Page 1194 - Week 05 - Wednesday, 30 May 2007
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MR SPEAKER: I warn you, Mrs Dunne.
MR BARR: According to Mrs Dunne, yes, it is. Was providing the new gymnasium that was opened at Melrose high school throwing good money after bad?
Mr Stanhope: According to Mrs Dunne it is.
MR BARR: According to Mrs Dunne, yes; according to the Liberal opposition, who have had nothing to say on the major education debates that have faced this community in the last 12 months—
Mr Stefaniak: I raise a point of order on relevance, Mr Speaker. He is sounding like a broken record. He isn’t attempting to answer the question, which is about the proceeds of school sales.
MR SPEAKER: I thought he had answered it. Make sure you deal with the subject matter of the question, Mr Barr.
MR BARR: Indeed. The question related to reinvestment of the reform proceeds of 2006 into the public education system, and I am outlining in some detail the range of projects that the government is investing in: $3.3 million towards the ongoing painting and external maintenance of 17 of the oldest schools in the territory; more than $1 million—$1.6 million in fact—as part of the older school upgrade for Campbell high school; $1.3 million to improve school playgrounds, to upgrade some of the areas where we need to provide a soft-fall surface below play equipment, for example; and nearly $400,000 just in the first year into a range of key sustainability pilot projects in schools, working particularly with the ANU and a variety of other organisations, working with school communities to improve the environmental sustainability of their school buildings. All of this is possible as a result of the reform process that occurred last year.
We are engaging in a complete transformation of the public education system to ensure that every school facility in the ACT is of the highest possible quality. As I have said before in this place, why we were prepared to accept a lower quality in our school buildings than we were prepared to accept in other public buildings is a great concern. We no longer accept that. Schools need to be upgraded. There are so many projects—pages and pages of them. Every public school in the ACT will be upgraded.
The size of the investment is in the order of $350 million over a four-year period. In the context of the territory budget, that is a massive investment—and at a time when, over the last five years, we have seen 2,000 fewer students in our system. The demographic changes in our city were such that we needed to make the changes, and we needed to make them in 2006 to ensure that we could invest in the future of our public education system. That is what we are doing; we are investing more than—considerably more than—any of the recurrent savings that are made from operating fewer sites.
We are investing money across the board—money that comes very clearly from the savings that are made from the reduced number of school sites, money that is derived
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