Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Water Resources and Conservation) Share this | Hansard source

That is absolute fact. I have testaments to that. The member for Lyons might like to visit western New South Wales and speak to the nurses—nurses that his government is supposed to be supporting. They have been left high and dry. Over the last week, the work in my electorate office has involved nurses, school principals and Aboriginal communities. They have been deserted by this government in this budget.

Another issue is the government’s propensity not to look at infrastructure for the Murray-Darling Basin but instead buy water back willy-nilly. There is the government’s recent purchase of the Twynam Pastoral Co’s water and what that means to the community of Moree. The local Chamber of Commerce estimates that the sale of that one property will result in the loss of dozens of jobs, and they will never come back. We will go from a drought that was induced by nature to a permanent drought—a government induced drought.

We have had a go at the students and we have had a go at the nurses. How about the teachers? We have been hearing a lot about the great ‘building the education revolution’ fund. Guess where my work has been involved over the last couple of weeks: school principals, like the Deputy Principal of Warialda High School. This school is recognised as one of the leading vocational educational high schools in New South Wales, if not Australia. It is also the home of the Gwydir Concert Band. Warialda High School has been in desperate need of a school hall for the last 25 years, but it cannot have one. It can have another science lab, but it already has two science labs. The school does not want that; it wants a school hall. The primary school can have a school hall but the high school cannot.

In Mungindi, a central school with a large Indigenous population of 100 students only has, unfortunately for them, 48 students in the primary school; therefore, they cannot have an assembly hall. The Catholic school down the road has 52 students. They can have one. So the Indigenous students that go to the state funded school—the so-called ‘education for all’—are now going to be further disadvantaged, but the Catholic school up the road—good luck to them—will have a new hall. So the gap in public education widens. Where is the fairness in that? I forgot the Aboriginal community. We had the apology to the stolen generation with much gnashing of teeth, crying and wringing of hands 12 or 18 months ago. So what will we do? We will do away with the Community Development Employment Program.

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