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

I rise to speak on the Rudd government’s third budget, Appropriation Bill (No. 1) 2010-2011 and related bills. As the shadow minister for education, apprenticeships and training, I want to particularly talk about education. There is no doubt that this budget has been a great disappointment in the area of education for people across Australia—teachers, parents, principals, people in higher education, people in trades and apprenticeships—who had hoped to see a budget with some vision on education. But unfortunately this budget was almost silent on the issue of education. There was virtually no mention at all of higher education in the budget. The only times that it was mentioned in the budget was in an announcement of a further delay or further blow-out in programs that had been announced previously.

In this government and in this minister for education, we have seen masters of the disappearing program. The first promise that the government made before the last election was that they would deliver 2,650 trade training centres, one to every secondary college across Australia. It will never happen. So far they have managed to deliver 12. Only 12 out of 2,650 trade training centres are operational in Australia. The program has been delayed, the program has blown out in cost and they are now saying that they will deliver one in 10 trade training centres. So they will deliver—maybe—265 trade training centres rather than the 2,650 that they promised. That is just one of their programs.

We have the now infamous computers in schools program. Everybody would remember the then opposition leader with Julia Gillard, the then shadow minister for education, waving a laptop around before the last federal election and declaring it to be the toolbox of the 21st century. He cannot have just a normal-sounding program. This was 970,000 laptop computers to be placed in the hands of every student from year 9 to year 12. They have so far delivered 220,000 out of 970,00 and the program will now be delivered over seven years, longer than it took to complete the Second World War, and at great expense. That is another blow-out of at least $1 billion that we can absolutely verify—another failure by the master of the disappearing program.

It gets worse. Under the Primary Schools for the 21st Century program—which has also been described as the school hall rip-off program and the Julia Gillard memorial school hall program—we know from hearings last week of the Senate inquiry into the waste and mismanagement of the Building the Education Revolution that there has been at least $5 billion wasted or siphoned off or gouged or mismanaged under this $16.2 billion program. That is on top of the $1.7 billion blow-out that the government already admitted to earlier this year. That is a $1.7 blow-out, a $1 billion blow-out in computers in schools and a $5 billion blow-out in the school hall rip-off program, making this minister the $7.7 billion blow-out woman. I know that the Parliamentary Secretary for Disabilities and Children’s Services, Mr Shorten, finds this all very amusing, because of course he has no love at all for the Minister for Education and in fact would probably prefer to take her job rather than have the one he has now.

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