Page 5260 - Week 14 - Wednesday, 18 November 2009
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number of high-quality baseball players over the years. Many have had to move away from the ACT to be able to play at a higher level. Now that the ACT is to have a foundation team in the national league our talented locals will not have to travel quite so far or quite so quickly. That is a good outcome for the young players in Canberra. An ACT team in the national league can only boost the number of high-quality baseball players coming out of Canberra. Canberra consistently punches above its weight in the quality of baseball players it turn outs. The campaign team for “Let’s do it Canberra” continued in this ACT tradition of punching above our weight and I congratulate them on a job very well done.
The campaign team have said today that they have a lot of work to do to be ready for the start of the roster in November next year. I wish them well in the work ahead to meet that deadline. Judging from the way they have carried out the campaign so far, I think this work will be in safe hands. I look forward to seeing the ACT team run out onto the pitch for the first time. I think it is great that we are participating in this national league. I look forward to hopefully the ACT team taking out a premiership in a very short time after the start of the league.
St Thomas the Apostle school fete
Miles Franklin primary school
ArtSound
MRS DUNNE (Ginninderra) (6.36): Mr Seselja touched yesterday on some of the fetes around. I would like to pay tribute to some of the people involved in the fetes that I attended on the weekend. Yes, I did attend the St Thomas fete in Kambah. It was well attended by MLAs, as well as members of the public. I hope that we did not frighten them off in future years. I pay tribute to the hardworking communities—the school principals and the fete organising committees—across the town who worked so hard for their school communities.
While I was at St Thomas’s I had the opportunity to be taken on a tour of the school’s refurbishment. As with most other schools, there is a vast amount of building going on. St Thomas’s is just in the process of finishing the refurbishment to its kinder, 1 and 2 classes and its library. It now has wonderful classrooms. All the plastic concertina doors have gone. There is double glazing and carpet in the right places and there are hard surfaces in the right places. It really is fantastic. They are about to replicate that refurbishment in the other half of the school through the stimulus package money.
One of the things that I was concerned about was that I was told that the first refurbishment of six classrooms, a breakout area and a library, which is at least the equivalent of two classes, cost $650,000 from the block grants and another $400,000 raised by the school. The stimulus money is going to refurbish the other half of the school. That includes eight classrooms. I was really surprised and quite concerned to learn that the second part of the refurbishment is going to cost $2.2 million compared to $1.05 million for the first half of the school. That is a matter of some concern. One of the besetting problems with the stimulus package is that there seems to be an inflation of prices.
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