Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to take this opportunity to tell my colleagues on both sides of the House how well the Building the Education Revolution program has gone down in the electorate of Lyons. I have been visiting a number of projects as they progress along and are finished, and I have found that the teachers, the children and the families have become highly motivated in using their schools now. Children are wanting to go to school to use the new buildings, the new technology and the new places to play. The extra spaces that this program has provided have also allowed the local community greater access to the schools so that they are getting past students coming back for special occasions and saying how good it is to see the school still there and being renewed. The designs are good and are well suited to the areas. They include covered outdoor exercise places to cope with our weather, which means our children can get out in the fresh air all year round.

Some of our schools in the country have been open continuously for 80 years or more. Some have had their centenaries and some have even gone through to their 150-year celebrations. I was up in Wilmot the other day and one of the families there has been associated with the school for the full time that it has been open. We had mum, at 83, and then we had her son and her nephew. I think the latter is now president of the school council. Their children will come along and the grandkids will also attend that school in the future. In the area in which I grew up, a state school was built in 1900. My aunt Lenna Hodgetts taught at the Saundridge school for 45 years, from 1900 to 1945. When that school was moved down to Cressy, it was where I went to school. Along with all the people that Aunt Lenna would have taught were the kids off the farms and the children of the convicts who had been assigned to the large estates in those regions over the years.

I believe this program has allowed our country schools to be renewed and I am sure that, in another 50 years, some of the same families that are associated with those schools now will still be attending them. The current technology may have been worn out by then, but new technology will have been introduced. I think this is a fantastic program and I am concerned that the criticism made by the opposition demeans each community that they attack for the money that is going into them. I am appalled by it. I congratulate those involved and I congratulate the minister.