Judge me on my record

After five years of Labor Government and declining student outcomes the Prime Minister has asked to be judged on her record in education.

“Julia Gillard is responsible for a Pandora’s Box of failed programmes, budget blow-outs and waste and mismanagement,” said the Shadow Minister for Education, Christopher Pyne today.

“After promising nothing less than an education revolution in 2007 and 2010, Julia Gillard should stand condemned,” Mr Pyne said. 

 “There is the Building the Education Revolution, where the grand rhetorical aspiration of having an ‘iconic’ building in every school in Australia was swept up in a tidal wave of waste and mismanagement, under the direct stewardship of the Prime Minister herself.

 “If just half of the $16 billion BER spend was saved it could have paid for at least one year of the Gonski review.

“There is the Computers In Schools Programme that was initially rejected by the States, blew-out to almost triple the cost and has entirely disappeared from the Budget forward estimates, meaning it is now a liability for the States to fund alone.

“There is the National Curriculum that still hasn’t been implemented by every State and has been roundly criticised by experts for problems with content and delivery.

“There is the My School website, apparently Ms Gillard’s crowning achievement that has created an atmosphere of recrimination in schools leading to a dramatic spate of cheating on NAPLAN tests and under-performing students being asked to stay at home on test day.

“Then there are the National Partnerships that the Auditor-General has criticised for a lack of transparency, lack of oversight and a failure to adequately assess the effectiveness of the billions being spent. This means no evidence actually exists they are working.

“The Prime Minister should be deeply embarrassed about her record in education as she should be deeply embarrassed about the many other failures of this rotten Government,” Mr Pyne said. 

September 4, 2012