Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Following the member for Lingiari’s thorough condemnation of the Northern Territory’s Labor government and its total lack of funding into schools, which is a basic state responsibility, I equally condemn the New South Wales state Labor government for its absolutely appalling neglect of the schools in that state. In the Sydney Morning Herald today there was mention of the release of a report by the principals of New South Wales public schools on 10 years of failed maintenance. Since the Olympic Games preparations, this state Labor government has taken money out of school maintenance to fund other things and has never put it back. This is becoming crystal clear to the voters of New South Wales in the lead-up to the election this Saturday.

From the federal level, since we have had the Investing in Our Schools Program in the electorate of Lindsay, dozens of schools in my area have got air conditioning. This is for children who have air conditioning at home and in cars and are used to air conditioned environments. I had some parents saying, ‘We didn’t have air conditioning in my day’, but for children to learn the amount that they have to learn today, air conditioning, especially in the heat of summer in Western Sydney, is critical. Being a Queenslander, Mr Deputy Speaker Scott, you will understand how schoolhouses were built back in your day. They were raised above a platform; air was allowed to flow. Today new schools are designed on the basis that they will have air-conditioning. Yet the newest school in my electorate, at Surveyors Creek, was built and opened in my time as the member for Lindsay without air conditioning. Thanks to the federal government, Surveyors Creek now has air conditioning.

Other schools that have got air-conditioning under this wonderful program are the Cambridge Gardens Public School and Braddock Public School. There has been such a turnaround in education at Braddock Public School. It is an outstanding school that is doing extremely well. It has come from a level of, I think, 40 per cent of the children not age appropriately literate to the stage now where they have one child who is not age appropriate. They are doing some extraordinary work there in a very difficult environment and they are getting results. That is, again, due to our national literacy and numeracy programs where we are identifying these gaps in education. We are identifying where kids are not learning and we are doing something about it. This is something that the New South Wales government has resisted and resisted. They did not want to be a part of this. There are finally some very good results coming through, including at Cambridge Gardens Public School and Claremont Meadows.

Claremont Meadows had just opened when I first became the member for Lindsay. That was the penultimate public school built in my area. Since then, on every redistribution, my electorate has got smaller and smaller because there has been such a flux of housing coming into the area. The state government’s response to all of the housing coming into Western Sydney is not to build more schools as the housing goes in but to put demountables on existing schools. In that time, the private sector has opened school after school in my area and increased permanent classrooms and permanent building construction. The average cost of a private school in my area is around $1,500 a year. That is about $30 a week. After you have been paying for child care as a working mum, $30 a week for the private school down the road is a lot handier for you than traipsing the kids across town to the public school that is supposed to service your area. You would say, ‘For $30 a week I can send my kid here rather than go to the inconvenience of trying to trek from Claremont Meadows to Glenmore Park High School.’

That is an appalling failure by the New South Wales state government. Not only have they not maintained the existing state schools; they are not even building new ones. And when they do build new ones on the odd occasion, such as five years ago, they are not even air-conditioned—a brand new building. Morris Iemma says, ‘We’re going to give all schools a school hall.’ What do you mean? Schools don’t have a school hall? What kind of promise is that? The program that we have has provided a number of COLAs. Admittedly, there was only $150,000 over the last three or four years, but it has provided covered outdoor learning areas, which substitute for halls at these schools. It is pretty tacky when it is raining, but it is still a bit of shade from the sun, and they substitute as places at which these schools can assemble. Everyone knows school assemblies are critically important. It is the key place where you get lots of information and, by and large, at our public schools it occurs out in the weather. After 12 years—and he was there for every one of them—Morris Iemma pops out and says, ‘By the way, we’ll give schools a large enough classroom to accommodate the school.’

Air conditioning: Leonay Public School, Mulgoa Public School, Penrith High School, Penrith Public School, Penrith South Public School, Werrington Public School, York Public School and Nepean High School. So many schools have been air conditioned under this project. The other thing they have been doing is electrical upgrades. St Marys South Public School is spending the entire $150,000 on an electrical upgrade on the box outside the school just so they can have the power to run air conditioners without blowing up every computer in the school. This is a failure of the electrical infrastructure in New South Wales. Equally, in the older parts of my electorate the electrical grid has been allowed to run down in the same way that the maintenance in the schools has been allowed to run down.

In New South Wales we have seen the electricity grids, the water pipes and school maintenance—every scrap of maintenance in every area and in every department of state responsibility—being ferreted out and tunnelled away. Money has been squirreled away for other purposes—goodness knows what—and we are left with a complete mess, and the federal government has to fix up the electrical grid so that a school can get air conditioning. For goodness sake! And the Labor Party have the hide to even look at amending this bill. They stick their heads up above the parapet like they have some right to have a say in this.

The government, through its good economic management, has delivered the wherewithal, the ability, to deliver programs like this. I would like to see the state government come up with it. We have already had two budgets in the red. Where are they going to find the money? Labor always runs deficits. It is just frustrating that you do so much work. It is like the household budget—occasionally you have to tell your children: ‘No, I can’t afford it. I’m sorry. But we will save up for it and it will come.’ With good economic management, things get done. Instead, we have this willy-nilly way of racing around. I would hate to think about the economic consequences of the New South Wales government’s bailing out of the cross-city tunnel fiasco. If that does not send the state broke, goodness knows what will.

The member for Lingiari talked about the right to a basic education and subsequently a vocational education. That is absolutely right—it is a state responsibility—but vocational education is something that this government has been pushing. The local member for Penrith, Karen Paluzzano—who is a Labor candidate in Saturday’s election—is putting out flyers with claims about education. After 12 years of a Labor government, and she has been there for four of them—and there was a Labor member before that—this is what she has done for education in the Penrith area: a $3 million upgrade to Glenbrook Primary School, a new COLA for Lapstone Public School, a new toilet block for Blaxland East Public School and increased funding for community preschools. Whoop-de-doo! The federal government gave $1.8 million to the Glenbrook Public School.

In addition to that, in 1996 when we came into government, the electorate of Lindsay was getting basic recurrent grants of $14 million to run the schools. Today it is $45,340,000—a massive increase in recurrent funding to schools in our area. And what do you see? The state government squirreling it out to the bottom. They have not increased the operational funding for these schools in 10 years. They are still insisting that a school like Nepean High School has an operational budget of about $100,000—it has not increased—and with that they have to paint the school, recarpet the school and do everything for the school, including having excursions, buying books and running scholarships. It is an impossible situation. I congratulate Nepean High School for the wonderful work that they are doing. Four years ago, 40 per cent of the kids at Nepean High did not come back after year 10. They finished year 10 and did not return for further training. I was at a recent no-dole pledge, a signing ceremony, at Nepean High. Eighty-five per cent of Nepean High’s year 10 school leavers last year returned to the school; and, of the 15 per cent that did not, I think all of those went to further education or apprenticeships.

Speaking of apprenticeships, this government has increased the number of apprentices in my electorate. In 1996 there were 740 apprentices who could get a place and go on to vocational training. The member for Lingiari was going on about vocational training: ‘Let’s get great education at primary and high school and then get vocational education.’ Under the Labor government 760 people from my electorate had the opportunity for that. Today, 1,640 people have the opportunity to take up a trade—an increase of 222 per cent. There was a 222 per cent increase in the number of people going on to vocational education and training, and the member for Lingiari thinks Labor is great at looking after tradespeople. Give me a break!

We have seen the opening of a technical college in Western Sydney which will deliver technical training to children in years 11 and 12, and I expect to see more of those colleges opening across Western Sydney over time. You see Morris Iemma running around everywhere in this campaign. Do you know what Morris Iemma is running on in this campaign? After-hours GP clinics and trade schools! Both of those things are delivered by the federal government. It took two rounds of negotiations for the after-hours GP clinic to be delivered in the Nepean Hospital. The Morris Iemma government was not cooperative at all when we were trying to get that GP clinic in there. I was at my wit’s end and looking at private sector options in order to get that clinic opened. The difficulty was incredible. And now he runs around campaigning for Karyn Paluzzano and Diane Beamer saying, ‘Oh, after-hours GP clinics. Oh, they are charging us rent in Nepean Hospital to deliver the services.’

The other issue is trade schools. How did Morris Iemma suddenly wake up to trade schools? This government is progressive; everthing we have done since 1996 has been about returning status to the trades and making tradesmen the educated people they should be. We have seen a turnaround in this university-or-bust mentality. We are seeing people take up trades with alacrity and go on to have wonderful, successful and lucrative careers. Being the very last government to sign on for any of our incentives to increase trades training, the New South Wales government now wants to sit there and say at the coming election: ‘Oh, but aren’t we great for trades. We’re putting out trade schools.’ Save me, please!

That government has such utter disrespect for the trades. A recent election was held by one of our group training organisations which carries a lot of the apprentices for tradesmen. If you do not necessarily want to have an apprentice yourself we have group training companies that will do that for you. In order to comply with the national requirements the company had to at least offer their workers the option of moving to an AWA. So the Australian Electoral Commission held a ballot for the Neeka Group Trading Co. in New South Wales. That organisation employs approximately 330 apprentices in the field of electrics in New South Wales and the ACT. In that election campaign the ETU actually mailed out to the apprentices electrical trades propaganda against our AWAs. I hasten to add that the vote was overwhelmingly carried for the apprentices to move to the AWA because they would be so much better off on it. But the ETU had a go, as did the CEPU, the PSU, the CFMEU and the ACTU. I am being inundated with literature from these unions in their attack on me in the New South Wales state election campaign.

In any event the union mailed out information to the apprentices. It turns out that their mailing list bears an uncanny resemblance to the mailing list of the Department of Education and Training. The New South Wales Department of Education and Training is handing over to the ETU the private details of people as to what courses they are doing through various TAFEs and trade colleges. Is that a state government acting responsibly? Has the state government even bothered to look at this? Is the state government going to inquire into this and say, ‘Hey, hang on a minute, this is totally unacceptable behaviour—the ability to download that list ought to be investigated and the public servant responsible exposed’? That is the ‘respect’ the New South Wales government have for the trades. They claim they are ‘heading in the right direction’. I do not see how. They are on the way down, in the red. I do not see how you could possibly say that the New South Wales economy is heading in the right direction. Certainly the schools are not. The electrical grid is a nightmare because it cannot even support air conditioning to local schools. The water system is an absolute disaster. I do not know how that can be heading in the right direction; I cannot see any solution happening there.

It is classic member for Lingiari stuff. He gets up here and pontificates and then says, ‘We’re heading in the right direction.’ You’re looking down at your shoes! It is about getting on with the job and fixing New South Wales. We are the biggest state. We have the biggest economy. We have the most people. We were the leaders in Australia. We carry Australia. We’re it. People come from Perth or Melbourne and they say, ‘Ooh! Sydney!’ In Sydney we are not like that. It’s: ‘We’re it. We don’t have to look anywhere else. It’s all here. We’re pretty good. We’ve always been great.’ But at the moment we are not—we are being beaten by Western Australia and by Queensland. We are even seeing growth in Victoria. For goodness sake, on some of the most recent figures, Tasmania is beating us. We are ‘heading in the right direction’? Give me a break!

It is so frustrating when, with wonderful policies such as those put forward in this bill, you are trying to really make a difference and to push forward great assets to your community, to your schools and to your young people, when you are investing in the education of those young people and when you are pushing them on to vocational education and training and delivering it in an environment in which they get employment, and you are hindered at every turn by the unions, with their backing and puppeteering of the Labor Party at the state and federal levels.

My local state member was asked: ‘You’re such a great supporter of public schools; why do your kids go to a private school?’ It is a question that embarrasses, even at the federal level, those on the other side, who will be voting on this bill later today. Their kids all go to private schools. When asked, ‘Why do your kids go to a private school?’ they answer, ‘It’s a matter of faith.’ If it is a matter of faith that a politician on a hundred grand a year can send her kid to a private school, why is it that a family, with mum at home and three kids, on $40,000 can’t send their kids to school as ‘a matter of faith’?

This is it. The Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amwendment Bill delivers funding into the private sector to keep it affordable for schools of faith or choice or difference. We are not all painted red. We all want something different in life, and it really helps if your school environment and your friends’ school environments reflect the values that you have at home. It is easier to raise your children if the values that you are espousing are held at school. I was at the recent opening of further buildings by this government and witnessed the tremendous work by the Muslim community at the Australian Islamic College of Sydney, and that could not have brought home to me more clearly the very different home life and values that those kids have. (Time expired)

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