Book 8 - Parliament of Victoria

BUDGET PAPERS 2011–12
1580 COUNCIL Tuesday, 31 May 2011
Mr Tee interjected.
Mr DRUM — Mr Tee, that is two and a half times
the amount of money that your government was going
to put in place for regional development, had it won the
election late last year.
I now want to focus in my contribution more locally,
because the contrast between the coalition and Labor is
at its most stark in the regions of Bendigo and
Castlemaine. The coalition started by pledging that it
would save Eaglehawk Primary School, a school that
Labor had decided it was going to close. Sorry, I must
correct my words: Labor does not close schools, it
simply merges them. It merges them with other schools,
and then it closes them. As soon as it can get them
closed they are bulldozed so that no-one can ever
accuse the Labor Party of closing a school that no
longer has kids in it. It simply bulldozes them and gets
them out of the road so that no-one can ever remember
that a school used to be there.
Eaglehawk Primary School was destined for such
action. The member for Bendigo East in the other place
was out claiming that the best thing that could happen
to Eaglehawk Primary School was that it be closed and
become part of a three-way merge. Bendigo North
Primary School was also gone, and only Camp Hill
Primary School would survive. But the Labor Party in
government would give it a new name, because it
always likes to give merged schools a new name to try
to complete the smoke-and-mirrors trick aimed at
convincing us it has not actually closed the schools but
has simply merged three of them.
There was a $2 million difference there, and the
coalition government has now invested $800 000 in the
school for maintenance and another $2 million for
capital improvements. Even as late as last month the
opposition’s education spokesperson in Bendigo was
advocating that the school close and merge. The
member for Bendigo East and the member for Niddrie
in the other place want Eaglehawk Primary School to
close. I can tell them now that it is not going to close; it
is going to stay open, and the people in Eaglehawk will
still be able to send their kids to the local primary
school for the next four or five years.
When it comes to the Bendigo hospital we see one of
the most amazing pieces of political naivety that I could
possibly have imagined. We have a situation in
Bendigo where the coalition government has promised
a $632 million development for the people of Bendigo
and the surrounding central Victorian region. It is
$102 million more than the Labor Party put on the
table, but we still have a situation where the members
for Bendigo East and Bendigo West in the other place
are actively campaigning for a hospital to be built for
$102 million less than the coalition government is
prepared to spend.
They want the old Labor Party model of a hospital to be
built because they are too proud and too Labor
focused — first, second and third — to ever think that
the coalition could come up with a better model or that
the coalition’s investment in its home town could
possibly be better than the Labor Party’s. Their pride
has got them to the point where they are prepared to
say, ‘We do not want your extra $102 million. You can
keep it. Just build the cheap model that we put on the
table. Build the cheap and nasty hospital that we tried to
sell to the people of Bendigo as an absolute fraud. We
would rather that than to admit that maybe the
coalition’s investment in Bendigo has the interests of
the Bendigo people and the surrounding region at heart,
because that is something we cannot bring ourselves to
do’.
They say, ‘We will never support something the
coalition government has done on our home patch, even
if it means bringing an extra $102 million to our town
in the form of a world-class hospital’ as opposed to the
hotchpotch brand of hospital that the former
government was planning to build and foist upon the
people of Bendigo. It is an absolute disgrace that
opposition members cannot bring themselves to say,
‘Thank goodness we have a coalition government that
is going to honour its promise to spend $632 million’.
That is the quantum of money we are going to spend on
a world-class hospital in Bendigo.
There is $40 million on the table from the coalition for
a hospital in Echuca. There was nothing on the table
from Labor. That is a stark contrast. People in the
region had a clear opportunity to look at the investment
in health proposed by the respective sides. There is
$40 million from the coalition for Echuca; there was
nothing from Labor.
There was $102 million extra on the table for Bendigo
from the coalition; $102 million less from Labor. When
it comes to Castlemaine, we made a pledge of
$10 million for the Castlemaine health-care group, and
we will honour that pledge of $10 million in the
forward years; and yet there was nothing from Labor.
There was an investment of $7.5 million in the
Castlemaine Secondary College, which was to merge
the two campuses of that college — the junior campus
and the senior campus. The community has been trying
to merge those two schools onto the one site. We have
put $7.5 million on the table to give those two
campuses the opportunity to do what they want to do,