Tony Zappia (Makin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Recently I attended the official opening of BER projects at Tea Tree Gully Primary School and Ridgehaven Primary School in my electorate of Makin.

At Tea Tree Gully Primary a new school gym was constructed and at Ridgehaven the funding was used to refurbish outdated classrooms. In both cases the respective principals, Grant Dolejs at Tea Tree Gully primary and Jean Perks at Ridgehaven primary, were very grateful for the federal government funding of those projects. Both were closely involved in the negotiations necessary for the works and both clearly believed that the projects represented good value for the money spent.

All of the students, teachers and parents whom I spoke with at the opening events shared the principals’ sentiments. In both cases the schools now have facilities that they have been waiting years for and which they may never have been able to construct without federal government funding. I also know of many local tradespeople who were kept in employment because of the federal government’s BER program.

The current 500-plus school children who attend both schools and the future students of those schools will now have facilities they desperately needed. They are facilities which will make their school lives so much better. It is these children, their families and their teachers whom the coalition would have turned their back on by blocking the BER funding, had they been able to do so.