an easy electoral judgement because they count the votes and they say: “Well, there aren’t that many voters in Hall or Tharwa. We don’t need to worry too much about those communities.” And that is the judgement they make. They have done the electoral maths and said: “We don’t need to worry about those communities. We will simply dismiss them.”
We have a government that has been shown to not care about these communities. We have a government that has shown that it cannot be trusted on education or on any other fundamental promise. We have a government which cannot be trusted on education. We have a government that has shown itself to be fundamentally dishonest on this issue. That is at the heart of this issue.
They can debate whether certain schools with certain lower enrolments were viable in the long run. That is a reasonable debate to have as a community. That is a debate we should have, and an open one. But do not go to an election when that debate is actually raised and say: “No, we’re not going to close them. We are not going to close one school.” In fact, in the debate, the government tried to portray it as the opposition that was going to close the schools; that it was the opposition’s secret plan to close all the schools. So not only did they deny it, not only did they fundamentally go back on their core promise, but they were even dishonest at the time of the debate. They tried to say it was someone else’s plan. This is what they do—they project their own foibles, their own flaws. And that is what they did in this case.
This has been a sordid and dishonest exercise. It is an exercise which reflects very poorly on the ACT Labor Party. It is a process which has not treated the community well. And we still see it in the attitude of Ms Burch, and no doubt when we hear from Mr Barr. The attitude is “Well, they don’t really matter; they should get over it; they should just get over it.” We say that you should not treat communities like that. You should be honest with communities. If you have to make a tough decision, have the guts and the decency to take it to an election and allow the people to decide. Do not sneak it in after an election, and that is really the story that comes out of this report.
Communities have suffered. Have many moved on? Yes, they have. They have no choice but to do so. But there is the ability to redress some of the damage that has been done. The trust will be difficult to get back. But some of the damage can be redressed. You can look at some of the communities—Cook, Hall, Tharwa and Flynn. You can look at Flynn and the projected enrolments they have had, the birth rate in the suburb and the fact that Flynn really has nothing else other than a school. But when they closed that school, there was nothing left. They ripped the heart out of it. There was no other community facility when they closed the school in Flynn.
That is what they did not take into account. They did not take into account that the enrolments in Flynn were actually reasonable. There were a number of reasons why
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