Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I enthusiastically support the government’s Investing in Our Schools program for a wide range of reasons. There are millions of reasons in my electorate alone—millions of Australian taxpayers’ dollars are going to school communities so that P&Cs and principals can get the priorities dealt with that they know have not been met by state governments over many years. That is at the heart of this matter. Let us get down to the heart of this. Under the Australian Labor Party there has never been a program like this because the Labor Party like big governments, big unions and big business, and they want to organise things that way. State Labor governments steal from schools in this country. They steal management fees from public works departments that need to conduct works in those schools. They steal from teachers and students and from the parents who send those students to those schools. They steal one dollar out of every four that this government sends to state governments to help with meeting the cost of public education. State governments steal it. They take it off the top.

You would think that, if you are going to fund an education system, the first thing you would do is ask: ‘What is at the heart of this?’ At the heart of this is the relationship between the professional educator and the student. So how do we resource that? How do we actually back that relationship in a way that makes sure there is bang for the buck—value for the dollar—and the results are achieved? Get the money as fast and as close as you can to that equation. In other words, get the money into the classroom. But no! The way the education system operates in this country, because of our apparently cooperative federalism, is that state governments take their slice off the top before any money floats through to any classrooms. I keep saying that it is like that Yes, Minister episode about the most efficient hospital in the national health system being the one with no patients. The way that education works in this country is that you pay the raft of bureaucrats in central office first and you pay for the teachers and the education process last. It does not matter how many students are in the classroom. The preservation process for the bureaucrats at head office is first and foremost the priority of spending.

New South Wales is the worst offender, with thousands of people at ‘education central’ who get paid big dollars and, surprisingly, are all card-carrying members of the Labor Party—I have no reason to doubt that my claim is correct. That is the way this political operation of state governments works. It is certainly true in Queensland. The way to get ahead in education in Queensland is to leave the classroom, not stay in the classroom, become a bureaucrat within the system at the district office and then leave the district office and go to head office—and by that time you had better be a card-carrying member of the Labor Party or you will not last. That is the way state governments organise their spending priorities on education in this country and it is an absolute disgrace.

The breath of fresh air which occurred after the 2004 election was the Investing in Our Schools Program. It for the first time identified the fact that the Australian government had never been big enough to trust local communities to know what their priorities were. I want to give some background to the House as to how this all came about. This is my story and it is true, because I would not be saying it to the parliament if it were not. I visited schools in my electorate, including Wellers Hill State School. The soffits were falling out of their buildings. This is a great old school. It has the best part of 100 years of history and service to our local community. The buildings were old and needed paint. They could not get paint onto the buildings; the soffits were falling out—the building structure was falling apart. They were asking, ‘Why doesn’t the federal government spend more money on education?’ and I thought, ‘We are now spending record amounts.’ I heard the Minister for Education, Science and Training say yesterday that there has been a 160 per cent increase in expenditure. Over $9 billion a year is going from this government to state governments. Bearing in mind that their first priority is to spend a quarter of that on bureaucracy, not on building maintenance, you can understand why the soffits were falling out at Wellers Hill State School.

I went to MacGregor State High School, my old school. I left there 30 years ago. I was the vice-captain there—or, as they used to say, the school captain in charge of vice, but that is an old story! The old manual arts block, where I learnt my woodworking and metalworking stuff in year 8 in 1973, was built in 1968. It is still there now and still servicing the community. I went into the staffroom; talk about occupational health and safety—the staffroom wall had three- and four-inch gaps in it where the building was falling apart. In order to keep the manual arts building safe, they had to put five-ply up on the louvres of the windows—something not known to members from the south—which should have created airflow for all the students and indeed the teachers in the classroom. But the louvres had to be covered off because they were breaking as the building was collapsing. Its foundations had given way. The state government would do nothing about it. The school principal, Karyn Hart AM, a former National President of the Australian Secondary Principals Association, showed me around all of these things. I do not want Karyn to now be subject to a witch-hunt—although anybody who tried would fail because she is a very formidable person, a very capable woman, a very dedicated educator. She said to me as the local federal member, ‘Where’s the federal funding to fix this?’ I said, ‘But, Karyn, we’re giving you record amounts.’ Again, it is back to this: record amounts are being stolen off the top before any money goes to resources.

I have been to Salisbury State School. It has provided almost 100 years of dedicated service to the people of that part of my electorate. The root systems of the Moreton Bay fig trees have now got into so much of the sewer main that two toilet blocks are not working. The school was given a quote for $125,000 to fix it, 10 times their current annual maintenance budget. Would the state government help them out? No. So what do the kids do? They queue in the toilet block that is working, while the school shut down the toilet block that was not. It is an absolute disgrace.

Back to MacGregor State High School. The assembly hall that was built a couple of years after I left—so it is about 27 years old—is falling down the hill. It is actually falling down the hill towards the main oval. The thing was not built properly. It is going to cost millions of dollars to fix, and frankly it should be fixed up. Just the other day I had the school captains from MacGregor high at my regular Moreton youth advisory group meeting, where all of the high school captains in my electorate come and talk to me about issues in their school, and they are still telling me that essentially the hall is not usable. It is deemed unsafe. And this is not a small high school; this is the third largest high school in Queensland. When I attended the school 30-odd years ago, it had 1,650 students. It still has 1,650 students. It is a huge high school, and the rotten Queensland Beattie Labor government’s priority is to spend money on the bureaucracy first and on buildings and resourcing student needs second. So, again, here entered the Investing in Our Schools Program.

All of those schools said to me, ‘We want something to help us with projects.’ I wrote to the Prime Minister about this in 2004 and I said: ‘I am sick of being accused of under-resourcing education when I know we’re putting in record amounts. I am sick of taking the fall for state governments who see the priority as spending money on big offices and flash cars and big bureaucracies of Labor Party card-carrying members’—the sort of environment we would have if there were ever a Rudd Labor government elected, I must add; we would see the same thing in Canberra. I told the Prime Minister, ‘We need to directly invest in our local schools; we need to do it.’ I reckon I gave the loudest scream of support when the Prime Minister made an announcement at the campaign launch in Brisbane City Hall in September 2004, because he backed my idea—and I am sure other colleagues made the same suggestion; I do not think that just because Gary Hardgrave put it forward on behalf of the people of Moreton $1 billion was put down on the table for this, but $1 billion was. This bill is about adding another $181 million to the task, to say to schools who have not taken full advantage of the Investing in Our Schools Program: you need to get onto this and do something about your school.

My big frustration and concern in all of this, though, and I put this on the record, is that, based on the performance of state governments—who fund the big bureaucracies first, the buildings, facilities and classroom needs of students last, with all the professional educators left till last, all of the good teachers told, ‘Leave the classroom if you want promotion; we don’t want to give you performance based pay, we don’t want to pay the better teachers more than the worse teachers; we want everyone paid the same’—with those sorts of approaches and their pattern of conduct, we will just see further cost shifting like we have already seen under the Investing in Our Schools Program.

I have had schools tell me that Department of Public Works officials and Education Queensland officials have ‘heavied’ them about ensuring that it was Queensland Public Works who did the work in the grounds, that they in fact have tried to undermine this program. This program was about saying, ‘We trust school P&Cs, we trust school principals, to hire people to do a job to fix something up, to build something in the school that makes a difference to the students.’ In fact, P&Cs all over my electorate have said that anything involving Queensland Public Works generally costs 40 per cent more than the going commercial rate. There is a lot of building activity going on in Queensland, so you can imagine the premium dollars Public Works Queensland are charging for things. We have had examples of Public Works officials saying, ‘We want a slice of that action,’ and then I have heard other people say that Education Queensland have said, ‘We want a management fee for anything that is done in the school.’ This is all about cost shifting.

I see the parliamentary secretary, Mr Farmer, who is responsible for this program, in the chamber. He has been to my electorate. He went to Robertson State School and he talked to people there. He understands what I am talking about. He knows all too well that the potential for more of this cost shifting, the potential for more theft of this program’s moneys by state governments, is going to be there. It is something that we all need to realise. We need to realise the priority must be resourcing the classrooms where the teachers, the professional educators, work with the students. That must be the priority.

Frankly, it would be easier to put a cost associated with each child’s education and pay the schools direct. There you go—that is my education policy: pay the schools direct on all fronts. Give the $9 billion plus we are giving to state governments this year directly to the schools. Let us trust the principals. Let us trust the P&Cs. Let us trust them to make their purchasing decisions. Let us put the power in their hands instead of in the hands of central office bureaucrats—Labor Party card-carrying bureaucrats, people with strong union affiliations who want to control things. I think that it is absolutely important that we should start to get resourcing of these issues right and invest in our schools. It has been so popularly received in my electorate because it is shown that the trust is justified.

I think of schools like Rocklea State School, a small school with about 70 or 80 students, with no capacity to raise great amounts of funds. But they have got $28,711 from Investing in Our Schools to date. It is not a large amount of money—I think they lose that in sugar allowance over in the Department of Defence—but a huge amount of money from an education point of view for a small school like Rocklea. They installed air conditioning. They were never going to get it under the Queensland government. They top dressed the school oval. They have a fantastic sports day each year and their two teams, Kaltee and Murri, that compete with each other are now competing on a far safer oval.

My old primary school, Runcorn State School, installed a sprinkler for their oval and rejuvenated it for some $38,000. All we need now is some rain so that they can use the sprinkler, I suppose. Salisbury State School got $19½ thousand for the improvement of one of the street entrances, and I opened it late last year with a group of year 1s. It made the access and the beautification of this great state school so much more appealing. There was Sunnybank Hills State School with ICT and air conditioning—almost $50,000—and Yeronga State School and ICT of some $50,000. Macgregor primary school, the largest state government primary school in the whole state of Queensland, the school my two kids went to, had refurbishment of senior toilets. We had to fix up toilets—$50,000! Where was the state government? They were too busy spending money on wood panelling and flash cars for Labor Party card-carrying bureaucrats in central office instead of doing something for the kids at Macgregor primary school. Nyanda State High School received $50,000 for outdoor learning spaces and shade structures. That was just from the first round. Calamvale Community College got $44½ thousand. There was almost $1 million from the first round alone.

In the second round we saw Graceville State School cover the walkways in this fantastic heritage school. They have now got safer, skin cancer protective walkways—a $136,000 project. Kuraby Special School, a fantastic school, received $41½ thousand to refurbish a classroom. Where is the state government? Missing in action. To upgrade the playground at Kuraby State School there was $72,000. Macgregor State High School gave up on trying to fix up the assembly hall. They finally got the manual arts building fixed because I made such an embarrassment of the state government over the whole matter. They spent $50,000 upgrading classrooms and about $56,000 on building shade structures. That was almost $107,000. Macgregor primary school got another $85,000 for their ICT. There is Milpera State High School—a school which is the first port of call for kids who have come as refugees to this country, where they are taught the basics of English so they can go on and learn other things in other schools like Yeronga and Sunnybank high schools—where for $109,000 we fixed up their canteen. It is a school with no capacity, because of its constituency, to raise anything like that. They now have a canteen they are proud of and they use it as a focal point for social engagement outside of school hours.

Runcorn Heights State School, another fantastic school that looks after non-English-speaking background kids, received $54,000 for playground equipment. Siganto and Stacey, a fantastic local air-conditioning company, provided additional resources on top of the $150,000 that went to Sherwood State School to air-condition their century-old library, and they did it in a very tasteful way, very much respecting the environment. I pay tribute to that company for their generosity in backing further what the Australian government has backed. Sunnybank Hills State School got $85,000 for musical instruments. It is a huge school whose great cultural diversity brings people together through music. There was $70,000 for that and $16,000 for shade structures. The ICT and library extension provided Sunnybank State High School with almost $144,000. Sunnybank State School, a smaller school with a poorer constituency, would never have the capacity to raise this money and they received $150,000 for shade structures and playground and sports courts.

There were three fires late last year in the area: at St Pius X Catholic School at Salisbury, at Moorooka primary school and at Wellers Hill State School. All had buildings destroyed in one night late last year and I spent a dreadful Saturday morning going around and talking to the principals of each of those schools. Wellers Hill had a hall built through the efforts of the P&Cs and we value added to that effort by P&Cs with $150,000 to further upgrade their hall. Then there is Yeronga State High School, a school which does an enormous amount of good in settling kids who have come from Milpera, the entry level for English education in particular, a culturally diverse school which has African faces as the school captains. We backed that school with $135,000 for an air-conditioning and ICT upgrade. The list goes on and on.

Coopers Plains State School got $136,000 to improve their school grounds. None of this money had ever been put forward by a previous Labor federal government. None of this money had ever been made available for so many of these basic things like upgrading toilets. These are failures of a state Labor government that says: ‘Pay the bureaucrats first. Pay them big dollars because they are card-carrying members of the Labor Party. Don’t resource in the classroom equation.’ Instead, this government has shown a sense of trust in the local communities that are built around our local schools. I am proud of the Investing in Our Schools Program and I am pleased that the Prime Minister is resourcing further and giving other schools in my electorate a chance to also get access to these important funds. (Time expired)

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