Joanna Gash (Gilmore, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Minister for Education. I refer the minister to recent comments by one New South Wales principal who stated:

I am sitting here staring at my beautiful new $425,000 library that cost the taxpayers of Australia $850,000. The internet is not connected … the fans can’t be turned on because they hit the ceilings, and the light switches are upside down, but I refuse to be negative.

Minister, is this value for money?

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

Of course, the source of that anonymous quote is an article in the Sydney Morning Herald this morning, recording the views of the Australian Education Union, the same Australian Education Union opposed to My School and so many of the government’s reforms. There is an interesting cabal developing over on that side, isn’t there? I presume we will see some more of that. On that anonymous quote, if the member has a scintilla of evidence to support it, please send it around to me, and then we will investigate it through my department. Should that investigation raise anything, we will forward it to the New South Wales government’s audit committee.

On the question of auditing in New South Wales, assuming the member is interested in something more than she has read in the newspaper this morning, the New South Wales audit squad are conducting spot audits of BER projects covering every region, every project type and every managing contractor. To date they have audited 102 schools. Seventy-nine of those are individual site audits where the audit squad have attended the building site to investigate the delivery of the project on site. Twenty-five of those audits are of managing contractors either at their head office or at their regional delivery office. There are 36 site audits planned for next week alone. Projects will be assessed on time, cost and quality. The audit squad are being funded in a way that does not cost schools any money. No money due to go to schools is being used to fund the audit squad.

The New South Wales audit squad of course is an additional audit method on top of the New South Wales Department of Education and Training’s audit directorate; the Nation Building and Jobs Plan Taskforce probity auditor, Deloitte; and the New South Wales Audit Office. And, should the member have any evidence that she wishes to raise, she might want to forward it through to ICAC. The federal government may request the audit squad conduct investigations of individual project anomalies brought to my attention, and I am very happy to do that. Should the member have anything other than the clip out of the Sydney Morning Herald, which records an unsourced quote in the context of an article placed by the Australian Education Union, she should feel free to send it round.