Alby Schultz (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the ongoing Building the Education Revolution and, in particular, inconsistencies regarding the costings in the construction of school halls and libraries. Gunning is a small town in the Hume electorate with a population of around 480, and the Gunning Public School has 56 students. The P&C association contacted me in late April, wanting to alert me to the problems that they have experienced with the whole process involved with the BER program. In February-March of 2009 the Gunning Public School were given a short time frame of only days to nominate their project for BER funding. In consultation with the then staff and the P&C executive, Gunning Public School applied for a new library and the conversion of the back of their existing library into an open-plan office block and sick bay area. For decades the situation has been that any child in the sick bay was stuck out the back of an old administrative building, unsupervised. The only person who is able to check on children in the sick bay is an admin officer who answers the school telephones, but to check on the sick bay the admin officer has to leave her room and walk down a corridor into the sick bay room.

When the plans for the school’s new library and admin block were scoped the school was told that the budget of $850,000 would not build a library and convert the office. The office conversion was then descoped and the school was told they would only be receiving a new library. Whilst the school is not complaining about receiving a new library, which was greatly needed, the members of the P&C, who class themselves as a group of financially responsible parents and citizens, are just asking, ‘Why is the library costing so much money?’ At the heart of the P&C’s confusion is why a single, seven metre by 11 metre new library building is costing taxpayers $850,000 or approximately $11,000 per square metre.

Gunning P&C are a very active and resourceful parents group and are constantly conducting fundraising activities to improve facilities for their children at the school. Between 2005 and 2009 many of them worked on a project to raise funds for, and eventually build, a new long day care centre in Gunning, which I opened last year. The total cost for the construction of this building, which far exceeds the size and scope of the single library at Gunning Public School, was less than $500,000.

The P&C have a unique school fundraiser that they conduct annually and which has been going strong for 13 years. Parents and children all go out in the middle of winter to the numerous shearing sheds in the Gunning area and scrape out sheep poo from under the sheds, bag it and sell it as garden fertiliser. This very successful fundraising initiative is called Gunning Gold. The parents and students of Gunning Public School are about to embark on this annual fundraiser. The money raised from this hard earned fundraising event is very wisely spent on necessary school projects.

I will be outside tomorrow morning joining representatives of the Gunning Public School at the protest rally that has been organised to highlight the growing number of rorts and inconsistencies that are being exposed in the BER program in relation to the blatant waste of taxpayer money. I will stand alongside not only Gunning Public School but all those other schools in attendance and call on Minister Gillard to implement an independent investigation into how and why this program is costing taxpayers so much money.

In closing, I say this: in the words of the president of Gunning Public School’s P&C, $850,000 is a hell of a lot of sheep poo!