Senator MASON (3:34 PM) —Given the scale of the government's maladministration, I might have to confine myself to the shambles of the implementation of the Building the Education Revolution program. Sir, you would think that if a government was to spend, let us say, $16 billion people would be happy, wouldn’t you? What has in fact happened? All the stakeholders—the students, their teachers, even the education union, the P&Cs—are saying this money has not been well spent. There has been a chorus throughout the country that this has been a very, very poor spend. Why? Let me tell you why: because, as Abbotsford Primary School illustrates so well, there is no flexibility. What is happening is that state governments are telling schools what they need to have. It is the old Labor Party story: ‘We will tell you what you want. If you don’t want it you can’t have it.’

Senator Cormann —Command model.

Senator MASON —Yes, command model—this whiff of Stalinism. The fact is that it is not flexible, has not been flexible and has not been working. What is worse is that it is costing far, far more than it should. Under the tender processes that the Commonwealth government is supposed to be oversighting prices have gone up. The taxpayer is not getting a good deal out of this, and that is an enormous problem. They say prices have gone up 50 per cent in the last 12 months on the same projects. This is a very, very poor spend. And there has been bullying by state governments. The money is being used to fulfil state government responsibilities and state government obligations. Incidentally, most of the money, the vast majority, that Senator Crossin spoke about is being spent on state government responsibilities. Infrastructure for schools is a state government responsibility, but they have not been performing, so the Commonwealth government picks up the tab. So much of the money is being used for state government priorities.

It is a bad spend for another couple of reasons. We do not even know how many jobs are going to be created, because the tenderers were not asked the question about how many jobs were going to be created, although I suppose with Abbotsford Primary School at least we know the government was going to knock down a four-classroom building and replace it with a new one. It is like digging a hole and knowing you are going to fill it up again, like something out of the Great Depression.

It has been an appalling spend, and we do not even know how many jobs have been created, and neither does the government. But even worse—and my friend Senator Back just reminded me about this—with a $16 billion spend, we are not even certain whether educational outcomes will increase, because that was never part of the project. We are not certain with $16 billion worth of expenditure that any student’s HSC score or TE score will rise even one point. We do not know that, and the question was never asked. It is a hell of a lot money—a one-off in the Commonwealth’s history—to give to an education system for no certain educational outcome. It is an enormous amount of money. Perhaps the only exception is my home state of Queensland and Evesham State School, where the lucky student—the single student at the school—has been given $250,000 towards whatever school she decides to go to. I understand that half of the principals in central-west Queensland are trying to find this poor young lady, because wherever she goes, they get the money. I am told they are offering her iPods and Sony PlayStations and that she will not have to do homework for a year as long as she goes to their school—that is because of the $250,000.

This is not a joke, but it just shows us that this whole project is quickly developing into a farce. Last week, poor old Ms Gillard—she has had a pretty bad fortnight—described the fact that this project has been underfunded by $1.7 billion as a mere bump in the road, a mere bagatelle. If you are spending $350 billion, does $1.7 billion more matter? Perhaps it does not. It is the sort of loose change that you find in your lounge suite under the cushions, isn’t it? Who cares about $1.7 billion anymore? It means nothing. Even when it comes to the government’s own advertising of their horrible failures on this project, when they finally put up the billboards in the schoolyards—do you know what, Mr Deputy President?—we will discover that those very billboards that are advertising the government’s failures are illegal. What farce.