Ok, well, look, it’s good to be here at the Booral Public School. It’s good to be with Debora Elliott, the P&C President. This is yet another example of the kind of extravagance and inappropriate spending that we’ve seen so much of in the Building the Education Revolution program. I think every school wants the best possibly facilities. Every parent wants the best possible facilities for his or her child but everyone wants value for money and the problem is we haven’t had value for money in the Building the Education Revolution programme. This $850,000 duplex classroom is a nice facility, no doubt about that. It’s a welcome addition to the school but plainly more should have been possible with $850,000. You’ve got at least one local builder who believes that he could’ve built this structure and much, much more for that kind of money and certainly as far as the school community is concerned it seems that while the are very grateful to have the hall, they would’ve liked to have done a lot of other things as well, such as refurbish the currently inoperable playground. This is the kind of problem that you get when you’ve got a government which is not good at managing money, when you’ve got a government which is more interested in central control than it is in trying to use local school communities real autonomy over their schools and over the funding which the schools get.

 

One of the things that the Coalition wanted to do at the last election was to ensure that any unspent BER money was provided to school communities for them to manage without the kind of almost impossible restrictions that the Government had previously placed on it.

 

So, it’s good to be here at the school. Just disappointing to see that so much more could’ve been done with taxpayers dollars than has been done in fact.

 

Sussan, would you like to say something?

 

 

It’s terrific to be joining the Pollie Pedal and we had a tough day yesterday along the Barrington Tops but for me the Opposition spokesperson on early learning, it all starts in the junior classrooms, finishes through primary school and high school but to see the level of waste and misappropriation of public funding here, is extremely disappointing.

 

 

Jus as far as P&C is concerned we’ve put a lot of voluntary effort into raising funds for our schools and here we are after the BER, with no reserve money to invest back into our playgrounds and into other facilities and resources we would’ve liked to have an investment in and from that perspective, here we are, we are going to be going out baking more cakes and we don’t mind doing the community service but we would have preferred that perhaps we weren’t spending all of our effort into raising funds for resources that should’ve just come.