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

I move:

That this House:

(1) acknowledges the Government's failure to deliver on its promise to provide a computer for every secondary school student between years 9 to12 within the original budget commitment of $1 billion;

(2) condemns the Government for promising to families that they would not have to pay for charges associated with using the laptop computers, and then for breaking that promise by authorising schools to charge fees and levies to parents to use the laptops; and

(3) calls on the Government to explain to families why it has broken its promise and why parents should be the ones to pay up to hundreds of dollars to make up the funding shortfall associated with the program, at a time when cost of living pressures are increasing.

Let us look briefly at the history that has led to the unfortunate situation of parents now having to foot the bill for the computers in schools program. The computers in schools program was once the centrepiece of Labor's education policies, but now it is another in a long list of programs where so much was promised and so little delivered. When the then Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, and soon to be Prime Minister again, stood up at a press conference before the 2007 election, laptop in one hand and microphone in the other, and promised all Australian parents that he would provide a computer for their child, they took him at his word. Labor's original education promise was $1 million to give a computer to every student in Australia in years 9 to 12. That was approximately one million students and therefore each computer was to cost the taxpayer $1,000.

At budget time in 2008, that became a $1.2 billion program and the government started using weasel words like 'access to a computer' as if they would not be held to account to their promise of a computer on every desk. In its first year of operation under the stewardship of the former minister for education, Julia Gillard, now Prime Minister and soon not to be, computers were allocated to less than 10 per cent of public schools in Australia. Many schools that were promised computers in midyear 2008 had still not received a single computer when their students left for Christmas that year. Freedom of information applications in estimates hearings forced the government to reveal that the program was underfunded by $1 billion, because it had not occurred to the Prime Minister that giving someone a computer without software, networking or IT support is pointless.

Departmental figures released under FOI in 2008 demonstrated that in order to deliver on the election promise of one computer for every child in years 9 to 12, the whole program would cost more than $5 billion. This was based on figures showing that states were going to have to commit $3.27 for every federal dollar under the $1.2 billion program.

Minister Gillard then tried to pass these costs on to the states but the states refused to pay for her federal Labor mess. Then the New South Wales Labor government dropped a bomb. In an interview in October 2008 the New South Wales Premier, Nathan Rees, confirmed on The 7.30 Report that the government's computers in schools program was in freefall across Australia, confirming what the coalition had known all along. Responding to a question about why his government was unable to take part in the second round of the program, Mr Rees said:

Well, the most recent advice to me from some of the other jurisdictions is that they [ha d] serious reservation as well.

Shortly thereafter, New South Wales withdrew from the program altogether and others states threatened to follow suit.

The South Australian and ACT governments then said that they were going to use the funding for new computers to replace old computers rather than increase the numbers of computers in schools. The Western Australian government threatened to withdraw from the program. By late 2008 the computers in schools program was in freefall and to save it the then minister for education was forced to announce a further $807 million at a Council of Australian Governments meeting as a bandaid solution, bringing the cost to over $2 billion by the end of 2008. The government attempted to blame the global financial crisis for the budget going into deficit—when in doubt, in emergency, break glass and blame the global financial crisis! It is a change from blaming Work Choices; it the new 'in emergency, break glass and mention Work Choices'.

The reality is that cost blow-outs in programs like computers in schools are driving down the surplus. It is economic incompetence and bungling mismanagement that is leading Labor to only produce budget deficits. I cannot recall any government in history where a $1 billion budget blow-out was considered acceptable.

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