Budget bungles mean teacher bonus payments on hold
24 May 2011
Media release Teachers won't benefit even one dollar from the Gillard Government's teacher bonus policy until 2014, Christopher Pyne, Shadow Minister for Education said today.
"The Prime Minister is so desperate to shift the public debate off the litany of problems besetting her Government that she has announced a policy that won't begin until after another federal election," Mr Pyne said.
"The tragedy is that the billions lost in the education portfolio due to waste and mismanagement, mostly occurring while Julia Gillard was Minister for Education, would have paid for the entire teacher bonus policy the Government has announced several times over," he said.
The computers in schools program blew out by $1.2 billion and the Prime Minister has confirmed today that only 413,000 out of the promised 970,000 computers have been delivered.
The computers in schools program is due to be finished by December this year meaning the Government must now install more computers in eight months than they have managed to install in three years.
The trades training centre program has built 70 centres that are time-shared by up to ten schools, a far cry from the promised 2650 training centres for every high school in Australia.
The Building the Education Revolution, or school hall fund, is mired in waste and mismanagement with billions evaporating due to inflated fees and charges, all the while Ms Gillard said everything was fine.
The national curriculum, originally promised to start in January this year now remains in limbo until October and the earliest it could be fully implemented is 2013.
It is a sad and sorry state of affairs that the only thing this Government has delivered in education is a widely criticised website.
It is a sad and embarrassing state of affairs that the Prime Minister, Treasurer and Schools Minister have the hide to announce a teacher bonus policy that won't provide a single dollar bonus to teachers for another three years.
"At the last federal election the Coalition put forward policies that would have allowed principals greater decision making power over staffing and paid teachers a bonus within our term in office," Mr Pyne said.
May 2, 2011
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Adam Howard
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