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STANHOPE-LESS

The eco­nomic vandal whose dis­graced gov­ern­ment has declared war on Can­berra

That was on today’s Daily Tele­graph front­page after ACT’s Chief Min­is­ter Stan­hope announced the new Budget, and justly so. Chief Min­is­ter Stan­hope has decided to axe our public edu­ca­tion system with his plan to shut down 39 schools, of which 22 are preschools, 15 primary schools my sister’s high school of over 850 stu­dents and one of Can­ber­ras most rep­utable and largest col­leges: Dickson College. It is already dif­fi­cult enough to try and find a space in a preschool, but the closure of 15 primary schools through­out Can­berra along with a large estab­lished high­school and college is really bring­ing the temper of Can­berra cit­i­zens to the boil.

Quite hon­estly this is the sort of thing that we would expect from perhaps a Liberal gov­ern­ment, not a Labour gov­ern­ment. Other items on the list was the scrap­ping of the Capital’s tourism with a cut in funding of 3 million, about 600 admin­is­tra­tive jobs layed off, most in Edu­ca­tion. Another over 390 jobs cut with almost half of them being school posi­tions. Living in Can­berra is going to get more expen­sive also with rates climb­ing almost 10%, aver­ag­ing an extra $96 ontop of what we cur­rently pay.

It seems as if the current gov­ern­ment believes the public edu­ca­tion system is not sup­ply­ing them with any­thing in return so they seem to be under the impres­sion that they can just close down a quarter of Canberra’s public schools. With Gin­nin­nderra High School closure last year student numbers already increased in nearby schools. Sud­denly the in-​area suburbs for Bel­con­nen and Melba High also included Ginninnderra’s. I was apart of Bel­con­nen High’s Student Lead­er­ship Council as well as the School Board last year and we could feel the effects of the nearby closure. Closing 15 primary schools and North Belconnen’s largest high school would leave lit­er­ally hun­dreds of stu­dents with nowhere to go.

The Gov­ern­ment has been plan­ning to build a new ‘super-​school’ on the grounds of Gin­nin­nderra High but it’s con­struc­tion would be fin­ished in 2009 and would not accom­mo­date all those affected by the clo­sures. Fur­ther­more this new planned school does not include preschool ages, being only, K-12, so the 13 preschools being shut down already start­ing next year would leave many young­sters with no where to go. Next year alone 8 primary schools are sched­uled to be shut down and in total all 39 schools includ­ing the high school and college would be shut before the new super-school’s com­ple­tion, by a year.

Attend­ing a rally at Dickson College, so that’s it for now. More info later.