Adding salt to the wound is the axing of the $50 back to school allowance, money which Griffith parents are spending on uniforms, stationary and school shoes.

Parents of one child could find themselves nearly $450 worse off at the start of the school year, while a three-child family using a school bus will look at a hefty $1350 hit on their budget.

Pupils living more than three kilometres away from school currently enjoy free bus travel, but Premier Nathan Rees admitted over the weekend he was looking to replace the scheme with a $391 annual fee for each child using the public transport.

The move will save the State Government an estimated $470 million, but Griffith High P&C president Michelle Harpley said the

new fees were “pretty rough” on families struggling to cope with the drought.

“I think the farmers are doing it tough enough with the drought that they don’t need another bill to pay,” she said.

“City families have the choice of schools to go to, while out here there’s no such luxury.”

Mrs Harpley and her 16-year-old son live nearly 10km out of Griffith, so there is little other option apart from bus transport to school.

While she doesn’t mind the system being tweaked to deal with private school students in Sydney, Mrs Harpley believed families in

regional areas will really suffer as a result.

“People out at Goolgowi and Rankins Springs have big distances to travel, so their only other option is to send their kids to boarding school, which is even more expensive,” she said.

“Four hundred dollars per student per year, and if you have four kids, $1600 is a lot of money.”

Murrumbidgee MP Adrian Piccoli has placed the blame squarely

on State Government mismanagement.

“I think it’s a disgrace that the Government is cutting funding for kids to pay for their own incompetence,” he said.

“There may be some changes that might be needed to make the system more efficient, but scrapping it is a major overreaction.”

Mr Piccoli said poor budgeting from the Government meant that crying poor was not a reasonable excuse from Premier Rees.

“They’ve just wasted so much money, and it’s not as if they aren’t getting any revenue in, but they’ve squandered it, and now the first thing they cut is basic transport to school,” he said.

“They went and spent $30m on

V8 supercars, and they spent

another $60m on this T-card

system for public transport in Sydney, all money down the tube.”