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

I rise today to update the House on a matter I raised in the Main Committee on 27 May this year and again during question time on 2 June this year. The Mount Victoria Public School is a great school. Together with the Leader of the Opposition, I visited Mount Victoria Public School on Friday, 4 June, to see firsthand the damage, delay and disappointment of the Rudd Labor government’s Building the Education Revolution rip-off.

The House is already aware of the scandal at Mount Victoria over the cost of a classroom to replace an already removed demountable. Baulking at the already overstretched cost of the brick classroom originally promised, the Rudd Labor government changed its mind and decided instead to construct a demountable Colorbond classroom at the school at a cost of $850,000. It took a visit from Tony Abbott and me to the Mount Victoria Public School to secure a brick classroom for the school. In fact, just hours before our visit, the brick classroom was approved at the still outrageous cost of $850,000. The school community, while it welcomes that it will be brick, is outraged that the proposed building will cost $850,000, especially when a ‘truly unique custom built and designed’ three-bedroom brick home across the street, with land included, is valued at half the price and is up for sale at $485,000.

When we were meeting with the local Parents and Citizens Association on that very brisk morning in Mount Victoria, it became clear that the school needed much more than just one new classroom—worth such an astonishing amount of money. The school desperately needs a covered outdoor learning area, or COLA, so the children can play outside and get some fresh air. The school does not have a covered outdoor area where the children can play. In winter it snows in Mount Victoria and the children are required to stay and play indoors during this time. Some of the classrooms at the school still have unflued heaters—another health issue which has caused a great deal of stress and another issue which has failed to be dealt with by the New South Wales state Labor government.

The coalition believes that the school community should have a say on how funds are spent on local infrastructure. I have no doubt that the Mount Victoria Public School community would be much better able to more efficiently spend their allocated BER funds than the central planning of bureaucrats in Sydney or Canberra. It beggars belief when you go to this school that a small classroom on a tiny block of land would cost so much money, and yet the school continues to miss out on what it desperately wants and needs.

The Rudd Labor government have ignored the concerns of the community in Mount Victoria and countless other communities across Australia. They have shown through their lack of action that the only way to get value for money for Australia’s schools—(Time expired)