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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 07 Hansard (Tuesday, 29 June 2004) . . Page.. 2989 ..

government’s plan is yet to replace the old ISS scheme. I gather that it is still in negotiation as to how that recovered money is going to be spent.

I will now talk about a couple of school issues in my electorate. I am very pleased to see that the Melrose High School gym is to be funded. That is well overdue. A couple of other schools still have to share facilities—they do not have a standalone gym or a standalone hall—but at least that is a start. A number of primary schools also need to have their facilities addressed. As I was saying earlier, we need to have more physical education training and more PE teachers. The University of Canberra is talking about running a couple of special PE teaching degrees. A teacher who specialises in one subject may pick up a PE qualification as a second string—and that may be the way to go.

I am very pleased to see that the wireless broadband program is being connected to schools in the Tuggeranong Valley. It has been a long time coming but it is there now. This facility will ensure that our students have and are able to access the crucially important IT capability.

I am pleased to see that the Birrigai Outdoor Centre is now back on its feet. I hope the government is able to pick up the two years of slack with the kids who perhaps missed out on that training in the past.

I have made enough comments about the budget and the appropriations. I may come back and address youth issues shortly.

MRS DUNNE (12.06): I want to touch on some issues that directly affect the electorate of Ginninderra. I will start close to where Mr Pratt left off in relation to the money in the capital works budget for the gyms at Melrose and Belconnen high schools. That money is laudable and welcome. I know that those school communities are very anxious to receive those grants, but I do bemoan the fact that poor little Hall lost out.

When I raised this in the Estimates Committee I think that, in order to quickly run to the minister’s defence, Ms MacDonald piped up and said, “How many children are there?” as if to say, “Well, because there are not very many children at Hall, they are not so deserving as perhaps the children of Melrose or Belconnen high schools.” It is quite the contrary. The children who live at Hall do not have easy public transport access to a range of other facilities and some of them live in outlying rural areas. For them Hall is as important as the Woden Plaza might be for the students of Melrose high. In Hall, there are no facilities of the type that most schools take for granted.

Even to have a hall that is higher than a classroom in ceiling height would be a luxury for the children who attend the Hall Primary School. I have spoken about it in this place before and I am deeply concerned that, for instance, the teachers at Hall Primary School cannot run the things that I would take for granted, the things that I expect my children would receive whether they were in the government or the non-government school sector.

They cannot run programs like gross motor exercises for children who have trouble with handwriting and things like that, because they do not have the space. They can barely run their band program, and they cannot run a concert very efficiently. They have two

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