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

Chickenfeed. One-and-a-half billion dollars: a mere bagatelle; a bump in the road! Who cares? If you are spending $300 billion, it doesn’t matter, does it?

And guess where $200 million of that money came from? It came from the budget for science and language centres for 141 of the neediest high schools in this country. The money was taken from them and given back to Building the Education Revolution, because the government’s own projections were wrong. The money has gone from really needy students to students who do not need it as much and has not been spent on education outcomes but for—apparently—creating jobs. This has become a fiasco, and it is getting worse and worse.

Now we know that, despite this farce, this litany of inactivity and the failings of the education revolution, the government believes that in the end it is okay to break the law and spend taxpayers’ money on large billboards for blatant electioneering, that it is actually okay to break the law and promote yourself and it does not matter so much that this program has been shown to be inflexible, that there has been overcharging in the tender process, that schools are not getting what they want and that it is spending $15 billion and all of the stakeholders think this is a farce and the money could be better spent. The government is not worried about all those problems. You know what it is worried about, don’t you? The billboards in the school grounds that are going to be polling places at the next election. That is what the government is worried about. That is its concern. It is not going to address all the other issues. No, the government will break the law and address that issue. That is what has become of the Building the Education Revolution.

This is one of the largest infrastructure projects in this country’s history of this sort ever, yet you have got stakeholders saying the money is poorly spent. I have never seen that before in Australian history. The government likes to use the acronym BER for Building the Education Revolution. I notice that in recent times schools have been saying that they do not call BER the Building the Education Revolution; they think BER stands for the Bloody Evil Revolution. I think that after last week BER stands for Bloody Expensive Revolution.