“This is a government with its priorities all wrong.”
Not only that, Campbelltown MP Greg Warren says he has scored the NSW Liberal Government’s efforts to address the school maintenance backlog at local schools as an F for fail.
Documents previously obtained under freedom of information showed that across the Macarthur region there is a backlog of maintenance work in excess of $31 million, including almost $10 million in the Campbelltown electorate alone.
However, recent information obtained also shows that efforts by the NSW Government to address the backlog are well below what is required.
Across the Macarthur region, just $2.5 million was allocated to address the backlog in the 2016-17 financial year; representing a mere 8.3 percent of the total backlog.
Within the Campbelltown electorate, the figures are equally as dire, with just $822,000 being allocated to address the backlog of nearly $10 million, equating to a similar 8.2 percent, according to Mr Warren.
At that rate, it would take over 12 years for the backlog to be fully cleared, without accounting for additional maintenance issues that could arise during that time.
“Just weeks after we learned of the Liberal Government’s outrageous neglect of our schools and their maintenance needs, we now find out that the Government is doing next to nothing to fix the problem,” says the local MP.
“The 2016-17 NSW budget that Gladys Berejiklian handed down as then-Treasurer had a surplus of over $4.7 billion, and now the government is trying to tell us that they can only afford to fix eight percent of the maintenance issues in our schools?
“The government could fix every single maintenance issue at every government school in all of NSW and still have a surplus of almost $4 billion, but they are choosing not to and our students are paying the price,’’ Mr Warren said.
The MP has started a petition (pictured below) calling on the government to get serious about addressing the maintenance backlog in the Macarthur region.
The last figures I have seen states the NSW is short of some 4000 class rooms but the Liberal Government is sitting on over $4.7billion while private schools build swimming pools as qiuck as they can. To the Libs State Schools dont matter