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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2010-05-26 Daily Xml
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PRESCHOOLS

Mr PENGILLY (Finniss) (15:30): It was interesting this afternoon in question time that the Minister for Road Safety raised the issue of the responsibility of parents and drivers to provide from 1 July restraints for children in vehicles. I felt some angst and some degree of annoyance over the fact that—not that for a moment do I believe that those children do not need protection—we have hundreds, if not thousands, of children in South Australia travelling across rural and regional South Australia in department of education school buses (and others) without seat belts, which makes an absolute farce of what the minister talked about here this afternoon, particularly given that some of those children spend two to three hours a day on these buses travelling 80, 90 or 100 km/h, with no air conditioning in many cases, particularly on the West Coast. The former member for Flinders raised this on numerous occasions.

I express a bit of righteous indignation about the fact that we are doing this for younger children, yet our children at school are not getting what they deserve, need and should have from the Rann government. It seems to me to be a government that has absolutely run out of puff, has run out of ideas and has got itself in a hideous mess on the Adelaide Oval redevelopment and where it is going with that. It smacks of State Bank stadium down there, quite frankly.

That is not what I was going to talk about this afternoon. I wanted to raise the issue of preschools in my electorate and the necessity for an extension of the preschools that already exist there and, indeed, to put some preschools into areas where they do not have them at the moment. One area, for example, is Mount Compass, which is a bustling little rural community with increasing numbers of young families and increasing numbers of younger children but no preschool centre. Parents have to take their children to Port Elliot, Victor Harbor or come over the other side of the hill towards Willunga.

I ask that the government and the department of education look seriously at putting in a preschool at Mount Compass, and equally at Parndana on Kangaroo Island which also does not have that sort of facility and which also has a large number of children. This thing is not going away, because the growth in the numbers down on the South Coast is rapidly leading us to the position where we need another, or a much larger, preschool in the Victor Harbor area. It is cramped and overloaded. We have private care facilities as well; however, the reality is that we do need a much larger preschool or a new one down there.

Earlier this year, along with the federal member for Mayo, Jamie Briggs, I visited Yankalilla. The Yankalilla preschool is also suffering from no room whatsoever. The facilities down there are quite primitive. The parents group and the people who run the centre are very actively pushing to obtain more funding to do something, seemingly without getting a lot of success. Yankalilla and Normanville is a bustling little community. Cathy Tozer, the director of the preschool down there, does a mighty job; and they have a very active and keen parent committee, management committee, call it what you may, that operates in that place.

Quite simply, we need to apportion expenditure to places where it is really needed. I seriously question the nonsense that has been going on this afternoon regarding the Adelaide Oval redevelopment coming from the Treasurer. We seem to have an open-ended cheque book in this state for doing things for sporting facilities, such as bridges over the Torrens or whatever, which seemingly has blown out from $20 million to $38 million. We certainly seem to be able to find money for all sorts of things, except when we really need it to improve the education of our children, the preschools of our children, medical facilities in the bush and services in the bush. We have got it wrong. We are not going in the right direction. We seem to have a want list instead of a needs list. It gets down to very basic ideals on where we are going.

Time expired.

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