Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Not Julia Gillard, not the Minister for Education. Now the parents at Lilydale High School have been told that they will have to pay an annual levy of between $150 and $300 a year. This is about to be repeated in numbers of high schools across Australia if they want to make the computers work. If they are prepared to leave the computers sitting in boxes, gathering dust and not making use of them, perhaps they will not have to charge a levy, but high schools as a result of combined federal and state Labor incompetence—as a result of one year of talk and no action—are having to charge parents to implement this Rudd Labor government policy. This has been happening all year; it has been obvious to anyone wanting to see.

I do not know what happens at these COAG meetings. Perhaps somebody has the secret remote control that they pointed at the Treasurer last week when they hit ‘mute’ and for 80 seconds he sat there unable to speak. Perhaps that is what happens every time computers in schools are mentioned at COAG; perhaps there is just silence. But now this new Rudd tax will be imposed on the parents of Lilydale High School students and other high school students across Victoria and Australia.

It was with great fanfare that the policy was announced at the last federal election—a computer on every desk—but I tell you what was not in the policy. What was not in the policy was that every parent would have to pay a fee or a tax to actually make the computers work. The other thing parents across Australia, particularly at primary schools, have realised is that the Investing in Our Schools Program has been abolished. The Investing in Our Schools Program, which enabled schools to pick the projects they wanted, has been abolished.

See this speech in context