Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Speaker. Of course, we have always said that there will be school communities delighted and some that needed assistance and had concerns. That is why we created the Building the Education Revolution Implementation Taskforce. We need to be dealing with the facts. That brings me to a report in today’s Australian newspaper which suggested that a project in the Larrakeyah Primary School in Darwin was poor, that the school was unhappy and that the project was of such poor value that it was even smaller than the local McDonald’s. I advise the House that I have today spoken to the school principal, Mr Graham Chadwick. He advises me and I advise the House of the following. He says that in his school Building the Education Revolution has been a fantastic program from the start. As soon as it was announced, he started work with the school council’s infrastructure committee.

A former student of the school, Hully Liveris, serves on that committee. He is an architect and his wife Emma teaches part time in the school. Hully, the school principal Graham, and Richard Wiltshire, who is president of the school council, the commander of the local Larrakeyah base and a former student of the school, worked with Des Hodges, the project manager appointed by the Northern Territory education department to deliver transformational change to that school and they are delighted with it. The school is growing in numbers because the Defence Force base is growing in numbers. At the same time the school serves around 120 students who live in apartment developments in Darwin, part of the new residential construction in that city. This meant that the school needed additional classrooms but was very concerned to keep its local play area available, particularly for the kids who live in the apartments.

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