Eric Abetz (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I hear an interjection ‘out of plantations’—out of those plantations that she opposes.

Can I also say that it is now quite apparent that this is a very ham-fisted approach by this government to the issues. It is typical of Labor; it is the one-size-fits-all, Canberra-knows-best approach. So if you have just built a house and installed insulation in the roof but you are saving your pennies for window treatments, bad luck, you miss out. Whereas, if a family say, ‘We prefer our privacy so we will go for curtains and drapes now and whenever we can save our money we will install the insulation,’ they will be subsidised by the taxpayer. That is the ham-fisted approach that Canberra knows best—that everybody will have insulation whether they like it or not or need it or not, and somehow we are going to have a Pink Batt revolution in this country.

It is the same with boom gates—they are somehow going to be the economic saviour. It is the same with the so-called revolution in our schools. We have got a situation where every school will have to have a particular type of building. What happens to a school that does have a science laboratory, a general hall and a gymnasium but does not have a music room? Bad luck. It does not fit the Canberra one-size-fits-all approach. Surely the schools should have been given the opportunity to determine their own needs—to allow the school community to determine what the need is—and then have that fulfilled. But no, it is the Kevin Rudd approach: I know everything best.

And it is this ‘I know everything best’ approach that brings me back to the issue, which of course is that there is a mistake in the UEFO of $97 million. Senator Sherry and Labor just simply cannot come to the point of saying, ‘Yes, we do make mistakes.’ They just cannot bring themselves to do it. It is an error, and what is the shame in acknowledging that you have made an error, unless you have rushed it and you do not want to be exposed as having rushed it?

We now know, Minister, that this booklet in fact went to the printers at six o’clock on the Monday morning. I would like to ask you, Minister, when cabinet signed off on the package. I also want to know this: who or which minister or which ministerial office proof-read this document before it went to the printer and at what time was that work finished? I have just got a hunch here that most people would not be getting up at five o’clock in the morning to be in the office by 5.30 am to make sure that they could email or electronically pass on a document to a printer at six o’clock in the morning. You would think that that would normally happen at about the nine o’clock mark or even possibly eight o’clock. There was an—