Page155 - Week 01 - Thursday, 3 December 2020
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Those have included $10 million for new active travel paths around Canberra. We have done that based on community feedback. They are footpath priority projects that have been put up by the community, as well as stakeholders, across a range of different areas for walking and cycling. That has included 60 projects, including cyclist priority crossings and bike-and-ride facilities, to facilitate the connection with public transport.
There have been quite significant projects in my electorate of Murrumbidgee. One of those is the further kilometres of shared path that we installed on the Cotter Road, connecting the Molonglo through to Curtin and the city, and also through to Cooleman Court. These were key missing links in our cyclepath network that we have been able to plug by building that new infrastructure, and we will continue to do that over the term of government. I know that, through the parliamentary and governing agreement and through our shared commitment to building more cycling infrastructure, we will augment our city cycle network even further and hopefully encourage more people to take a bike or walk throughout our community in the future.
Government—schools policy
DR PATERSON: My question is to the Minister for Education and Youth Affairs. Molonglo Valley is a rapidly growing part of the Murrumbidgee electorate. I ask: how is the government providing excellent public school infrastructure to the growing community there?
MS BERRY: I thank Dr Paterson for her question. Of course there is the importance of a new school, the Evelyn Scott School, being named after an Indigenous Australian political activist and educator herself, in Denman Prospect. I have seen for myself that the building work has been progressing well, that the admin and preschool areas of the building are now being occupied by leadership and admin teams and that the school will be open from day one of first term next year. The multipurpose gym will be ready in the middle of the year. The school hosted a community day, and I understand a couple of hundred people attended to see the new school as it is being progressed. I know that there was a lot of excitement about that as well. The school is already valued by its community and I am looking forward to the community moving in and for schoolchildren to be taking advantage of that wonderful space.
DR PATERSON: My second question is: how is the government improving public schools across our city for the 2021 school year?
MS BERRY: There is a lot of work happening across our public schools, and it will happen over the summer holidays to cater for the changing population which I referred to yesterday in responding to a question from Mr Davis that our population growth in the ACT is even faster than it ever has been.
The use of solar energy in our schools, across all the electrical systems, will be upgraded. There are new transportables going in across schools. Even on the hottest days some of those new transportables are using clean electricity that can power other classrooms by reducing school energy bills.
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