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

It got dropped off, as the member for Casey says. It was dropped right off the edge of the cliff. Two hundred and twenty-two childcare centres were to be built—apparently in 2007 there was a desperate need, but in 2010 apparently there is no demand at all for new childcare centres. And she has presided over changes to the budget which make child care less affordable for average families by capping the childcare rebate at $7,500.

But perhaps the worst example in this litany of failure is the school hall rip-off program. It was not long ago that the Minister for Education was scoffing at the concerns of parents, of parents and friends organisations, of principals, of state governments, of the opposition, of Ray Hadley on 2GB, of the Today Show, of the Australian. The Minister for Education mocked the Australian and said they were fabricating examples of waste and mismanagement in the school hall rip-off program. Who is red-faced now? The member for Port Adelaide could not possibly be planning to defend the school hall rip-off program. The minister dismissed these as isolated concerns. She mocked the parents of the Hastings Public School, who in 2003 built a covered outdoor learning area for $78,000; in June last year the covered outdoor learning area was to cost $400,000, and by the end of the year, six months later, it was costing $954,000. The Minister for Education scoffed at that concern and mocked the parents of Hastings Public School. In this place she misled the parliament by saying that we had got the Berridale Public School example wrong, when we compared their toilet block with the BER project. She said the toilet block was 36 square metres. In fact, of course, the toilet block at Berridale is 118 square metres. But do you think the Minister for Education has come back into the House and apologised? No. She is not returning; she is never wrong. The Minister for Education is never wrong. We were given that information by the parents at Berridale, when Tony Abbott and I visited them one morning at their school.

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