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

I agree with a lot of what the member for Lalor has just said. I think we all want to empower teachers, have better teacher quality, have teachers actually engaging with students rather than just running off lesson plans, and ensuring that young children who come from lower socioeconomic backgrounds are raised up in prosperity. They are all things that everyone in this House can agree with. The issue is one of how we get there. Unfortunately, the knee-jerk reaction from the Labor Party is always just to throw more money at it—and a lot more money at it. What they do not do is budget where the money is coming from. We have heard that it is going to come from $40-a-packet cigarettes, but I do not know that that is ever going to go down with the electorate, and that we are somehow going to reap a whole heap of money from companies like Google and Apple, even though there is absolutely no plan as to how we are going to get that funding. So it is pie-in-the-sky stuff that is going to be unfunded and is going to require us going further and further into debt.

If you want to see a great example of how the Labor Party last threw money at the education sector, without any significant outcome in terms of learning, have a look at the Building the Education Revolution plan. It was basically about schools having money thrown at them to build school halls and tuckshops, which in some cases they did not need, at the expense of other things they did need. It turned out that these were very high-cost projects which were a massive waste of public money, and that was found out through reports by the Auditor-General and numerous reports about the epic fail of the program.

I went to one school in my electorate, where I was shown by the principal the new BER stage they had gotten built, and then they showed me a building right beside it, which was about three times as big as the BER one. The difference was that they had built it themselves with their own raised money, but, as soon as the BER government one came along, the one that they built through the BER was actually double the cost of the one that they had funded themselves. It just showed how throwing money at a problem does not fix it; in fact, it created more problems because the cost of the construction of those buildings went up. I can go through the figures in Queensland. Labor's own task force found that, in Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria, state schools overpaid for buildings by more than 25 per cent on average compared to Catholic schools.

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