Richard Colbeck (Tasmania, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Agriculture, Fisheries and Forestry) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to make a contribution to this motion on the Rudd government’s complete failure to implement what it termed with great fanfare during the election as the ‘education revolution’. I recall saying to some people at the time that revolutions are usually accompanied by chaos and all sorts of mismanagement, and we have seen it again—complete and utter chaos in the management of this program, really demonstrating this government’s complete lack of capacity to run programs. In my view, this program has the capacity to be a bigger problem for the government than its scandalous pink batts program. Once this program is properly scrutinised—and we know the government is trying to batten down the hatches, get everyone to stay quiet and hold off on releasing all the information that it possibly can for as long as it possibly can—and once all this starts to come out, I think you will see that this is going to be a bigger problem for the government than was the pink batts program.

Senator Bernardi has already put some of the information on the table as to concerns that have been raised with him. A real sign of the significance of the problem is that the New South Wales Teachers Federation—part of the Labor Party’s own—is now saying that it is concerned about the rort, the overpricing, the overcosting of this program and has written to the Auditor-General in New South Wales saying it wants the Auditor-General in New South Wales to look at it. We know the Auditor-General here is going to look at it at a federal level, but I do not hold much hope that we will see anything on this program before the election. I would like to think that we might but I doubt that we will. That is no reflection on the Auditor-General; it is just the way things are going.

We can go right back to the start and look at the way this program started. Right at the outset we had signs outside schools. Every school regardless of whether it had a project up and running yet got a school sign out the front proudly saying that this school would be the beneficiary of the education revolution. It is about the only successful part of this program—the government has managed to get signs up outside every school. But the signs have to stay there for two years, right through the election. In Tasmania, they even offend the Electoral Act. Bruce Taylor, the Electoral Commissioner, has deemed them to be electoral matter under the state Electoral Act 2004. The ruling leaves no doubt that these signs are designed to provide a political advantage to the government. So, that was at the very outset of this program.