Page 123 - Week 01 - Wednesday, 13 February 2019
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here. Many New South Wales schools are on busy roads with high speed limits. The lights indicate that the driver must make a rapid reduction in speed. Almost no ACT schools are on these types of roads, and most of our schools, fortunately, are well embedded in the suburbs, often with relatively small residential streets around them. Some are on busier roads—there is no doubt about that—but we also have all-day 40-kilometre an hour limit at schools, which I believe has been successful and reflects the fact that children come and go at different times.
Occasionally there are letters to the editor or I have received them from constituents saying, “Why don’t we make it like New South Wales?” I think New South Wales should make it like ours. Kids come and go. I think the schooling environment has changed particularly in the past few decades where children come and go at different times. Whether it is for regular reasons such as particular appointments or it is something one-off or children going to a nearby facility—there are a range of reasons why children are moving around during the day—I think the all-day limit is a very important approach. As I said, the smartest thing to do is to assess what each school needs and invest in that rather than waste government funding on interventions that are less effective. That is what individual school assessments will achieve.
I will come back to the figures that Ms Lee cited in her speech from the surveys done by the P & C association. In that they outlined a range of risks that they have identified, things like dangers in the carparks and those sorts of things. Flashing lights are obviously not going to fix that, and that is where those individual assessments will achieve results.
I think I have spoken in this place before—but if I have not I know others have seen this—about the very successful approach taken by Macquarie Primary School where they were having significant issues with their car park. One potential solution was simply to go and build a bigger car park, which would have required a whole lot of money and disruption and the like. They actually did a wonderful co-design project with their students where the students sat and watched the car park for several morning and afternoon drop-off periods, then sat down and did some design work.
For a couple of thousand dollars and with a few bits of tape and, I think, a few witch’s hats and a few other bits and pieces, they reconfigured the car park, made it safer and made it flow better. And I think that was a terrific example particularly because the students were involved and did it as a learning exercise. It was a particularly impressive piece of educational work, both in terms of learning and in terms of providing a practical response.
I am not sure that flashing lights are needed to warn people that the speed limit is 40 kilometres an hour in all school zones. I think it is really well known here in Canberra that that is the case, and I do not believe that everybody is receiving speeding tickets in school zones because they were not aware that the speed limit was 40ks an hour. They are, I think in the large part, receiving speeding tickets because some people are complacent or they are perhaps distracted by something else or they are deliberately speeding and hoping they will not get caught.
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