Gary Humphries (ACT, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to address a number of things that have been raised in this debate. I will start with the point raised by Senator Marshall at the end. He talked about how robust this system of funding building projects in schools might be and how flexible the bureaucrats are in facing difficulties or problems that the schools might have in accepting certain template projects. I certainly did hear those assurances being given by the department, but I have also read the words of Henry Grossek, the principal of the Berwick Lodge Primary School in Melbourne, who encountered in a practical sense what was going on with a particular project which his school wanted. He wanted to have certain projects that the department did not want him to have. He said in a letter to the Australian that ‘schools are being harassed into signing off on templates they did not want’. He went on to say that state bureaucrats are ‘being complicit in the siphoning off of vast sums from government schools, particularly given that they accepted templates with only the flimsiest of building details and a total absence of costing valuations’.

Yes, projects might eventually have been sorted out in the case of that school, but, unless principals take steps like that, are other schools going to get those sorts of outcomes? I have my doubts. Why should they be forced in the first place to accept templates that do not suit their needs? One of the things I want to come back to in this debate is the question of whether it should be the schools initiating these projects or whether it should be the bureaucrats and the government sitting here in splendid isolation in this city.

No-one would question real investment in education. No-one would want to attack a program that does actually improve the quality of classroom teaching in this country. In other circumstances you would have to say that the investment of $14.7 billion in schools would be very good news indeed. But the longer and harder one looks at this spectacularly large project, the more one begins to wonder exactly what is going on. The more one sees the options for sustained improvement in classrooms being passed by in the pursuit of flimsy headlines, the more one realises that this whole program is one of missed opportunities, rushed decisions, flawed process and the bypassing and disempowering of local communities who have a better idea than other people of what they can achieve in their own schools.

Labor are very good at spending money; what they are not so good at is spending it well. That is the point which has been raised with this matter of public importance today. It is not about the magnitude of this investment in education. Nobody begrudges putting a lot of money into education. The former government did that; this government appears to be doing it. Nobody has an issue with investing heavily in education. But we owe it to a community like ours, particularly when our economy is at such risk, to spend every dollar of government revenue in this context in the best possible way and to waste none of it. Endlessly talking about how these programs are meant to work and the size of the investment does not cover up the key question here, which is: how well targeted or planned is this investment?

It needs to be said that good schools are not defined by the quality of their bricks and mortar. You do not get a good school merely because it is new and has lots of new facilities and infrastructure. Nor are old schools or even rundown schools necessarily bad schools. The quality of infrastructure in schools is one element. It is part of the answer to producing better quality educational outcomes, but it is not, I emphasise, the whole answer. A good illustration of this is the way the government has approached the question of distance education. Initially, schools that catered for the provision of distance education in Australia were not to be eligible for Building the Education Revolution funding. They were completely off the radar. It was only when this issue was raised in the Senate estimates committee a couple of weeks ago that the government indicated it would be revising this position and coming back to look at whether we could in fact put money into schools which have no infrastructure but whose quality of outcomes is very important to the students who happen to be enrolled in those sorts of educational opportunities.

This goes to an important point about the government’s program: it is built around deciding in advance what schools need. Contrast that with what the previous government put forward, the Investing in Our Schools Program, which was a community driven exercise. We did not say to people, ‘You’ll have a library, you’ll have an all-purpose hall, you’ll have X number of computers.’ We said to them, ‘What do you want? What’ll make your school a better school? What does your community want to see happening in that school?’ People put their hands up in droves and they got the outcomes they wanted. They got the money they were after, they got processes they could drive in their own local communities and they were happy with those outcomes. I am afraid that what we are going to see with the so-called Building the Education Revolution program is precisely the opposite. We will see people being pushed like square pegs into round holes.

I also want to address the question raised by Senator Marshall about the previous government’s performance on education. It is raised constantly by those opposite and it is completely untrue. When we came to government, the federal government was funding government schools across Australia to the tune of $1.4 billion a year. When we left office nearly 12 years later, we were funding government schools to the tune of $3.5 billion a year. That represents an increase in real terms of 77 per cent across those 12 or so years. It is a complete untruth to suggest that the previous government neglected to fund education or in some way ran it down. I am proud of our achievements in education. I am proud in particular of the processes we used. As far as Investing in Our Schools was concerned, we did not want to have a program that was driven by state government bureaucrats because, frankly, they are the ones who have allowed current investment in schools to decline—a decline which had to be addressed by the federal coalition government with its increased recurrent funding for government education across the states.

So raw numbers do not make an education revolution. Simply throwing billions of dollars into a name, a slogan, does not add up to a change in outlook for Australian schools and Australian students. Even if $1 of every $5 in this program is misdirected or wasted, that represents a waste to the taxpayer of $3 billion. How much better could we spend $3 billion in the current environment? (Time expired)