Louise Markus (Greenway, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on behalf of Mount Victoria Public School’s parents and citizens association, who are terribly frustrated and indeed dismayed at the mismanagement of the buildings promised to them under the government’s Building the Education Revolution scheme.

The school was promised a new brick classroom to replace a demountable as well as a covered outdoor learning area, commonly known as a COLA. After being promised the new brick building and the COLA would be provided for $850,000, the school was informed by the government and their contractors, Multiplex, that the new brick classroom would cost approximately $1.5 million and would not be going ahead. The demountable would instead be replaced by yet another demountable. In a letter from the Mount Victoria Public School community, they state that $1.5 million to build a brick classroom is outrageous and excessive. They say: ‘With this type of ineffectual budgeting and project mismanagement it is completely understandable that the money set aside for this scheme is running out.’ What the school community cannot understand, however—and this is their question—is why Mount Victoria Public School is yet again last on the list and having to fight for a fair go.

Only two weeks ago, Multiplex informed the school that the government was going to backflip on the classroom and that they would once again be getting a brick classroom and a much cheaper bus shelter to replace the COLA that they were promised. But this has not yet been confirmed. Today I am calling on the Minister for Education to keep her promise and confirm that the Mount Victoria Public School will indeed get the brick classroom and a bus shelter instead of the COLA that the minister originally promised the school. I support the Mount Victoria Public School community when they ask the government in their letter why Mount Victoria Public School is yet again last on the list and having to fight for their share.

The Mount Victoria Public School community are fed up with being treated as second-class citizens by a Labor government that just cannot get it right and that continues to bungle program after program, throwing good money after bad. Labor simply cannot be trusted to get it right.