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

Well, I do not know what construction industry you are working in but it certainly was not the situation in the construction industry that I worked in, I can promise you that. Quality documentation is absolutely paramount and there are significant problems that are occurring in the schools with respect to this. There is no question that it is having a detrimental effect on school communities. You see genuine contractors who say, ‘We don’t worry about these projects too much. We have decided we will take a few of them that we know we can manage and we let the rest go through to the keeper because they are creating too many hassles for our businesses. They are causing us too many problems to have to deal with.’

Just like we saw with the pink batts fiasco, we are seeing cost overruns and we are seeing rorting of projects. The situation in New South Wales where you have projects that are costing multiple times the cost for equivalent types of structure is an absolute disgrace. That is the sort of rubbish you see when you start to inflate an industry the way that this program has done, just like we saw with the pink batts fiasco.