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

So you have the delight of hearing from me for the next five minutes. I am delighted to be able to assist the Leader of the House and give him the information he so desperately needs to know about education. That is why you came early, I assume—so that you would be able to hear from me.

In the minister’s response to my questions about education, she neglected—I am sure inadvertently—to answer a number of the key questions I asked her. I will put them on the record again to give her the opportunity to take on notice and report back to the opposition at the appropriate time. For example, in answering the questions about the staff of the implementation task force, she answered by talking about the advisers who have been appointed as part of the deputy chairman’s panel for the chairman of the task force, Brad Orgill. The question I asked her was about the staff that he had appointed to assist him. We know the task force has appointed a media adviser, but we are actually asking if the minister is going to keep the promise she made on 12 April that Mr Orgill would appoint, as part of his staff—not as part of the advisory panel—investigators with a range of skills in building design, construction and safety, quantity surveying, architecture, financial auditing and law. How many forensic accountants and auditors have been appointed as part of Mr Orgill’s staff? It is not enough to have a media adviser. Obviously we expected the head of the implementation task force to take a suite of rooms in Canberra, appoint the best forensic auditors in the country and go through, contract by contract, the extraordinary rip-offs, waste and mismanagement that have been features of the minister’s signature tune, being the school hall rip-off program.

We also asked her not whether the chairman of the implementation task force would be able to access the contracts in each of the states other than New South Wales but whether she would provide those contracts to the opposition. In New South Wales the state government, as rancid as it is, provided the contracts to the New South Wales upper house so that the members could examine them themselves and work out whether the taxpayers had received value for money. We asked the minister whether she would provide the opposition with the same contracts from the other states, not whether she would provide them to the implementation task force. So I ask her that again.

The minister entirely avoided answering the question about how many schools had been fitted out with the 100 megabits per second broadband that the Prime Minister and she promised before the 2007 election would go hand in hand with the computers in schools program. We asked her which schools and how many had actually received that hook-up. I think the answer to that is probably none.

In answering a question about the Education Investment Fund, the Minister for Education talked about projects that were being funded by that fund—a fund that, of course, the previous government established. The question I asked the minister was whether the promise the government had made to put an extra $5 billion into the Education Investment Fund was going to be kept. She completely avoided answering that question and instead talked about the projects that were going to be funded. The question from the opposition was: will the government keep their promise to take the Education Investment Fund to $11 billion—which I note the Leader of the House trumpeted in question time on numerous occasions. I would make the point that what has in fact happened is that the Education Investment Fund has been raided for the pet projects of the Prime Minister and the minister, and not one extra dollar has been put in to reach that $11 billion. I also asked her about the trades training centres. She absolutely did not answer any questions about the trades training centres—(Time expired)

Proposed expenditure agreed to.

Infrastructure, Transport, Regional Development and Local Government Portfolio

Proposed expenditure, $829,038

See this speech in context