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

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by the Minister for Innovation, Industry, Science and Research (Senator Carr) and the Minister for Employment Participation (Senator Arbib) to questions without notice relating to the Building the Education Revolution program.

You would think that if a government was spending $14.3 billion on schools, the school communities would be happy. But they are not. In fact they are outraged. The people that really matter here—the parents, teachers and indeed even the education unions—say the Building the Education Revolution is fast unravelling. The government thought they could spend $14.3 billion and the next election would come to them. They thought that the stakeholders would be docile and no-one would care. The stakeholders do care. The kids, their parents, teachers and even the unions think this project is a waste of money. That is the problem.

I very, very rarely quote the Australian Education Union but today they called for a review:

The Australian Education Union today called for a transparent review of the implementation of the Building the Education Revolution (BER) program to examine issues that have arisen with the first rounds of implementation.

The AEU Federal President, Mr Gavrielatos, said the review should investigate, among other things, whether state and territory governments are maintaining their own effort in school maintenance and capital and the extent to which they are charging administration costs and if costs are being inflated.

“It is about ensuring that in the interests of our students and school communities, we realise the full potential of this significant investment in school infrastructure and the full economic stimulus benefit,” he said.

Even the union movement is not happy. Even they know this is not a good spend.

Who is happy? The federal government are happy because there are some photo opportunities. They are really happy. Mr Rudd and Ms Gillard put on the hard hats and the high-visibility vests and run around with bulldozers. The federal government is pretty happy because it makes for great photo opportunities. I understand that even state governments are pretty happy because they are creaming off the largesse. They are thinking, ‘Great. We will not have to look after state schools because the Commonwealth government is going to foot the bill.’ The only people happy here are the federal government and the state government. The kids, their parents, the teachers and even the education union think this whole project is a dog.

It is a strange thing. There were two principal aims of the Building the Education Revolution that the government put forward. Firstly, it was to create jobs. And yet they did not even ask how many jobs would be created by each individual project. That was not one of the conditions of attendance. Secondly, it was to enhance educational outcomes. But what have we learned over the last few days? We have learned that there is insufficient flexibility in the Building the Education Revolution. This is not about schools getting what they want; this is about state bureaucrats giving to schools what they think they should have. And do not believe me; believe Mr Harry Grossek, the principal of Berwick Lodge Primary School. On page 2 of the Australian today he says:

Our option was a gymnasium complex, I was told. It didn’t matter that we already had a perfectly suitable gymnasium.