Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

You might remember that in November last year one of the defining points of the election campaign was the then Leader of the Opposition, Mr Rudd, at a school surrounded by an adoring throng—not the media on this occasion but school students—holding a laptop computer. He said of the laptop computer, ‘This is the toolbox of the 21st century.’ It was great optics and very good politics but also, of course, great spin. The education revolution became one of the centrepieces of the campaign, in particular the computers in schools program—the promise that every high school student would get their own computer.

Nine months later, however, we have all been expecting the good news but it seems perhaps there is a false pregnancy. After two rounds of estimates, several COAG meetings and increasing media scrutiny, we now know that the education revolution is a sham. This is symptomatic of the general approach of the Rudd government: clever rhetoric, I will give them that—often great rhetoric—attractive promises and lots of spin. But then the reality hits. It sounded like a good idea at the time, but they have not gone through with it. They have not done the costings, they do not know how they are going to implement it and it ends up being a shambles.

Let us just go back and look at the computers in schools program. There are roughly one million year 9 to 12 students in Australia studying at both public and private schools. The promise, on kevin07.com.au, was that there would be one computer for every student—in other words, roughly one million laptop computers provided. That was in November last year.

When we got to estimates this year, the promise then was not one computer for every student; it was that there will be access—the government will provide a computer so that all students can access a computer. So we have gone from one computer for each student to each student having access to a laptop computer. Then we get to June—to budget estimates.