Page 1715 - Week 06 - Wednesday, 4 June 2014
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full-blown renovations, including an increase in size. These renovations will bring these two childcare centres up to meet the national quality standards for early childhood education and care services, meaning a higher quality of care and education for these children.
This $1.4 million is in addition to the work currently underway on the Tuggeranong introductory English centre that is due to be ready for the start of next year’s classes. The school will ensure high quality introductory English courses are able to be provided not only to the children of migrants but the entire family. This availability provides these welcome new residents in our communities an easier transition to life in Australia through the use of new language skills to facilitate access to local education, health and public transport services.
Along with the upgrades in health and early education, there has been another major announcement for my electorate, Brindabella, in the budget—provision for investigating the opening of a CIT campus in Tuggeranong. That has been a long-pushed program from Joy Burch. A campus in Tuggeranong would be a dramatic improvement for education services in the region. This will mean that those students who go into a CIT course after year 12 or as a mature aged student will not need to face the extra burden of a long commute to their educational facility. This represents a large contrast to the newly released budget from the federal Liberal government, which has used its first budget to announce major cuts and deregulation of the higher education sector, making it harder for students to obtain higher education.
Together with the educational and health benefits in the Tuggeranong area, we also see a major improvement in local services through territory and municipal services, as well as sport and recreation. After a long community campaign, the ACT government has taken the first step to working with the Theodore community on its local oval through the provision of outdoor gym equipment for the local oval. The provision of this gym equipment will assist the local community in their health and wellbeing, while continuing community pride. The Theodore oval has been very much an underutilised area since the irrigation unfortunately needed to be turned off during the drought, causing large damage to the facility.
In addition to the improvement of the Theodore oval, the Greenway oval will be receiving upgrades to the value of $8 million. These upgrades will see the addition of several facilities on the site to assist local sporting teams utilising this facility as well as upgrades to the surface itself. Both of these upgrades will help the community in Tuggeranong to become more active and healthy, helping the progress of the ACT’s healthy initiative program through direct government investment.
Local recreation will also see a major improvement with $100,000 for design and planning works and $500,000 for construction of a local water play park at the Lakeside Leisure Centre. This centre will provide Tuggeranong locals with additional aquatic facilities similar to those that can be visited at Dickson pool and the recently opened Gungahlin Leisure Centre.
This budget also sees the next step taken in the Erindale master plan. The Erindale bus station will see a $900,000 improvement, and this is a local infrastructure project that has been long requested. Public transport continues to grow in popularity due to the
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