Christopher Pyne (Sturt, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Certainly, absolutely. Thank you for your guidance. We are talking about $1.2 billion of federal investment in relation to this program. If this ratio is the same in all states and territories—a not unreasonable assumption—then this means that the government’s election promise is going to cost the states and territories $3.9 billion to implement. Is it any wonder that the Western Australian Minister for Education, Dr Liz Constable, is today quoted in the West Australian as saying:

… it is patently absurd that Mr Rudd can make an election promise that the States have to meet.

The Western Australian government is not the only government that has expressed its dismay at the Deputy Prime Minister’s handling of this program. Even the government’s Labor friends across the country have been lining up to take a shot. Today, in fact, the Premier of Western Australia, Mr Colin Barnett, indicated in the clearest possible terms that Western Australia is considering withdrawing entirely from the computers in schools program because, as he says, there is absolutely no reason why the state governments should fund the promises made by the Rudd government when they were in opposition.

The New South Wales government has pulled out of the program. The New South Wales Minister for Education and Training, Verity Firth, likened the program to offering to buy someone a suit but then asking them to buy the jacket themselves. In South Australia the Minister for Education, Jane Lomax-Smith, admitted in estimates that she was exchanging old computers for new to avoid these massive new costs. Exchanging old computers for new is not reducing the computer-student ratio; it is just providing states with replacement computers. That can only be described as an abject failure of the policy.

The ACT government is not only exchanging old computers for new—it claims that the costs of the program are even steeper than has been revealed in Western Australia, with four territory government dollars to every one federal government dollar spent. In Victoria we have seen some public school parents being slugged with increased fees if they wish their children to have access to computers. Lilydale public school featured the details of the plan on their website, which was hastily pulled down after it was exposed in the media.

I am not sure whether the Labor Party policy before the last election came clean with the Australian people that parents were going to be asked to provide the funds for the services and infrastructure of the computers in schools program. I think the election result might have been quite different if some of the things we are now discovering about the Rudd government had been known before the election—not only their profligate economic management, which is leading the government into debt, deficit and ruin, but their management of computers in schools. I think if parents had known that they would be asked to pay for the costs of services and infrastructure there might have been quite a different response.

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