Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I did not, and I have made that very clear over a period of time. I do not care if you raise it here or elsewhere. My views on that matter are well known. The point I want to make is that minister would stand up in this place and give detailed chapter and verse answers to the opposition. Their problem was that it was all very accurate and arose from good decision making and good administration. You do not come to this place to make fancy speeches; you come to this place to run the country. And let me just say that when it comes to the responsibility of ministers, which is what this legislation is all about, it gets pretty interesting.

Any of us who pick up the Sunday papers, in this day and age of great interest in property, housing and the cost of housing, will find an insert, particularly at the weekend. I note that in my state it is labelled ‘Home’. If you open that up, you see it is a series of advertisements that tell you what you can buy a house for. Of course at the lower end of the market, and I cannot say whether this is with or without the $20,000 subsidy, but it becomes irrelevant, a couple of hundred square metres of house—brick and tile—in Western Australia is advertised for $170,000. If in fact that is the price after the subsidy, the original price could be $190,000. And what is in those houses? A series of bedrooms, a fully equipped kitchen and probably two bathrooms.

Yet evidence has been bought into this place of this government spending $800,000 on a single classroom. Minister Albanese got up, in the absence of the Minister for Education, and it is a matter of record in the Hansard, and quoted the education department of New South Wales as having costed out two classrooms with two accompanying storerooms at $350,000. And yet when I rang up the builder who missed out on the job, and he was from New South Wales, he said it would cost about $170,000. So where the figure for double that amount of money came from one does not know, but let us come back to the fact that when ministers rely overly on the decision making of public servants, and more particularly ones that live in another state and that are answerable to another government, that is the sort of thing that happens.

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