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

I was reading last week that one of my colleagues said that the Building the Education Revolution had become a cheap political stunt. I think that he is wrong. This is a very expensive political stunt; this is a $15 billion fiasco. And every day, it seems, a new horror emerges. Can you imagine spending $15 billion and yet have all the important and relevant stakeholders—the parents, the teachers, the principals, the school communities, as well as the education union—thinking that this money has been poorly spent? Can you imagine spending 15 thousand million dollars and have the stakeholders thinking that it has been poorly spent? You would have to try hard, wouldn’t you? But that is what people are saying. So this has become a very expensive political stunt.

Why? We now know, after several months of this, is that these notorious templates being peddled around by state governments are all about giving to schools what state governments think they should have, and not giving school communities the control that they need and want. The Labor Party, particularly the Left in the Labor Party, quite like these templates and this whiff of central planning.