Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Universities and Research) Share this | Hansard source

In her speech on the opening of parliament, Her Excellency the Governor-General said:

… education lies at the heart of the government’s agenda to strengthen workforce participation and enhance our nation’s fairness and prosperity.

Putting aside for a second the fact that what was supposed to be at the heart of the Labor Party’s agenda was in fact forgotten in the naming of their ministry following the last election, this concentration on education—the so-called education revolution—echos what Mr Blair and New Labour were doing 15 years ago and, indeed, there are echos going back to President Johnson and the ‘Great Society’ in the 1960s. It is quite common in the social democratic project to have education at the core.

The question really is: how has the government gone over the last three years with its—to use its words—‘core project’? How has the government performed? Senators might remember it all started with Mr Rudd and the laptop computers. Do you remember that, Mr Acting Deputy President? He stood up one day—it looked great on television—and said, holding a laptop computer, ‘This is the toolbox of the 21st century.’ It was great TV graphics. He said there would be a computer for every student from year 9 to year 12. He sort of said that, but then he spoke about access to a computer. Indeed, we wondered what the promise meant. But in the end, the government came to the party and said, ‘All right, we’ll provide a million computers so that every student gets one.’ There is a ratio of one to one—one computer for every student. What happened on this first part of the core project? The Commonwealth underbudgeted by about $2 billion. Far worse than that, it was only talking about the capital cost of the hardware—the computers. What about the installation, the maintenance, the insurance, the licensing and the software; who is going to pay for that? Guess who had to pay? State governments, private schools and parents ended up paying billions because the federal government had not thought about that—it did not look cool on TV—and in fact it cost four times as much as the hardware. For every dollar you spend on hardware, you need to spend about another $4 on other costs. So state governments, nongovernment schools and parents had to come up with somewhere between $2 billion and $4 billion to cover the so-called ‘laptop computer oncosts’. This was right at the start of the Building the Education Revolution.

How is the implementation going? As of last October 2010—the last estimates—out of one million computers promised, how many had been delivered? Only 345,000. I can accurately say, 34.5 per cent, about one-third, had actually been delivered. At this rate of delivery, even on the government’s own figures—and laptop computers become redundant after four years—given only one-third have been delivered after three, they will become redundant before they are delivered. This is a fiasco. It has received a lot of airplay but this was, in a sense, a principal commitment in the core objective of this government.

The other important aspect of laptop computers was not just the provision and delivery of them, it was also the internet connection. The other part of the promise that Mr Rudd made was to connect all laptop computers to fibre internet with speeds of up to 100 megabytes a second. Remember, that was the promise from 2007. So let me ask: how many laptop computers have been connected by the Commonwealth to fibre? Pick any number between zero and one million. The answer is none—zero, or as Mr Rudd would have said, zip. None has been connected by the Commonwealth government to 100 megabytes per second broadband, not one. But I am told at every estimates meeting not to worry. ‘Don’t worry, Senator Mason, because Senator Conroy has it under control. When the NBN gets going everything will be OK and all the computers’—even if they are redundant—‘will be attached to fast-speed broadband.’ By the time the NBN rolls out, the students who are promised fast fibre connection will be as old as me. It has taken a long, long time.

You know how generous I am—very generous. In my former life as a university lecturer, I commonly gave out marks to students and I was always very generous and well known to be generous. So I will give a scorecard on the first part of the education revolution. In terms of the laptops I have decided, after a lot of reflection, to give the government a fail mark—sorry, and that is being generous.

The next part of the education revolution was building school halls. Part of this was to provide stimulus to the economy, to answer the global financial crisis, and also because apparently new school halls meant better educational outcomes. We have never heard much about new school halls leading to better educational outcomes. That link has never been made conclusively. Putting that aside for the moment—as you know I am generous—we know that the building school halls project cost about $16 billion. It is the largest infrastructure project in our history.

The question really is: how could you spend $16 billion and have so many people unhappy? How could a government do that? There are several reasons. The first one is the lack of flexibility. These infamous design templates, which have a whiff of central planning, which I know my friend Senator Carr loves—the whiff of Stalinism; this soviet-era planning that he loves. Schools that wanted gymnasiums got libraries and schools that wanted libraries got gymnasiums. It was a shambles. The templates did not work.

Far more fundamentally, as the Commonwealth Auditor-General said, the problem with the entire project was this: the Commonwealth government did not have the technical expertise to adequately oversight state expenditure of Commonwealth money on schools. That is the heart of the problem—the Commonwealth government did not know whether they were getting good value for money or not. That, in a sentence, is the problem with the entire school halls project.