George Christensen (Dawson, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

If there is one legacy this government will leave our school students it is a new definition for the word 'revolution'. Over the four years of the Rudd and Gillard Labor governments, we have come to learn that when the word 'revolution' is in the name of a program it is shorthand for bungled failure; it is shorthand for mismanagement and waste; it is shorthand for saying, 'We were in such a rush to put something together that we just grabbed a couple of words and stuck revolution on the end.' And here we find it again with the Digital Education Revolution, otherwise known as the computers in schools program.

It is a shame that the education revolution did not start with the Labor Party, because that is where basic mathematics is sadly deficient. Just about every aspect of their Digital Education Revolution promise in 2007 has been broken, and they are only a few months away from making it a complete set. The Australian people were promised a computer for every student in years 9 to 12. The Australian people were promised that the taxpayer cost for this program would be $1 billion. Australian parents were promised that there would be no additional fees or charges. They were promised that this program would be completed by the end of 2011. The clock is ticking. It has now been 3½ years in the making and there is only six months to go, and where are we up to? Last month the Prime Minister informed us that 413,000 computers had been delivered, out of the one million that were promised, achieving a student-to-computer ratio of around two to one, when one to one was promised.

They are not even halfway with their rollout and we are expected to believe that more than half a million computers will be delivered in the final six months of this program—that is, 600,000 computers in six months when it took 3½ years to roll out 400,000. No, there will not be a million computers by the end of this year and there will not be a one to one student-to-computer ratio. The sad truth is that thousands of students started secondary school after the promise was made by the government and they will leave before the promise is even halfway delivered in their school. There is a very good reason why they cannot finish the program: no-one in this government thought to add up the figures, no-one thought to think the policy through and no-one thought to even cost the delivery of a computer. Someone simply plucked the figure of $1,000 out of the air and thought, 'That'll do.'

It is the same methodology that is behind the digital television set-top box costing. Harvey Norman can deliver set-top boxes for half the amount, and they can deliver a computer for half the amount as well. The government simply have no excuse for going over budget, apart from the fact that they have no idea how to spend taxpayers' money wisely. Their answer is to simply keep throwing money around until something happens and then keep introducing taxes to keep the money supply coming. But Australian taxpayers are not an endless supply of money for the government to waste. Australian taxpayers are facing spiralling living costs precisely because of this attitude. Australian parents are struggling to pay for the essentials: electricity, water, food and school fees. The 2007 promise made when the Minister for Foreign Affairs was the Prime Minister guaranteed that parents would not have to foot the bill for this so-called Digital Education Revolution. Somewhere along the line, the policy changed. Somewhere along the line, a constituent in my electorate of Dawson was being told by the Proserpine State High School that they now had to pay a fee for their child to use a computer they got through this program.

Part of the reason behind that fee is mismanagement behind this program. Rather than deliver the student-to-computer ratio of one to one as promised, the government deducted one new computer for every existing desktop computer that the school already had on the books. They were deducting desktop PCs. I have to say that you cannot take home a desktop computer from school, and that was exactly what this scheme was promoting. Now the Proserpine State High School is delivering the one to one ratio to years 9 and 10 only, and that is a ratio of two to one for the whole school, while they are being forced to decommission out-of-date desktop computers.

This government stands condemned for breaking its promise to parents. On all aspects of this program, serious questions must be answered. Parents have the right to know why the cost has blown out to more than double. They have the right to ask why the delivery to date has been less than half. These parents know that they can purchase a brand new netbook with appropriate software for around $500. Somehow the government allocates $1,000 and then parents are asked to shell out hundreds of dollars more. Parents and students deserve better than that.

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