Transcript - Radio National AM - 13 April 2010

SUBJECTS: BER Taskforce; Education Union Boycott

Geraldine Doogue: Good morning Christopher Pyne.

Christopher Pyne: Good morning Geraldine. How are you?

Doogue: Good thank you. How much money do you say has been this program?

Pyne: Well given the kind of estimates that we've seen for building for example a covered outdoor learning area, or a core seven library, and given the inflated prices that schools have been paying we think that they probably received eight billion dollars of value for about 16 billion dollars of spending.

Doogue: So you think we've had a hundred per cent overrun?

Pyne: Not an overrun in terms of blowouts because the Government only essentially increased the amount of money available by one point seven billion dollars. But what's it's done of course is enormously downgraded the projects that schools received. So schools were told they were going to have four classrooms and they ended up receiving one or two. Or take Berridale for example, where the school could have got a library for 285 thousand dollars and ended up getting a library for 908 thousand dollars with no air conditioning and no fire exit.

Doogue: What is for you the worst example of a rort? I mean you were alleging no value for money, but you're also alleging rorts I think. What have you come across that's really had your hairs stand on end?

Pyne: Well I think the emblematic fiasco has been the Hastings Public School in New South Wales where they built a covered outdoor learning area in 2003; so 78 thousand dollars. And in June last year they were told it would cost 400 thousand dollars and by March this year it was costing 954 thousand dollars. Now nobody with any common sense could recognise that as being a well managed program; that something could blow out, even since June last year by 554 thousand dollars.

Doogue: And what is the central problem there? Is it this issue of bigger firms coming in and charging money effectively for project management?

Pyne: Look it's a whole range of thinks. Its management fees blowing out from supposedly one and a half per cent to closer to 20 per cent. It's for example eleven schools in New South Wales building the exact same building, the designs for which have been settled since 2003 and that same building has been built across all New South Wales. But each school out of their 250 thousand dollar grant has been charged 114 thousand dollars for design, for drawings, for site maintenance and inspection fees.

Doogue: So people were reinventing the wheel you're saying?

Pyne: And they didn't' need to. They probably knew they didn't need to, but the Government made this enormous error of pumping 16 point two billion dollars of demand into the system without doing any thing about supply on the other side. Because the Minister doesn't understand the rules of supply and demand so of course prices went up amazingly and a lot of builders just added 30 per cent to their usual quotes thinking if we get it that'll be fantastic or we've got enough work on, the department might go away, and the department would simply come back and say "no problem". Now the reason we know about these rorts or these rip-offs in New South Wales because they were at least critical enough to publish all these breakdowns on the net. In the other states they haven't even published this information so....

Doogue: I was at a school (inaudible), last week down in Hobart and the Primary Principals Association had actually gone to all their principals and they said there were some problems in two states and I assume one of them was New South Wales, but the bulk of the people were thrilled to bit with the changes to their schools, some of which had new toilets for the first time in many years. So I just wonder politically whether this is going to get the traction you imagine it will?

Pyne: Look Geraldine, this is the fundamental misunderstanding that a lot of people who've said the Coalition shouldn't be criticising it's (the Government's) program. There's a difference between saying you're in favour of infrastructure in schools and saying you're in favour of infrastructure in schools and you don't care how much it costs. Now Julia Gillard has basically been saying, "The Coalition is against infrastructure in schools." We're not, but we don't believe that taxpayers should be ripped off. And taxpayer should get value for money. It's not infrastructure at any price, it's infrastructure at the right price because it's taxpayer's money. It's not the Government's money.

Doogue: Ok, I've just got a minute and a half left. On the issue of the NAPLAN test; the Australian Education Union has written quite a big ad in today's Australian explaining why it wants teachers to boycott the literacy and numeracy test. We had somebody from the Parents and Citizens association New South Wales office saying that parents were divided about these tests. They thought they were too narrow and they though the information could be misused. Whose side are you on?

Pyne: Well the previous Government initiated the literacy and numeracy test. My view is that they always need to be reviewed and updated to make sure that they are staying abreast of developments and that they are relevant. And they shouldn't certainly be the same when they were first mooted because obviously you learn from each time that you do them. Now we support the national literacy and numeracy test because it's extremely important for parents and for teachers and for schools to know where their students are and what progress they're making and where they can improve. Therefore we support them. What we don't support in the Coalition are leagues tables that signifies so called underperforming schools and don't take into account all sorts of circumstances which might make their results less good than other schools. And the Government's failure with the Myschool is that it creates a culture of stigmatising schools without the power to actually fix the schools to have better outcomes.

Doogue: Alright, Christopher Pyne thank you very much indeed.

Pyne: It's a pleasure Geraldine.

Doogue: Christopher Pyne the Shadow Education Minister, and we did invite Julia Gillard the Education Minister onto the program, but she was unavailable.

Ends