Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I think we can thank the member for Brisbane for the interjection of the day, possibly the interjection of the year! I say to the shadow minister for education that if he actually stopped talking for a second and started thinking he might want to consider that a program that has already delivered $116 million worth of computers to schools is a success. A program that in its second round has applications from all of 1,420 schools is a success. A program that will deliver $1.2 billion in new resources to bring computers and digital education tools to secondary schools around the country is a success.

I can understand why the shadow minister for education is asking questions like these: he knows that the former government left this nation with a legacy when it came to education that the Liberal Party should be ashamed of—falling backwards in international testing, less than 50 per cent of secondary students learning history, no national curriculum, employers and others complaining about the lack of quality in education and in grammar teaching and basic English language skills, no computers in schools program to make sure the children could learn with the learning tools of the 21st century, no trades training centres in school programs to lift retention rates and retention rates which are poor by the standards of the OECD and our competitors. Yes, we have inherited an education system full of flaws and bearing the consequence of more than a decade of neglect. We have systematically set about bringing an education revolution to that system, including our digital education revolution, which has been welcomed by schools around the country. If any Liberal member wants to contact my office and say that they want to tell their schools to send the computers back, I will be very interested in their names.

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