Darren Chester (Gippsland, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too want to raise some questions to the minister in relation to the Primary Schools for the 21st Century program. I believe I first wrote to the minister in about March last year to reflect the concerns put to me by several members of my community from within the building trade, the primary school sector and the school councils. I do thank the minister because, on most occasions, she responds very promptly to my correspondence. Though some other ministers are nowhere near as prompt, I do get responses. I am sorry that the paper warfare probably will continue in the future.

There were several concerns presented to the minister at that time, and many of them have come to fruition in relation to the valuation for money of this program. The schools in Gippsland that I have had much to do with are very concerned about the way this program was rolled out in terms of the template designs which were forced upon them and which were not necessarily what they wanted. In the Victorian sense, and certainly in the Gippsland sense, many of the schools had not done a master planning process to the extent that probably some of the independent and Catholic schools had and so they probably were not as well placed when the time came to roll out this program in the manner and time frames forced upon the school communities. I do not believe we necessarily got the value for money that we could have received if we had had a little more control of the funding at the local level. That has been a real concern for the state schools in my electorate.

The actual contracting process and the way in which the projects were packaged together also created some very serious anomalies in Gippsland. One of the most obvious ones was the Bairnsdale situation, where we had two Bairnsdale building firms given the opportunity to tender for three jobs. The three jobs were located in Foster, San Remo and Wonthaggi. Each of those towns is two or three hours away from Bairnsdale. The two Bairnsdale firms involved were not given the opportunity to tender for jobs in the state school system in their immediate area. Naturally, they did not even bother tendering for the jobs in Foster, San Remo and Wonthaggi and waited until the local Catholic primary school had jobs available for them to tender for, and they went through that process.

One of the other areas I want to raise with the minister relates to the issue of portable buildings. I believe many of my smaller communities could have leveraged off far more results for their school communities if—

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