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

I present members of the House with a test. I ask them to tell me what the following people have in common: the Auditor-General; the Australian Education Union; the Australian Secondary Principals Association; the Australian Council of State School Organisations; the Australian Primary Principals Association; the Victorian Principals Association; the New South Wales Teachers Federation; the Federation of Parents and Citizens Associations of New South Wales; the New South Wales Secondary Principals Council; Infrastructure Australia board member Peter Newman; Reed Construction Data, an industry expert on building costs; Henry Grossek, the Principal of Berwick Lodge Primary School in the electorate of the member for La Trobe; Stuart Daly, the Principal of the Oatlands Primary School in Melbourne; the Head of Curtin University School of Education, Jenny Nicol; the President of the New South Wales Aboriginal Education Consultative Group, Cindy Berwick; Institute of Public Affairs research fellow and author Julie Novak; the South Australian Primary Principals Association; Education Strategies director and author Kevin Donnelly; and the opposition. What is it that the House thinks we all have in common? It is a very unusual group of people to be aligned together. I will tell you. What we have in common is a chorus of discontent about the government’s free-falling, failed education revolution.

That chorus of discontent is rising to a roar, but this minister cannot hear it. This minister cannot hear the roar that everyone else in the parliament, both Labor and Liberal, can hear. Labor MPs are getting the same information in their electorate offices about the failure of the education revolution, but this minister cannot hear the chorus of discontent that is rising to a roar in the electorate. She sees no evil about her programs, she hears no evil, she speaks no evil, and she will have no evil spoken about Building the Education Revolution. I have in my hand a full folder of BER bungles that surround the schools stimulus debacle. Almost all of them of course have come through the educationforaustralia.com.au website that we have established. Why? Because the government has gagged the principals and chairmen of governing councils who would like to speak out and cannot do so. Like Marie Antoinette in the French Revolution, this minister says: ‘Let them eat cake. I don’t see their problems.’ So it was no surprise to me that Ross Fitzgerald, in a column in the Australian on Monday, wrote:

Nor does it surprise that the Auditor-General has announced he will be conducting a full investigation into this spending, a humiliation for the Minister only three months into the delivery of her program. If it were anyone else on the Treasury benches in charge of this debacle, their career trajectory would be in serious freefall.

‘If it were anyone else on the Treasury benches’—but not this minister, not this protected species. Joel Fitzgibbon, the former Minister for Defence, must wonder what he needed to do to survive the crisis that engulfed him. As Ross Fitzgerald said of the Minister for Education, she is all style and very little substance—not everyone would agree with that, of course. He said she is long on rhetoric but short on delivery, all foam but no beer. Minister, isn’t that the reality of your handling of the education portfolio in the last two years?

We can legitimately ask: why is the Auditor-General inquiring into the Building the Education Revolution primary schools component? He first conducted a preliminary investigation where he went to the department and asked them a series of questions. He was obviously dissatisfied with the response that he received, so he has launched a full audit under section 15 of the Auditor-General Act 1997. This must be one of the most humiliating debacles for a minister in the government in the last 22 months. The Auditor-General is conducting a full investigation, a full audit, into the Deputy Prime Minister’s handling of Building the Education Revolution, which is supposedly the centrepiece of what this government stands for.

This government was supposed to be the education government. The Prime Minister stood up during the election campaign and waved laptops about and visited TAFE colleges and promised to end Australian technical colleges and establish training centres. This was to be the education government. How embarrassing it is, how humiliating it is, that they have been reduced to a full audit by the Auditor-General of Australia into their handling of the education revolution. The Auditor-General will find a litany of complaints, a litany of failures. I have a few of them here. I will of course hand over to the Auditor-General every bit of information that I have, and I would urge all my colleagues—particularly my Liberal Party and National Party colleagues, who are well aware of the problem—to do the same. The Auditor-General will find a litany of failure, a litany of waste, mismanagement and an incapacity to deliver value for money to taxpayers.

Taxpayers of course welcome spending on school infrastructure. Who would not think that spending on school infrastructure was a positive step forward? Who would not think that our schools should have the best possible infrastructure, if not the best possible teachers and the best possible IT? Of course they should. But taxpayers expect—and we in the opposition expect—that the government will at least try to deliver value for money for taxpayers’ dollars. It is not the government’s money. It is the Australian taxpayers’ money. It is the hard-earned income of the Australian taxpayers, which they hand over to the government and expect it to manage wisely. They would be sorely tested by this government’s performance in education.

The Auditor-General will find skimming by state governments. He will find that the South Australian government cut their school infrastructure budget by 12 per cent this year, as though the state government had achieved all the objectives they needed to in infrastructure. This year, for the first time in many, many, many years in South Australia, the infrastructure budget for schools was cut, by 12 per cent, a very substantial cut. What they have done of course is remove their spending and let the federal taxpayers substitute effort. The federal government said that they would not tolerate the substitution of effort. The opposite has occurred.

The Auditor-General will find profiteering by business. Most of my colleagues would be able to give and have given examples of overinflated contract arrangements, of people increasing what they would usually have charged because they know that the bureaucracy is so desperate to push money out the door. The chief estimator of Reed Construction Data, which is one of the firms at the forefront of building in schools, has been quoted in the media:

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. “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.”

We hope that the minister has not taken it out of her earlobe, but clearly someone in the departments right across Australia is allowing business to get away with profiteering out of the Australian taxpayers’ money.

The Auditor-General will find that the Queensland state government is paying consultants up to $525,000 for six months of work to manage their projects—to manage, apparently, five to 10 schools. It is an exorbitant amount of money that the Queensland state government is flushing out into the system. Of course, the consultants are deeply into the trough. They have got their snouts deep in the trough. They are getting right into the trough and lolling about in taxpayers’ very satisfying and relaxing money.

The Auditor-General will also find, as was revealed by the Australian on Saturday, examples like X-site, a small business, a small building firm, trying to garner some of the money from the Building the Education Revolution program and get some jobs. The head of X-site, Mr Lester, was quoted in relation to trying to fulfil the bewildering array of conditions that the government has applied to this:

“It’s tough, and it’s expensive,” Mr Lester said.

“You basically have to employ somebody to tell you that you’re abiding by the standard.

“That means you’ve got to get a consultant, which is going to cost us about $10,000, to dot the Is and cross the Ts.

“It will cost several thousand more to get certified. But you have to do it, otherwise you miss the boat, and it’s expensive because you have to pay somebody just to tell you that you’ve met the standard.”

Of course, for the Labor Party $10,000 is a mere bagatelle, $10,000 is nothing. But, for small businesses and small building firms, $10,000 is a very substantial amount of money and it is straight out of their bottom line, straight out of their profits, straight out of their capacity to employ people, to employ other Australians.

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