Mike Symon (Deakin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Last week, on Friday 1 July, I attended the opening of Nunawading Christian College's new multipurpose hall, centrally located in the electorate of Deakin. This is another excellent example of what local schools have been able to achieve under the Building the Education Revolution program. From memory, I think this is the 16th such opening I have had the pleasure of attending in my electorate—and there are more to come yet. There will be a great rush of them coming along later this year. Schools have been able to pay special attention to their needs and get a result at the end that suits them.

Nunawading Christian College is a non-government school that has been a great example of this. Although the opening was 1 July, they have been using their hall since December last year. On 2 December I attended a very large concert put on by the students there, and it was a great event even then. Since that time the hall has just about been fully fitted out and now not only is it a hall for school assemblies and musical performances but also it has a fully equipped basketball facility that includes nets that can be dropped down to protect the video screens on each side of the stage while it is being used for basketball. The hall also has facilities above and beyond what I have seen at any other school that has built a similar size multipurpose hall, and that includes things like having an area upstairs which is particularly good for stage shows—it allows for lighting to be done in much better ways than just from the one angle. There are also new offices downstairs and facilities that the school simply did not have prior to the Building the Education Revolution program.

The great thing about this project is that they were able to build onto part of what they already had. The school previously had a small indoor hall—far too small for the whole school to fit into—but by remodelling that and joining the new building to it they were able to construct something bigger and better than most equivalent schools have been able to do. That is great testament to the benefit of putting some thought into how the job should be done. All up the project cost $2.167 million, $2 million of which was from the P21 component of the Building the Education Revolution program. As I mentioned before, the rear projection video screens on each side of the stage are a great idea and they enable anyone in the hall—whether you are short or tall—to see what is going on on the stage. Even if you cannot quite see the stage, you can certainly see what is happening on the video screens.

I had the great pleasure to be invited to the official opening and I was shown to my place by the primary school captains, Ella Rankin and Jack Stott. They did a great job of doing the introductions, standing up in front of those hundreds of people. They were very well practised in what they did and they were naturals—it was a great effort. Mr Peter Michalski, the Nunawading Christian Coll­ege primary school principal, delivered the welcome address, and a great performance was put on by the student musicians. They played an amazing number of instruments. Some very small primary school children also did a fantastic puppet show for us—that kept a few people laughing as well. With all the staff, around 200 primary school students and all the college's secondary school students, there were around 450 or so in attendance for the opening, and of course there were a large number of parents at the school to witness the event.

Mr Adrian Styles, the Nunawading Christ­ian College secondary school principal, introduced me for the speech, after they pulled a bit of a surprise and got me up on stage for an ad hoc interview—but there were no trick questions; it was a very good interview. Brian Mercer, the regional director of Adventist Schools Victoria, was also there, and Minister Chester Stanley attended for the dedication address. Lyndon Chapman, the former principal of the college, was also in attendance and I would like to thank him especially for all the work he put in when the Building the Education Revolution program was announced. He almost had plans ready the next day, and it was refreshing to see at the time that someone had such a clear judgment and view of what the school needed to do. Ben Stennet, the Mayor of the City of Whitehorse, was also in attendance to witness the opening.

Nunawading Christian College is a great non-government school in my electorate of Deakin that continues to excel and will do so into the future.