Too Busy For Words - the PaulWay Blog

Sorry, Pascal, but I cannot agree that closing schools is absolutely disasterous and must be prevented at all costs. There are preschools out there with five children in them, and student per class numbers generally are lower in the ACT than any other state in Australia. When Belconnen and other areas were rapidly expanding and lots of new families were moving in, having a school in every suburb made perfect sense. Now, with that same demographic moving into outer suburbs, having schools in the inner suburbs is haemmorhaging money.

I live in Cook, which now is an 'old growth' forest suburb: the majority of people in Cook are older people whose children have moved out over ten years ago. Sure, having a school at the end of the street is convenient for the minority of people who live in Cook who have children, but it's economically disasterous. Schools require a level of maintenance and administration that starts at a high level as soon as the school has students. There's several schools that will remain open - two within two kilometres. This isn't "Students won't have anywhere to study," this is, "Students will have to go a bit further to get to school". Hardly sensational stuff.

Sure, I wish the Government had spent more on having schools and facilities where they were needed, so that it didn't have to build a ghastly gaping gash through bushland that some people call the GDE. This road was built to connect people living in Gungahlin with their work in Woden. For Sydneysiders this would be like building a special freeway for people living in Hornsby to get to work in Bankstown. I ask the question, "why aren't they living in Woden?" Or Tuggeranong, which is close to Woden but is as affordable as Gungahlin. Where are the governments that are demanding the money from developers for failing to put in schools, shops, hospitals, workplaces in local communities? Or forcing them to put them in in the first place?

I do have problems with government spending. But making better use of existing resources and stopping a lot of useless expenditure isn't amongst them.

(And yes, I'm aware that technically Route Six in Sydney does allow people to get between Hornsby and Bankstown fairly directly. But it's not a direct, no-traffic-lights, bulldoze-a-big-hole-through- pristine-bushland highway, is it Sydneysiders? And don't you wish it was? :-)