Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Yes. A whiff of the central planning that I know my friend Senator Carr enjoys so much. And perhaps Ms Gillard, reliving her days in student politics, enjoys that whiff of Stalinism and central planning.

We also know this: there has been overcharging. Already there have been anecdotal reports from throughout the country that the price of these buildings has gone up, not by 10 or 20 per cent but potentially by 50 per cent, over the last few months. The price of the buildings for school communities has gone way up. And what has happened? The Commonwealth government has had totally inadequate oversight of the process. They are hands off. ‘It doesn’t matter. Throw enough money and a job or two might be created. We don’t care if it costs a fortune.’ And we know that has been a bad spend, because they have not kept their eye on the cost of the buildings.

What is going to happen in the next few months is that the Auditor-General will bring a report down. It will be very interesting to see what the Auditor-General says. We have also seen bullying by state governments. State governments have been bullying school communities, because they want to use the money for their own objectives and their own priorities. None of this is a surprise, but this is what has happened over the last six months.

This in fact has so far been a very bad spend. It is not flexible; there has been overcharging; there has been bullying by state governments and worse: when this project was set up the government did not even ask tenderers how many jobs would be created by the tenders they asked for. Job creation ostensibly was important. Yet the government did not ask when approving tenders how many jobs would be created. That just shows the lie of the government’s processes. This is all about spending money and looking good politically. They did not even ask how many jobs would be created—not at all.

What about the education outcomes? Did they ask about those? No. They are going to spend $15 billion. Did they ask how this would assist the educational outcomes of Australian school students? No. I would have thought that better teaching and better teaching education and perhaps paying teachers more money might be a far better way of getting better educational outcomes than building more ‘Hon. Julia Gillard Memorial Halls’. Any educational expert would tell you that. But no, the government was throwing money and they did not even know how many jobs would be created. Anyway, the Auditor-General is going to look at this. It will be interesting to see what happens.

Last week, it emerged that there had been a budget blow out of $1.5 billion in this process. Ms Gillard said, ‘This is a bump in the road.’ A $1.5 billion budget blow out is a bit of a bump in the road; a mere bagatelle! If you have spent $300 billion in the last 12 months, I suppose $1.5 billion is change that you would find behind the office couch, isn’t it? Perhaps that is where Ms Gillard found it. Just a bump in the road!