Mark Coulton (Parkes, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

My question is to the Prime Minister. I refer the Prime Minister to the Auditor-General’s report released yesterday into the Green Loans Program, which exposed a failure of governance critically because government workers were distracted by the failed Home Insulation Program. Given that the Prime Minister yesterday described the insulation program as a mess, the solar homes program was in chaos and there was no effective governance of the Green Loans Program, why did the Prime Minister promote Minister Garrett, who was responsible for all three programs?

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

I thank the member for his question. I presume the member, in asking the question, has actually studied the Auditor-General’s report on green loans and I think if he had done that he would have seen that it recorded, for example, that ‘the former minister’—referring to Minister Garrett—‘received incomplete, inaccurate and untimely briefings on program design features and implementation progress, challenges and risks’. It goes on further to say the former minister ‘was not served well by his department in this respect due to the poor-quality briefings he received’. When you read the report overall, it is quite clear on a reading of it that there were significant failings in the design and early implementation of the program, that these failings existed in the department. The Auditor-General in fact has not made any recommendations in this report because the government has already acted, obviously, to end this program, to phase it out, to create a new program and has already acted to move the program from the department that it was originally in to the department of climate change. So I would say to the member that if he wants to read the report in full I think he will find that the conclusions of the Auditor-General are very clear indeed about the departmental issues in the administration of this program.

On the question of the current role of the minister, I am looking forward with considerable enthusiasm to working with the Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth in the further delivery of the government’s education revolution. I ask the member whether, for example, he will want to be working with Minister Garrett on things like trade training centres for his local schools, whether he will want to be working with Minister Garrett on things like computers in schools, whether he will want to be working with Minister Garrett on the national curriculum, whether he will want to be working with Minister Garrett on more resources for disadvantaged schools in communities to make a difference for kids from poorer backgrounds for the rest of their lives, and whether he will want to be working with Minister Garrett on all of these measures that make a profound difference for the education of individual children for their lives, hopes and chances and, obviously, a profound difference to the prosperity of the nation.