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House of Assembly - Fifty-Second Parliament, First Session (52-1)
2011-10-18 Daily Xml
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SAVE OUR SCHOOLS RALLY

Mr PISONI (Unley) (16:52): Last Friday I was at the Save Our Schools rally at Elder Park where there were families, students and teachers opposed to the school cuts that were announced last year under the first budget of the Minister for Education, Mr Weatherill. We all know that there was a proposition to amalgamate 67 co-located schools, and a very active campaign has been run by parent Julie Caust, the chairman at Modbury High School, to put a stop to the process happening between high schools and primary schools—and now those who are in junior primary schools and primary schools are fighting the battle.

This measure was to save $8.2 million. At that rally I was presented with a copy of a petition, and 879 people within the electorate in and around the school have expressed their concerns about the government's announce-and-defend policy of ignoring the very same amendments to the Education Act that they made in this place in 1998 that called for consultation and a proper process to be in place in order to enact school closures and school amalgamations.

We are looking at the government forcing through these amalgamations and saving $8.2 million. When he backed down on the merger of the high schools and primary schools, the education minister explained that that was not going to cost them anything—to back down on that savings measure—so we can only assume that the $8.2 million referred directly to the 42 primary and junior primary schools that are being forced to amalgamate through a farce of a review process that has been conducted after a decision has been made.

If we look at where the government has found these so-called 'tough cuts', this 'tough budget' that had to be made for the sake of saving the state—at that time, eight years of Labor government in Australia's most buoyant time when we saw enormous growth in state revenues. I think the budget here in South Australia doubled in that time from about $8 billion to $16 billion. We have not seen a single percent more in the share of the education budget. They are stuck at around 24.5 per cent, as it was in 2002, and as it is in this year's budget.

We saw cuts of about $100 million straight out of schools—not from the bureaucracy but out of schools—and we saw cuts to teacher development programs and school security. Remember earlier in the year the fire at Unley High School. The arsonist was successful, I understand, after about six attempts to burn that building down, and I know that Unley had to wait longer for their fencing requirements because of the cuts to the school's security budget. Out of school hours care has been cut. Around $500,000 has been cut from the budget and those costs will be passed directly on to the parents.

Do not forget that the forward estimates predicts an extra $25 million in school fees being collected from parents, more so then than what is being collected now. We saw school maintenance budgets cut, and we saw bus services cut. This is the extraordinary thing: we saw cuts to basic skills test funding. The reason given in the budget was, 'Well we don't need it anymore because that funding is being provided by the federal government,' but this May, the federal government cut their funding. Do not forget that Mr Weatherill, the education minister, has presided over the two worst Naplan results in this state's history since he has been the education minister. We went backwards in 14 out of 20 categories in the last Naplan results, after going backwards in 2010 from the 2009 results.

So you can see that the education minister, who is soon to be premier, has taken the easy option, taking money from schools rather than looking at the bureaucracy within his department to make those savings that were required through the Sustainable Budget Review Committee. The Auditor-General has even identified a very easy saving for the minister with $4.5 million in surplus education department employees with nothing to do. Some of them are being paid up to $120,000 a year.

Time expired.

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