Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research) Share this | Hansard source

Senator Mason, I thank you for the question but I must inform the Senate that I am not aware of the article. Nonetheless, I can inform the Senate of the great strengths of this government in terms of its capacity to provide additional resources for Australian working families and for Australian students to ensure that there is a genuine level of equality of opportunity in this country—which, of course, the previous government failed to provide.

What Senator Mason refers to is the National Secondary School Computer Fund. He drew our attention to what he perceives to be the inadequacies of that fund. The truth of the matter is that the Australian government is investing $1.2 billion over five years in a digital education revolution which is aimed to improve access to world-class information for Australian secondary students. One part of this investment is $1.1 billion for the National Secondary School Computer Fund.

Round 1 of the fund paid $116 million to 896 secondary schools across Australia. That is 116,820 computers that we have provided through this fund. That means that the ratio of computers for these schools has moved from one to eight to one to two. This is a very, very significant improvement. Some 9,293 computers have been delivered to 85 schools across Australia. This stands in sharp contrast to the position of the previous government, the previous regime, where the computer to student ratio was one to five. It was much, much worse than that in many schools. The Rudd Labor government are delivering on our long-term plans to implement a digital education revolution.