Bruce Baird (Cook, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to draw the House’s attention to the hectic media schedule yesterday of the Premier of New South Wales, during which he visited a school in my electorate, Grays Point Public School. He also brought with him the New South Wales Minister for Education and Training, Carmel Tebbutt, and the state member for Miranda, Barry Collier. Flanked by news cameras, the trio fawned over students as they sat in the school library at their brand-new laptop computers. Channel 7 News captured the spectacle last night and showed the Premier crouched down and admiring the new equipment, as the adulation of all and sundry was plainly evident. What a great job he is doing for the students, the parents and the teachers of Grays Point Public School! What a great job he is doing for the people of the Sutherland Shire! How kind of him and the minister to stop in and check out the new laptops!

What Premier Iemma’s permanent cycle of spin does not tell you is that it seems those computers he seemed to admire so much on television were actually paid for by the federal education department’s latest round of funding under the Investing in Our Schools program. We gave Grays Point Public School $40,000 for new laptops. The gall of Morris Iemma and his New South Wales government is well known, and this case is no exception. The state member for Miranda, Barry Collier, who is not afraid to accept my frequent invitations regarding Commonwealth initiatives and to launches in my electorate, has also acted with unapologetic underhandedness by allowing this deception to take place. The Investing in Our Schools program is highlighting the chronic neglect of state schools by the state Labor government in New South Wales. I point out that the paper today says that in fact the state government will spend more money on buying new cars for public servants than on upgrading schools this financial year. It just shows where they are at. Yesterday’s event really epitomises this.

They went to Grays Point Public School yesterday and tried to find something they had done. Of course, they could find nothing so they found something that this government has done. The Investing in Our Schools program has handed out 2,359 projects in New South Wales in the first two rounds, worth $107 billion. In my electorate of Cook, schools have received $1.5 million in funding. This is real funding for real projects, not the make-believe spin that Premier Iemma and his minister invested in yesterday. It was total spin without substance. Put some real money into the development of schools in my electorate next time, instead of spin.