Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

In answer to the shadow minister’s question, can I say this and say it very clearly to him. I do not think you, Mr Speaker, are going to be surprised when I say this, although maybe the shadow minister is going to be surprised, but I do not myself deliver demountable buildings. I do not myself lay concrete foundations. That is true; he is correct in that. I am not individually building each of the 24,000 projects around the country. What we as a government are doing, through our guidelines and our auditing systems, is monitoring the rollout of Building the Education Revolution. When there are problems—and there was a problem with the construction of the foundation at the school that the shadow minister mentions—then, of course, they are rectified. That problem is being rectified by the contractor who made the error. That is being rectified at no additional cost to the government. That is what one would expect a contractor who has made an error to do. That would happen if one was engaged in Building the Education Revolution, if one was a businessperson engaged in building a commercial building or if one was a householder who was building a home renovation. An error was made and that error is being rectified without an additional cost to the government.

It does seem to me to be really bordering on the pathetic that, on a day in which this nation received unemployment numbers of 5.3 per cent as a result of the economic stimulus that enabled hundreds of thousands of Australians to go home at the end of a working week with a pay packet in their hands, the best the opposition can do is point to one error by one contractor, out of 24,000 projects in more than 9,000 schools, that is not costing one extra dollar. It says everything about the shadow minister for education, everything about the hollowness of this opposition. They do not care about jobs. They do not care about health. They do not care about education. They do not care about cost pressures on families. And of course their greatest achievement this week is Tony’s new tax on everything a family buys.

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