Education stimulus a Federal ‘waste revolution’

By DOMINIQUE HARALDSON
THE Federal Government’s Building the Education Revolution (BER) is being mismanaged and is wasting taxpayers’ money, according to ACT Liberals Senator Gary Humphries.

A Senate inquiry into the BER will be held in Melbourne, Sydney and Canberra in May after funding blew out from $14.7 billion to $16.2 billion dollars. “It sounds to me like an education minister, federally, who’s just shovelling money, you know, off the top of a building and hoping people catch the dollars when they get down to a street level, not the sense of careful management and control which both means there’s good value for money from a tax payers point of view and that schools get what they actually want, rather than what the government thinks that their school should get,” he said. The BER was central to the National Building Economic – Stimulus Plan (ESP) aimed at curbing unemployment. While the ESP has created more jobs, the overspending on infrastructure in schools is under scrutiny.

Education Minister Julia Gillard recently admitted that the Federal Government designed the BER without sufficient oversight. Many complaints have also emerged since the education stimulus, with schools unhappy at how the scheme was managed.

While there have been many positives to come out of the BER, speculation is aimed at whether new school infrastructure will effectively improve the knowledge and skills of future generations.

However, the Principal of Mary MacKillop Catholic College, Michael Lee, believes that new school structures such as libraries will advance education. “It’s a 21st century facility for learning and I think that’s a good investment for the country,” Mr Lee said. “This country needs independent thinkers, it needs independent researchers, it needs critical literacy skills. “I think there’s pluses and minuses. My political question is what would the federal opposition have done if they were in government at the time?” Senator Humphries believes the current education scheme used to stimulate the economy was pointless. The $16 billion more successfully. “I just see lost opportunity everywhere with this program,” Senator Humphries said. “The chief issues are really around not so much whether the ideas are good but whether they are being well executed.

“Perhaps we should be looking at spending some of that money in a non structural sense… away from infrastructure and more into classroom teaching…for example by paying teachers more and improving pedagogy.”