Page 2933 - Week 11 - Thursday, 22 October 1992
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Mr Kaine: The $200,000 was. You said that it was.
MR WOOD: The $200,000 has never been in the budget. It is in the maintenance program, if indeed it is still there. When its priority is assessed in that list of items that I mentioned before, and others, when it reaches a relative priority with demands across the system, it will be funded, and it will be funded out of the maintenance program. That is the way it was always expected to be.
Let me tell you how the passage of time has demonstrated the accuracy of what the Chief Minister and I have said. We removed those inflated figures from that first bid that was taken to the Chief Minister. I have been through that today. Surely the proof of the pudding is in what has happened since. Were they essential to the reopening of those two schools? Did they have to be on that list, as some people on the other side now want to say? Were those works prerequisite to the functioning of the school? No. The schools are up and running and doing very nicely, thank you. They are very good schools. The enrolments will show you that.
Let me tell you what maintenance has been incurred this year so far, and then for the 1991-92 year. These figures will indicate the perception and keen mind of the Chief Minister, because she was able to weed out unnecessary expenditures.
Mr Humphries: That you had put to her.
MR WOOD: Yes; no question. For the Lyons Primary School, on the figures I have from the department, for the 1991-92 year for maintenance, headed "urgent and minor, operational, recurrent, specific maintenance", the total cost is $25,362. That is nowhere near $200,000. Let us refer to Cook Primary School and see whether we can get near that $200,000 figure. Under the same headings, the total cost for Cook Primary School is $9,251. In round figures, it is about $35,000. That is what we have spent at those schools in a year-and-a-half. I do not have the precise breakdown, but it may even be that it includes the bits and pieces about new windows and tiles and things like that.
We have not needed to replace the boiler. The carpet at Cook, as some of the people out there will tell me, is pretty tatty, but it is still there. It is waiting for other carpets that are tattier to be fixed before getting its turn. The other work that was in that first bid, which is what it was, have simply not needed to be done.
Mr De Domenico: Well, why the urgency, according to your letter? If it was not a good bid, why the urgency?
MR WOOD: Let me turn to the letters. It seems to me that Mr Kaine is not quoting all of the material he has. I read through this earlier, but I will go through it in greater detail. On 15 June we had that letter from me to the Chief Minister seeking $890,000. As she indicated to me, that was a figure that she had great trouble with. The cost of running those schools was $520,000, on Mr Humphries's figures, and therefore the cost of reopening should be about of that order. That was an eminently sensible proposition and I could not dispute it. I immediately went back to the department and said, "Let us go into these figures in great detail. We are going to have to look at those figures for boilers, et cetera, and they cannot be sustained". To repeat, time has proved that. That was on 15 June.
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