Mark Butler (Port Adelaide, Australian Labor Party, Parliamentary Secretary for Health) Share this | Hansard source

After that contribution by the member for Sturt, the convenor of the left faction of the Liberal Party in South Australia, who is spending a lot of time in his area doing factional gains, it is good to see in the lead-up to the Leader of the Opposition’s speech a listing school by school of the schools around Australia to lose their BER funding under his budget reply. We look forward to that. We look forward to the member for Bradfield and others going out to their schools and telling them that the Leader of the Opposition has stated in his budget reply that schools in their electorate will lose the BER funding which has often been, certainly in my electorate, the first time there has been significant capital funding to these schools for many, many years and in some cases decades.

We on this side welcome the opportunity to have a little talk about the cost to the nation of waste and mismanagement in government programs. You could not think of a better phrase to describe the economic legacy of the Howard-Costello government—a government for which the member for Casey was a prime adviser.

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