Damian Hale (Solomon, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise this morning to briefly outline some of the fantastic Building the Education Revolution projects that are occurring in my electorate. As there had been some conjecture and plenty of debate over the BER funding, I went out and spoke to the principals of different schools and collected some third party endorsements on how well this program has been received. I spoke to June Wessels, principal of the Bakewell Primary School, one of the biggest primary schools in my electorate with 680-odd kids. They got a new classroom block and they got an all-weather roof for basketball courts and outdoor stage facilities. She said to me that there had been excellent feedback from the community. Local businesses had been able to build a lot of the infrastructure that was very important to the people in my electorate. The Durack Primary School principal, Heather Stedman, got new extra classrooms and more library space. Once again a local company did the building and it had been received very positively by all the community. Certainly the Durack Primary School is growing. It is a very big school as well and this was very significant funding for that school. Even smaller schools like Ludmilla Primary School had work done. It had a library extension and a new resource centre. Its principal said to me that the whole community was right behind the BER funding and these sorts of projects were very important to the school as it continued to develop.

Even in the Catholic schools sector, the principal of Sacred Heart Primary School, Kathy Neely, was very positive about the upgrade of the classrooms and the library extension. Once again, it was a local company that did the work—on time and on budget. She said the community is pleased and the parents have been very much involved in the design and very much involved in the whole process there. Principal Kelly Smith, of St Paul’s Primary School, said the roof over an outdoor learning area was something that they had been saving for and she said it would have taken many fetes and many chook raffles to get that money to be able to afford to do the extensions at the St Paul’s Primary School. So there are many great stories out there about the BER funding. I think one of the threats, obviously, is that the Leader of the Opposition has made it quite clear that these projects will be cut. There is $20 million worth of projects in my electorate of Solomon alone, and I ask the Leader of the Opposition to come to Darwin and tell those schools that they are not going to be funded. I would like to seek leave to table these third-party endorsements that I have received from principals.

Leave granted.

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