Page 2932 - Week 09 - Wednesday, 12 October 2022
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The education budget for the coming year includes welcome commitments to expanding the future of education equity fund, modernising and expanding Majura Primary School, putting in three new modular learning centres and re-using eight existing ones, and building a new primary school in Whitlam, a new high school in Taylor, an expanded Margaret Hendry School and another secondary college in Gungahlin.
This adds up to nine major school infrastructure projects on the way and another five to begin over the next four years. All of this is great, and undoubtedly necessary, but of course our education budget is not just about having enough space for more kids; nor is it about a lot of very nice equipment and facilities.
I will digress just for a moment to note that one of our Greens team here in the Assembly staff, just a few months ago, did help transfer a horse float load of cast-off furniture from Radford College to Melba Copland Secondary School. What lavishly-funded Radford was casually throwing away, cash-strapped Melba Copland was eager to receive. That says a lot about the inequalities in our federal education funding model, but it is telling, nonetheless.
I want to talk a little bit about some of the upcoming challenges that we see, particularly things that I have learnt through my service on the education and community inclusion committee and our recently concluded inquiry into school infrastructure and maintenance. At the territory level, apart from lobbying for a more equity-based distribution of federal public money towards education, we do need, as part of future budget decisions, to make sure that we are spending our own education budget in ways that will also see a second kind of return on investment, to top off the one I just talked about.
This is a difficult conversation but one I think we need to start now. While we are building a lot of very nice new schools in areas of growth, many of the school buildings in our inner suburbs, the inner north and inner south, are now showing their age, in terms of their energy efficiency, as just one example. Each one needs to be properly assessed as to whether renovation or an entire knockdown rebuild would be the best approach and yield the best return on investment for ACT ratepayers.
The up-front cost of this is high, I understand, but the savings on energy and the enhancement of learning environments for kids and teachers will be significant and ongoing down the track. It is worth noting that, of the submissions that we received on the education committee, the schools who highlighted the most concerns with infrastructure and maintenance were older schools, relics of a time pre self-government, particularly concentrated in the inner north and the inner south of the ACT.
In commissioning new school designs, the government does need to pay close attention to circular economy principles as well. We do not want to see the ACT government 30 years from now—who knows, it may even be a Canberra Liberals government—having to face these same expensive renovation or knockdown decisions again. I think the government, to their credit, have shown a real understanding for and appetite to make tough decisions when it comes to weighing up the balance of renovation over knockdown rebuilding.
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