Bridget McKenzie (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to contribute to the debate on the Gillard government's dismal record on education reform and the missed opportunities that this government has had—for the entire period of time that it has been in government—to actually attain real change in our Australian schools. It was interesting to hear Senator Thistlethwaite's contribution in which he brought up the Building the Education Revolution. When we look at my own state, Victoria, and the waste that that program delivered on the ground—and I see Senator Thistlethwaite shaking his head as he leaves the chamber—that waste was not evident where the school system was able to choose their own method of spending. For state schools, they had a prescribed list of educational resources they could access, and they had to go for it.

When I think about missed opportunities and real education reform, I think about the first missed opportunity. As a former lecturer in education training, I know that our universities' capital infrastructure needs have been severely lacking. The former government recognised that and set up a fund to take us forward: the now-defunct Higher Education Endowment Fund. I think that the first missed opportunity of this government was to not spend it all on capital infrastructure for higher education. Similarly, in another missed opportunity, there was a federal Labor commitment of $16 million to stem the shortage of maths and science teachers by fast-tracking bankers, accountants and engineers into classrooms. By the way, those three particular cohorts of people—we have all got friends in those cohorts—are in classrooms now. Think about it. There is a reason that they did not choose education as their first choice of career. It has been an incredible, expensive failure with just 14 participants recruited. Those who are experienced in banking and who are highly successful engineers and accountants may be able to perform certain types of arithmetic, but I would doubt their capacity in terms of flux equations and partial differentiation.

Prime Minister Julia Gillard announced the Teach Next scheme during the 2010 election, promising that Labor would over four years recruit 450 mid-career professionals to teach. However, just 14 participants have been placed into schools, after two intakes, and every state and territory, except Victoria and the ACT, has either not participated in the scheme at all or has pulled out. The computers in schools program blew out by $1.4 billion. The school hall program, mentioned earlier, blew out by $14.7 billion to $16.2 billion. The blow-outs in these two programs alone are more than double Wayne Swan's projected 2012-13 now-dumped surplus—