Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

There are at least two own goals here today. The biggest own goal is the legislation before us, the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Amendment Bill 2007. The Investing in Our Schools Program is a brilliant concept. I will give a tick where a tick deserves to be given and, when the Treasurer announced and outlined this program in the 2004 budget, I listened to him thinking it was pure genius. It is pure genius to go into an area where you have no control whatsoever, no legislative input and no administrative concern—government and non-government schools throughout Australia—and to use the parents and citizens organisations, or parents and friends organisations, to provide up to $150,000 worth of equipment and projects to these schools over a four-year period. This was promised by the former Minister for Education, Science and Training Brendan Nelson. To do that, I thought, was sheer political genius—to be able to cut through and deliver such a potent program. But when the government says, part way through the program, ‘The $150,000 over four years will not go to 2008 but is going to be knocked off in 2007’ and, ‘If you have not applied for and got the $150,000, although we said you could have it, your new ceiling is going to be $100,000,’ that is an own goal.

The second own goal was the member for Lindsay’s. She said: ‘I’ve got a school that needs three-phase power, Chester Hill Public School, and it won’t get it because it hasn’t yet applied for the major part of the program to supply it with three-phase power so it can run all of the school’s computers.’ That has nothing whatsoever to do with the state of the electricity system in New South Wales.

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