Wednesday, 19 February 2025

 Nick McGOWAN (North-Eastern Metropolitan) (18:30): (1433) I have very much looked forward to this moment, because one manager of school business after another has said to me, ever since the announcement of the school saving bonus, what a burden it has placed on them. These are the managers of each school, predominately female in terms of the workforce, it is fair to say. The overwhelming feedback from my electorate of Ringwood – but right across the North-Eastern Metropolitan Region, I am hazarding a guess, and I would guess also even in Minister Erdogan’s area as well – is that the administrative burden that that bonus has placed on schools is extremely significant. It is no small matter. In fact from what I understand of local schools, any number of managers of those schools have been in tears. It has not taken hours, it has not taken days, it has literally taken weeks to administer this program.

You have to go back a step, because when this program was announced what we learned through the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee process was this: there was not a scrap of evidence that they had actually consulted the bureaucracy prior. The bureaucracy in fact said at the time, and Secretary Atta was before the Public Accounts and Estimates Committee, that the system would most likely be a voucher-based system. Well, that never, ever eventuated. Instead what we have is complicated, last-minute scrambling by the department to try and catch up with this chaotic government and their ministers and their harebrained ideas.

There is no-one in this chamber that does not support sincere and true cost-of-living relief, but this is not what this is. This is an administrative burden placed in the way of and administered by schools, with no forethought and little respect for the time and resources it would take each and every single school in our state, particularly primary schools. If this government and this minister do not understand the amount of stress, the amount of worry and the amount of genuine inconvenience – and that this inconvenience represents time not spent on all the other matters every school has to deal with day in, day out, including the welfare of the students these schools are charged with – then they are absolutely kidding themselves. You also have to recall that this is fudging the finances, because at the end of the day this government has already signed up to the National School Reform Agreement. What we learned, again through the PAEC process is that the schools always had to spend the money.

In closing, I would say to every parent out there who is listening: make sure that you claim every cent you can, because I tell you what, just as in the story of Cinderella, the wand was waved and the pumpkin turned into a carriage, but come June, you will lose that saving bonus.