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

The member for Bradfield is an excellent member, and I see two excellent members sitting together in the House. The member for Bradfield raised the Wahroonga Public School, which had received a $22,660 quotation from a local fencing company to be spent at that school. But Spotless, the preferred state government tenderer, had also tendered for $40,122. There was a $17,000 difference, and of course Spotless was told that they would win the tender and the local tenderer was told that they had missed out. The minister would say, ‘What is $17,000?’ Seventeen thousand dollars is just a Versace suit to the minister. The $17,000 is a metaphor for exactly what is going on in the so-called Building the Education Revolution on the grand scale as well as on the micro scale. Why doesn’t the minister wish to act? Why is the minister hiding from the Auditor-General’s scrutiny of yet another one of her bungled, failed programs? Unfortunately, this is a minister who is long on rhetoric and short on delivery.

In terms of waste and management, Reed Construction Data, who are considered to be the industry bible on building costs, are absolutely shocked at the amount of money that is being spent on school halls. The Australian of last Saturday stated:

Reed’s chief estimator, Gary Thornley, said an average school hall should cost no more than $1000 per square metre to build.

A three-storey office block could be built for the price the government was spending on halls, he said.

And I agree with him. The article quotes him as saying:

I reckon $3m is a really big hit …

Even if we went beserk we’d never come up with that figure. Whoever has produced that figure has taken it out of their earlobe. It’s Versace stuff.

Unfortunately, the government has gone berserk and we do have a minister who has no control over what is going on at the grassroots level in her department. She has taken it out of her earlobe, and that is the problem. That is the answer from Mr Thornley. Most of these quotes are in the minister’s earlobe and she is pulling them out and throwing them on the ground for her bureaucrats to pick up. The bureaucrats are rushing them out into the public and the builders are saying: ‘This is a tremendous amount of money, but we’re hardly going to argue about it. Why wouldn’t we want to make a profit?’ The losers are the hardworking taxpayers of Australia.

But there are much worse examples. Take the Hastings Public School. The minister confused this school yesterday with the Hastings Primary School in Victoria—we have always been talking about the New South Wales one. The principal, to his great credit, because he would be fearing repercussions from probably the New South Wales Labor Party for speaking out, said he was shocked. He said:

It’s not my money. It’s not your money. It needs to be used properly.

He is quite right; it is taxpayers’ money. He also said:

I am intrigued as to how the figures have been arrived at and who gave them a figure of $400,000 for what is essentially a weather shelter.

Reflecting on our experience of six years ago—

and the minister has still failed to answer these questions after two days—

we built a COLA—

a covered outdoor learning area—

that is almost as big as the one we anticipate to build now, and it cost just over $40,000.

Even if there were another contribution that made the total cost $80,000, she entirely failed today in her answer to deal with the fact that today it is $400,000. He said:

Inflation hasn’t increased 10-fold in six years.

I’m expecting the Taj Mahal of COLAs.

And I imagine so is his local community. The article stated:

Mr Heaton said $2.6m for the new double classroom also seemed too high.

“I’ve got a friend in the building industry and his jaw dropped when I mentioned the figure to him,” he said.

“It’s a very large figure for two classrooms.

              …              …              …

“I want someone to show me why a weather shelter is going to cost $400,000.”

I think that is a reasonable question, but for some reason the minister refuses to answer it.

There are more examples. There is poorly targeted spending in the Prime Minister’s own electorate at the Holland Park State School, where they are required to have the same school facility rebuilt. Craig Mayne says about the Queensland state government bureaucrats:

It’s just numbers to them.

That about sums it up. It is all just numbers to them—numbers to get the money out the door as quickly as possible. Any justification or scrutiny of the decisions that have been made is not nearly as important as the fact that they can go on the news at night on Channel 7 or another channel and say they are spending $14.7 billion. I am sure the public think that $14.7 billion being spent on school infrastructure in some respects would be justified, but they would also want it to be spent sensibly. They would not want it to be spent in a wasteful and mismanaged way. Unfortunately, that is what this government is delivering.

The piece de resistance so far, and I am sure it will get worse, is that project managers in Queensland are being paid at least twice as much as the Prime Minister to manage these projects—$525,000 over six months. Members on the other side must be amazed that the minister is allowing them to get away with this. They are being paid $525,000 over six months to manage these projects. That is much more than the Prime Minister earns in a year. What did the minister do when she was asked about that today? She said, ‘We have a 1½ per cent administrative fee.’ She completely avoided the question that was asked. The facts on the ground are showing that half a million dollars is going to project managers in Queensland. What is she doing about it?

I could go on and on, and I am sure the minister would like me to. I could talk about the Cleve Area School, about how eight classrooms can turn into four in a three-month period, an inflation figure somewhere between Ethiopia’s and Zimbabwe’s, or the lunacy of air-conditioning not being allowed to be included in existing buildings, which the member for Kalgoorlie raised yesterday, but I will finish on the really pernicious issue that the minister today refused to address—that is, the Orwellian nature of the guidelines that stop any criticism of the government; the Orwellian nature of writing a guideline which strikes fear into the hearts of principals and the chairs of governing councils around Australia. They have given us a lot more information than we have been able to use, I assure the House. They do not want their names used, because they are frightened of Labor Party recrimination.

If the minister were genuine about wanting accountability and transparency, she would lift the veil of secrecy that exists over this program and hand it to the Auditor-General. Clear up the mess, Minister. Give it to the Auditor-General and save taxpayers’ dollars.

See this speech in context