Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to raise an individual issue with the Deputy Prime Minister’s BER, or school halls project. Snowtown Area School is only an hour and a half north of Adelaide—in a seat like Grey, certainly not to be classed as remote by any measure. The Snowtown school has a student enrolment of about 90 and, accordingly, was allocated $850,000 for a classroom refurbishment program. One would hope that, at almost $9½ thousand per student, they end up with some pretty flash classrooms. However, I have received correspondence from the chairman of the school council, John Cummins, expressing frustration that the school is being forced to forgo $94,000 of the program to accommodate the late inclusion of tanks for firefighting purposes.

The school initially applied for funding under round 1 and was eventually successful under round 3. One would think that, after that amount of negotiation, all compliance issues would have been worked out, rather than finding that the school is being faced with a $94,000 hiccup. The tanks—two 37,000-litre tanks—are available from local tank suppliers for $8,900, less than 10 per cent of the value quoted. These tanks are not to be plumbed in, because they are to be drawn on only in a fire emergency. They will not collect rainwater; they must remain full at all times. Mr Deputy Speaker Sidebottom, have you ever heard of anything more stupid than rainwater tanks that do not actually collect rainwater? The school already in fact has a number of rainwater tanks which can be drawn on and a swimming pool which holds double the capacity of the tanks.

Leaving aside the South Australian regulations insisting on these tanks when other suppliers are available, this is clearly an issue of state cost-shifting. Fire compliance is nothing to do with the BER, and Minister Gillard should get on top of her school rorts program. After all, how will having superfluous fire tanks at 10 times the market price possibly contribute to better educational outcomes for the children of Snowtown? The Deputy Prime Minister is keen to repeatedly advise us on this side of the House to come to her rather than to the press with individual problems so that she can sort them out. I wrote to Minister Gillard on 27 May and neither the school nor I have had any contact on the matter.

Snowtown is not the only school to have issues with fire tanks. The letter from John Cummins highlights the fact that a school on Eyre Peninsula managed to get their tanks installed at only—and I emphasise the ‘only’—three times the market value of $30,000, and a little closer to Adelaide Macclesfield Primary got theirs for $26,790, and they were the same size tanks. It was still probably far too much, in my opinion, but certainly only a fraction of the $94,000 being extorted out of the system by the South Australian Department for Transport, Energy and Infrastructure.