Andrew King

Yes, it's really positive news targeted at our most isolated and smallest rural schools here, which is very welcome news.

Well, it's because a relief teacher can teach in any school that they choose during the week.

And so it's really important that we've got teachers

something in the system that supports them to commute as far out.

Some schools could be up to 100 kilometres away that they might need to drive to in our most isolated communities.

Well, yes, I think we've got a system that's based on numbers of students in terms of funding, and the smaller you are, the less of an operations grant you have, and the more manoeuvring, the trickier the manoeuvring of budget outlines that you've got to do.

Having that $2,500 means they don't need to think about where they need to take

money from elsewhere and they can focus that $2,500 on fuel shortage related costs or fuel increase costs.

Well that's a really good question so it's good to see something really proactive in basically disestablishing the reliance on diesel boilers.

That's something that needed to be done years ago though wasn't it?

Surely.

Yes, it would have been great if it happened sooner, but it's good that it's happening now.

Yeah, so we've got ministry-run routes, plus we've got direct resourcing routes, and the increased costs there, the ministry deals with that.

With our direct resourcing bus routes, though, that gets reviewed six monthly in terms of the operational cost.

But we're working with the ministry on that.

The way that politics has gotten into our recovery has really started to hurt people on the ground, and I wish it wasn't that way.

Disaster is nonpartisan.

Everyone believes that the government should step in and help.

I wish that would happen sooner.