Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to start by thanking the member for Sturt for giving me the opportunity to speak about one of the greatest government programs in this country for many decades. He chuckles away there across the chamber. I know he thinks that it is all quite funny. The reality is that putting this on the Notice Paper is just a stunt. I listened very carefully to some of the contributions of others to see whether they were putting forward any real points. They want search warrants and the like, and they have all sorts of ideas, as if there is some grand conspiracy out there—an ‘X file’. It is a simple program for the good delivery of infrastructure for a heap of schools across this country. If those opposite actually were interested in this program, they would look at all the positives of this program rather than the tiny percentage of cases where there have been some problems and some mistakes. It is not as if we have not admitted that there have been problems. It is not as if we are trying to hide them. In fact we have made it completely open and we could not be more open about where the problems exist. Where the problems exist, we have said, ‘We’re interested not only in the good work this program can do but also in making sure that it is efficient and it is value for money.’ We are of that view.

In these large programs you are going to find some problems and some issues. Not everything is going to be 100 per cent. But we are going to make sure that we do it effectively and properly and, as such, we already have in place an independent task force—the Building the Education Revolution Implementation Taskforce, headed by Brad Orgill. That task force has responsibility to review implementation of the Building the Education Revolution, including investigating complaints, assessing value for money arrangements in place between the Commonwealth and the states and territories, assessing value for money aspects for individual projects—every single one of them—and making recommendations to improve the BER. The task force has already delivered an interim report. It has made 14 recommendations, all of which this government are happy to accept.

Not only is the BER a great program; it is doing great things in this country. We are prepared to say that where we find problems we will go out and fix them. There will be issues in a program of this magnitude—that is life—but the thing is you have to have enough courage to implement the program in the first place. We have some new members in the House, and I apologise for not knowing the seat of the member opposite.

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