Alex Hawke (Mitchell, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

That was a big mistake, as the member for Sturt quite rightly points out. I have asked the Prime Minister in question time about several cases—and this goes back to September last year—relating to Baulkham Hills North Public School and Annangrove Public School. These are great public schools in my electorate. They are fantastic schools with fantastic P&Cs, with honest P&C presidents who are not engaged in the political process. When the BER came to Baulkham Hills North Public School it made one mistake. The P&C president, Mr Craig Turner, was an architect, and he was one of the first to come to me. He said, ‘Why are we getting a new school hall to replace the existing school hall, for $1.2 million, when it is smaller than the existing hall?’ I could not explain that.

I asked the Prime Minister—then the Deputy Prime Minister and responsible for this program—why the school was getting, for $1.2 million, a hall that was smaller and could not hold the school population. Of course she went through a series of vitriolic responses that did not answer the question. When I turned up to that P&C and said, ‘This is what Julia Gillard said to my question,’ many of those people said: ‘We voted for her. We voted for that government. We will never vote for that government again.’ They are not Liberal people. They are people in a public school trying to do the best by their kids and by their school, and they were outraged.

I turn to a further case. Ms Donna Hunter of Annangrove Public School is a great P&C president and someone with a great concern for her local school. This is an outrageous example, and I want to highlight these examples because we do need a judicial inquiry into the BER and this bill provides for that exact thing. The experience of Annangrove Public School is one of the grossest examples in this country of waste and mismanagement in a government program. Annangrove Public School has just 90 pupils. It got $850,000 under the BER program, something which ought to have been a boon and a gift for that school, something which should have set up that school for the next 20 to 50 years. It needed classrooms and it desperately needed new toilets for the school population. The school community asked for classrooms and toilets. What did they get from the New South Wales state government? A library. What did they already have? A library.

When you go to Annangrove Public School you stand in front of two libraries. You go to the existing library, which stands next to the new library. The existing library is air-conditioned and is fully functional and serviced with shelves. The new library, which cost $850,000, has no air-conditioning, has no shelving and is completely useless as a library building to that school with its 90 pupils—$850,000. When you look at the line items you see there was $66,000 in landscaping for that school. The member for Sturt and the Leader of the Opposition were good enough to come to this school and see it firsthand. They did not turn a blind eye like the member for Blair. They did not pretend it was not happening. They visited this school, spoke to the parents, spoke to the P&C and said, ‘Show us what is happening.’

There was $66,000 for landscaping but you find 12 plants, which had to be removed because they were a fire hazard, and a one-metre by one-metre patch of concrete. If this is landscaping then somebody has got a very good job out of that, I would suggest to you, Madam Deputy Speaker. Somebody has profited from that, and I say that in the full seriousness of understanding what those words mean in this place.

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