Michael Danby (Melbourne Ports, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The last four years have seen an unprecedented investment in schools across the nation by the Labor government. In my electorate alone we have seen $65 million invested in school buildings and state-of-the-art facilities. This has undoubtedly been a golden age in federal government funding of school classrooms, which were absolutely needed in many electorates across the country because of our growing population and the growing number of youngsters who need proper schooling. It has helped with the enrolment levels in Port Melbourne and investment in new school campuses in particular.

In 1990, the Kennett government closed three primary schools in the South Melbourne and Port Melbourne areas. As a direct consequence, the remaining schools, such as the Port Melbourne Primary School and the St Kilda Primary School, are now struggling to cater to an ever-growing school population in my electorate. Due to zoning, which restricts schools to enrolling students only from within a designated local area, enrolment levels have put undue pressure on both these schools. Enrolments at the Port Melbourne Primary School jumped from 122 in 2001 to 445 in 2011, and are projected to go to 900. A survey commissioned by the City of Port Phillip predicts that unless more primary schools are established, the Port Melbourne and St Kilda Primary Schools will be unmanageable in the numbers of enrolled students they will have to take under these zoning laws.

The federal government, together with the former Brumby government, injected over $6.5 million to rebuild Port Melbourne primary to meet the growth in the school population. Despite this, the new Baillieu state Liberal government has refused to give a commitment to build a new school in the Southbank-South Melbourne area, despite the fact that the Minister for Planning wants to make that area a growth zone. The local member for Albert Park, Martin Foley, has written to the state Minister for Education requesting that the government fund a study provided for in the 2011 budget to search for a new campus for the students in the Southbank, Port Melbourne and South Melbourne areas. The response of the state Minister for Education was pathetic. He has offered extra portables to support the growing school population—an outrageous short-term bandaid.

The state government clearly hopes that this issue will go away, that it will be swept under the carpet and forgotten. Frankly, it is an insult to all the people in Southbank and Port Melbourne to suggest that more portables will combat the population growth that the very state government is fostering. I do not mind their fostering it. I am in favour of population growth because it leads to economic vitality in Australia, but we have to build infrastructure with it. This is a very short-sighted attitude by both the previous Kennett government and the current Liberal mob in Victoria.

The state government has announced that it intends to establish an inner urban growth corridor at Fishermens Bend. How can the Baillieu government justify investment in new growth corridors when it does not invest in schools in those areas? The most egregious thing about this refusal to fund a new facility is that the local state Liberal members are at every school opening that I attend—from Caulfield to St Kilda they tour all of the new facilities in the BER that they curse, but they will not build a new school for the area. (Time expired)