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

My honourable friend has not seen one in his electorate. Thirty-four have been delivered across the country. There is evidence that up to 10 schools in an area have to pool their resources to create a trade training centre, because principals know that a lathe in the corner of a classroom at the back of the school is not going to make the slightest difference to building skills and training and encouraging apprenticeships, vocational education and training in this country. So I think we can say with confidence that there will never be a time under the Rudd government when there is a trade training centre in every school across Australia. There will never be a time when there are 2,650 trade training centres in secondary schools, because it is out of the question that the money that has been allocated by the federal government would deliver a trade training centre in every school, and we are already seeing the need for principals to pool their resources.

Coincidentally, the kinds of resources that are being created eerily mirror the old Australian technical colleges that my venerable colleague the member for Goldstein, and before him the former member for Moreton, established under the Howard government. The Labor Party have essentially abolished them, and they refuse to visit them because they know how good they are and do not want to see the work they are destroying. They have trashed Australian technical colleges and decided to go with trade training centres which, because of the pooling of resources, bear an eerie similarity to Australian technical colleges. Isn’t that always the way with Labor? They are driven by ideology, bureaucracy and the union movement and kill things that work if they are free of regulation, involvement and control from the centre. That cannot be allowed to happen—we cannot have more freedom or the capacity for things to compete and grow! It has to be dominated by the union movement and the government, whether state or federal. It is one of the enduring embarrassments of Labor and can be traced right back to their very beginnings in the late 19th century.

In the package that has been announced there is a description of the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program as having received an outstanding response from schools across the country. The unreality of that statement struck me in its tendency towards Maoism. How absolutely ludicrous! It bears a similarity to Maoists’ descriptions of their own programs in the 1950s and 1960s, such as: ‘Consolidate and develop the grand achievements of the great proletarian cultural revolution,’ ‘Let’s go and save our money in the bank for the sake of building a happy life,’ and, ‘Warmly hail the successful happenings, warm care and great encouragement.’ These were the kinds of descriptions that Mao’s communist China used to put on its failed programs. In the package that was announced yesterday, trade training centres are described as having received an outstanding response from schools across the country. There are 34 out of 2,650 promised, hardly an outstanding response. Principals across the country are pooling their resources because of the paucity of the money that has been put forward for trade training centres. Federal President of the Australian Education Union Angelo Gavrielatos, no great friend of the coalition, described the centres as:

… a modest investment—

that—

… won’t offer a long-term solution to skills shortages.

That was post the election, after the coalition had been defeated with the AEU’s help. So how could trade training centres at the same time receive an outstanding response from schools? As I said, the suggestion has Maoist similarities in its air of unreality.

I now turn to the computers in schools program and its absolute failure. So far we have seen Trade Training Centres in Schools, essentially an unsuccessful program run by a part-time education minister who is more concerned with her future in the Labor Party than she is with delivering the policies that were announced by the then Rudd opposition. But the greatest criticism of the Labor Party’s pathetic performance in education can really be saved for computers in schools. The computers in schools program was going to cost about a billion dollars and apparently deliver a laptop computer to every child between year 9 and year 12 in schools across the country. We have now seen it blow out to at least $2 billion. It is now costing twice as much and delivering half the value. The promise now is that every second child will have access to a laptop computer—every second child at twice the cost! On any reading, computers in schools is a dramatic failure of public policy. It blew out from a billion dollars to $1.2 billion and then to $2 billion and is delivering half the value. When will the next blow-out occur? On that basis, the latest announcements in yesterday’s package will cost not $14.7 billion but more likely $29.4 billion and deliver half of what is promised. Maybe a school hall will be shared between every two schools.

This program has been a shambles from the start. And the Minister for Education, the part-time minister, bears absolute responsibility. In the first year, computers were allocated to less than 10 per cent of public schools in Australia, and many schools that were promised computers midyear had still not received them when their students left school for Christmas. Freedom of information applications and estimates hearings forced the government to reveal that the program was underfunded by several billion dollars, because it had not occurred to the minister that giving someone a computer without software, IT or ongoing maintenance or networking support was pointless. The minister tried to pass these costs on to the states and—surprisingly!—the states rebelled. The states revolted. And why wouldn’t they—because everybody knows that the uplift factor from $1 billion being spent on computers was dramatically more than the $1 billion outlay? The states simply did not have the money; they did not have the resources. Alan Carpenter, the then Western Australian Premier, said:

It’s a matter of how you implement it rather than having boxes of computers which nobody can afford to use in schools.

Independent Schools Queensland director of operations David Robertson said:

Where independent schools have additional maintenance costs they have limited choices—raising fees, stop doing something they are currently doing or appeal for parent fund raising …

Anne Gisborne, of the State School Teachers Union of Western Australia, said:

… if you’re going to be putting forward something positive and constructive, and it can’t operate, then it’s fairly useless.

I will repeat that: if you are going to be putting forward something positive and constructive and it can’t operate, then it is fairly useless. What better way to sum up all the announcements of the Labor Party in education over the last 18 months. They make a big announcement—trade training centres, computers in schools, money for numeracy and literacy—but, when the rubber hits the road in the delivery, the administration and the management of these programs, it is an abject failure. So why would the opposition tick off their latest big announcement, their latest hollow-man announcement of huge spending in the schools sector, when we have zero confidence in the capacity of the government to deliver this package on the ground in schools? We know full well that what will happen is that this will disappear into the ether, like the computers in schools program, like the trade training centres. The government will get a couple of good headlines, and the principals, the parents and the students will be left without any actual nourishment for the programs that have been announced. They will be delighted, initially. But the failure of administration, the failure of management and the failure to deliver will leave them hollowed out as individuals and schools, with the disappointment that that brings, because we know that the minister will be incapable of delivering this program.

Finally, there are huge holes in this program from the point of view of education. With its $41½ billion of taxpayers’ money to be run up on the credit card, not one dollar has been earmarked for the response to the Bradley review of higher education. With the money being blown in the way that it is—with the latest cash splash, of over $11 billion, following up on the December cash splash of $10 billion, sapping away at the resources of the taxpayers of Australia—where will the money come from for the response to the Bradley review? Where will the money come from for improvements to aged care, which is in desperate need in this country? Where will the money come from for waiting lists in hospitals—for infrastructure in hospitals? There are so many holes in this package. In education alone, I have identified a number.

The Labor Party, having pooh-poohed the Investing in Our Schools Program, is now seeking to bring it back! We support that. We believe in investing in our schools. We initiated that package. We wanted to keep that package. Labor abolished it. And now they are seeking to bring it back in this package. That is one area that we will look at in our response to this package that the leader, Malcolm Turnbull, will announce in the hours and days ahead.

So, more in sorrow than in anger, the opposition will oppose this package in the House of Representatives and the Senate.

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