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

I am sorry: Mr Deputy Speaker, in rising to speak on the Nation-building Funds Bill 2008, Nation-building Funds (Consequential Amendments) Bill 2008 and the COAG Reform Fund Bill 2008, I note that my contribution is particularly drawn towards the Higher Education Endowment Fund, which has been renamed and slightly restructured as the Education Investment Fund. The Education Investment Fund will have $8.7 billion, $2.5 billion from the 2007-08 surplus and the remainder from the Higher Education Endowment Fund. To put it another way, the Education Investment Fund will contain $2.5 billion from the surplus created by the remarkable economic legacy of the coalition government and more than $6 billion from a fund established for this purpose directly by the coalition government.

The Higher Education Endowment Fund was an excellent initiative of the coalition. In rebadging it, the government are conducting a cynical exercise in claiming credit for something that they did not do. They do not fool anyone. As the former Minister for Education, Science and Training, the member for Curtin, said in May last year when the fund was established, this investment will promote excellence, quality and specialisation in Australian universities for years to come, helping our institutions to become truly world class. It was an unprecedented investment in the future of the higher education sector.

In the same manner as the Future Fund, the Higher Education Endowment Fund was innovative and forward thinking. It was a demonstration of the fundamental importance that the coalition places on higher education. It could only have been achieved by a coalition government. It was the coalition that took the tough decisions necessary to pay off Labor’s $96 billion debt. Labor, addicted to deficit, as we saw again today and yesterday, voted against every one of those very tough decisions but now seeks to claim the credit for the fruits of that hard work.

Despite promises at budget time of increasing the size of this fund to $11 billion, that figure relied on future surpluses. No doubt the government is hoping that people will have forgotten that headline by the time next year’s budget comes around and the government slips into deficit and debt. The fact is that it seems that the Rudd government will not have sufficient fiscal surpluses to contribute any significant extra dollars to these funds in 2009 and 2010.

Turning to the sorts of projects that this fund will support, I note that moneys from the funds will not pay for any ongoing running, maintenance or staff costs. According to the explanatory memorandum, where specific projects have an ongoing cost component it is intended that such funding would be sourced through other means. This could include direct funding from the bank, outside the Building Australia Fund, or funding by the states or territories in relation to proposals that are brought forward as part of the COAG reform agenda.

Given that capital costs are being split from ongoing maintenance costs, I am concerned that this could lead to instances where the whole-of-life costs of an asset are not appropriately considered when these funds are being invested, and this is an issue on which this government has form. This is, after all, the government that delivered—or failed to deliver—the computers in schools program, the rotten core at the centre of the failed education revolution. The lack of a whole-of-life assessment of the cost of this project has meant that additional capital and recurrent costs of two to three times the initial cost were not factored into the rollout of the program.

The Rudd government’s claim that the infrastructure program will be subject to rigorous cost-benefit analysis is not reassuring. For example, the computers in schools program is typical of the government’s approach to date—a proposal that was not subject to any serious analysis, resulting in a delivery failure. The computers in schools program has been a monumental embarrassment for the Rudd-Swan government. As recently as yesterday new details emerged as a further indictment of the mismanagement of the program. Freedom of information documents have revealed that, while $51 million of federal funding is expected to be given to the Western Australian state government for computers in schools, the program will cost the state an additional $167 million. This works out to a ratio of $3.27 of costs to the states and to the schools for every federal dollar spent. We are talking here, Mr Acting Speaker, about—

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