Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will indeed and I thank you for correcting me: the Ms Gillard memorial halls, or what was formally known as the Building the Education Revolution. It was because of my previous membership of the Catholic Education Commission of Western Australia for some nine years that I saw, at the first meeting we had, in Melbourne, with Senator Cash sitting beside me, as I recall, the scandalous difference between the management of those funds by the different school sectors—the Catholic and independent school sectors as opposed to the state school sector.

We know that it had nothing to do with stimulating any building activity in Victoria, because by the time moneys were spent in Victoria the global economic crisis had in fact passed us. We also know that in three states alone—Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland—if you compare or contrast the expenditure on exactly the same buildings, of the same per square metre costs, the state governments in those three instances wasted somewhere between three and five thousand million dollars on the state school constructions as contrasted with those of the Catholic and the independent schools. It would have been far better to have given the management of the whole project to the Catholic and independent school sectors. The expenditure of moneys would have been much more effective, putting to one side that there was very limited educational benefit to building school halls. Most of us—it is true in my particular case and, I am sure, for others—came from very small country schools where there were 50 to 60 kids in a class. There were no halls, there were no gymnasia and there were none of these other things, and yet we all seemed to perform. The absolutely essential matter associated with educational excellence is excellence of teachers and teaching, and the stimulation and encouragement of teachers—none of which the BER program addressed.

The second matter I draw attention to in regard to so-called government account­ability—excuse my mirth; I was overcome for a moment—is the pink batts program, where we not only wasted $2 billion or $3 billion but regrettably had deaths. We also have ongoing costs—'we' being the Australian taxpayers. Not Treasury, not the government but the taxpayers of Australia have ongoing costs, trying to undo the absolute brilliance of pink batts.

I had the pleasure of travelling recently with Mr Costello on a plane from Melbourne to Perth. If I may use his Christian name in this context, I said to him, 'Peter, are you over it yet?' He said, 'Chris, I am most of the time, but when I see the squandering and the waste, when I see what was a surplus go to nothing, and when I see a debt go to $50 billion'—and, as my colleague Senator Cash said earlier today, that $50 billion went to $200 billion and now to $250 billion and even higher—'that really upsets me.' 'But do you know something?' he said. 'When I was the Treasurer they walked the pink batts in to me. They put it in front of me and said, "This would be a great idea, Treasurer." It took me about three nanoseconds to see through it, to see the stupidity of it, and I told them to shred it.' Of course, they did not shred it, did they? They just put it in the bottom drawer and waited for the Labor Party to come into government, at which time they extricated it again. All it did in the efforts to deliver it was to prove what Peter Costello had predicted would happen. It obviously did.

The matter that I really want to draw to the chamber's attention in this context of government accountability is the NBN, the National Broadband Network. I remember, when speaking to that matter, asking Senator Conroy what the business plan was. He smirked in his usual fashion—I did not know him all that well then—and he said, 'We don't need a business plan, Senator Back.' I said to him across the chamber, 'Well, what about a cost-benefit analysis?' Having spent the last 30 years of my life running either my own businesses or government departments, I know that business plans and cost-benefit analyses really are quite useful, particularly when you have to be accountable to yourself, to directors or indeed to parliament. I remember giving a speech on the matter and I actually went through the notion of what a business plan for the NBN might look like, in the vain hope, I now know, that he might take some notice. Had he taken some notice, he would not now be in the position he is.

Only last week I was in the three wheat belt towns in Western Australia of Quairading, Bruce Rock and Narembeen. People told me that the simple fact is they are going to lose what is a relatively slow program at the moment called ADSL. They are going to lose it under this new brilliance of NBN and it is going to be replaced by satellite services, which are slower than ADSL. So in fact their service is going down. The interesting thing about all that is what my host, Stephen Strange, pointed out to me. He said, 'The fibre-optic cable goes through my north-west paddock and yet we are losing ADSL to get an even more inferior service.' I pointed this out in this chamber one day only to be derided by my Western Australian Labor colleague Senator Bishop. I pointed out that no towns with fewer than 1,000 occupants would be getting the service about which we were speaking. In fact, so stupid were Senator Bishop's comments to me that he was called upon to withdraw them. Bruce Rock, Quairading and Narembeen are only three examples of what I was just speaking about.

Only today did I meet with grocery retailers and they were telling me that they are suffering terribly now because of EFTPOS. Some 70 per cent of sales in small country towns are on EFTPOS, and retail is the area that the government were telling us today they know all about. Older people use EFTPOS for banking purposes, but now EFTPOS is going to need access to some sort of broadband. They are not going to see it. Services are going down, and all we see is further deterioration. These are just a few examples. We could go on. There was the renewable energy nonsense under various ministers. We could talk about cash for clunkers. If only time permitted I would speak to the chamber about some of the activities that occurred as a result of the overnight suspension of the live export trade. I would love to talk about government accountability, but not in this place with this government. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.