Whyalla High Schools Amalgamation

Mr HUGHES (Giles) (15:22): I rise today to talk about the dramatic fall in wholesale electricity costs in South Australia, a very dramatic fall which obviously upsets those opposite—

Members interjecting:

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order!

Mr HUGHES: —as well as the fact that we have become a very significant net exporter of electricity.

Mr DULUK: Point of order. I am outraged by the member for Giles' slur and I ask him to withdraw. I share his desire for lower electricity prices.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: I am sad to hear you are outraged.

Mr HUGHES: It is very good to hear that indeed.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: Order! Back to your grievance.

Mr HUGHES: I was going to talk about electricity but, given that one of the questions asked in question time, along with some supplementary questions, concerned the new high school proposal in Whyalla, I have decided to pick up that subject instead. It is a subject that is close to my heart not just as the member for Giles but also as someone who is the father of three children who, until fairly recently, went through the public education system in Whyalla.

There is a real need for a new high school in Whyalla, a new high school co-located with the university and the TAFE to create what I believe will be an amazing educational precinct. The simple fact is that we have just over 1,000 high school students in Whyalla scattered over three sites. We have two junior high schools feeding a senior high school, and one of those junior high schools has just over 100 students. This is not a sustainable proposition, and it is a proposition that disadvantages students in Whyalla.

The shift to a new high school, accommodating all our public high school students in Whyalla, will be a major step forward. I am not aware of anywhere else in the state in the public education system that has that model of junior high schools feeding into a senior secondary college. Tasmania had that system, and it was a really bad system. They had some of the worst results in the nation. There is often a range of factors at work, but the fact that you had this transitional arrangement in your high school years seriously disadvantaged students, especially some of the most vulnerable students.

The shift to a larger one-site high school in Whyalla will open up a range of opportunities that are not available at the moment. Some of that is just a pure numbers game. If you have a larger school, you are able to provide far more specialised services and far more specialised supports, so it will be to the benefit of all the high school students in Whyalla. Last year, there was extensive consultation with the school communities about what we should be looking for when it comes to the future of high school education in Whyalla.

I am pleased to say that the three principals and the chairs of the school councils have all come out in support of this worthwhile proposal. I touched on the fact that it will be co-located with the University of South Australia and the TAFE facility, so that will be one of the few places in the country where you have an educational precinct of that nature. The pathways and the linkages that will be provided will open up a whole raft of opportunities for students in Whyalla. One of the other things worth touching on is the fact that adjacent to the new site will be SABRENet.

SABRENet will allow that new high school to lock into a system that has speeds on average 100 times greater than the average speeds with the NBN. That in itself will open up all sorts of opportunities for the students and teachers at the new facility. It is important that we address some particular concerns that some parents have when it comes to bullying and other issues, and they are legitimate concerns, but they are far easier to address in a school with far more services and far more support—a school with state-of-the-art facilities that will be a massive step forward from where we are now.

Time expired.