Tuesday, 20 June 2023

 Peter WALSH (Murray Plains) (12:59): On behalf of the Echuca Twin Rivers multischool campus, I want to raise a ridiculous situation in which that state-of-the-art school, which was only opened in 2018, has no air conditioning in its gym, rendering it unusable for almost half of the year. Only the Andrews government would build a school in inland Australia and not have it air-conditioned. This school is shared by the primary school and the specialist school and used by the Echuca Basketball Association, but the basketball association refuses to use the gym in summer, ruling it unsafe because of the extreme temperatures, which also means Twin Rivers School misses out on the valuable rent income to further supplement its school program. Now the school is going cap in hand to funding bodies to try and raise enough cash to install industrial-strength fans – a poor compromise and hardly a solution. Even worse, the Twin Rivers school has been told the specifications for the gymnasium may not allow for air conditioning to be installed anyway and the school will need an engineer’s report at its expense to see if it can actually be done. The lesson to be learned here is the ongoing incompetence of the Andrews government to even get a small project right.