It is a bizarre irony that the former minister for education, Julia Gillard, succeeded Kevin Rudd as prime minister when it is the waste and mismanagement of a program she is entirely responsible for that seriously damaged the Rudd government’s credibility and contributed to his downfall.

Given what we know about Gillard’s abilities, it is not surprising that, during the first few weeks of her administration, the wheels have fallen off her solution to stop the influx of asylum-seekers, and that she is looking decidedly shaky on the mining tax deal.

Over the past 2 1/2 years there hasn’t been an education policy that hasn’t been partially or entirely bungled in some way, shape, or form by the former minister for education.

Putting that aside for the moment, it is worth considering the new Minister for Education and the possible reason he was chosen for the job. Gillard did not decide to go with a young up-and-comer or a firebrand visionary type who could reignite the portfolio of education, which is historically considered one of Labor’s greatest strengths. Instead she opted to go with Simon Crean, trying to shore up problems and inoculate the huge deficiencies in the portfolio in the hope they can quietly sit out the election.

Despite Gillard’s comments this week, Labor simply cannot afford to fight the election on education because of her record of failure in the portfolio. With the effective and energetic Christopher Pyne as shadow education minister, Gillard couldn’t risk putting the portfolio in the hands of a novice.

The opposition now has the opportunity to offer innovative and carefully targeted education policies that can outflank the government, whose record of waste and failure is monumental.
Last week Tony Abbott and Pyne announced the Coalition would redirect school-hall funding directly to schools to manage, thus cutting across Gillard’s continuing complaint that the Coalition would cut school funding.

It is well documented that the grandiosely named Building the Education Revolution has been tainted by chronic waste and mismanagement and reports of systemic rorts, price gouging and collusion in the construction of school halls and other facilities.

From the outset the guidelines for the program were deeply flawed, sending billions of taxpayer dollars directly into the hands of state governments.

State education bureaucracies were entirely ill-equipped to deal with the complexities of the roll-out, so projects were contracted out to developers, who have reportedly been charging exorbitant prices for substandard buildings.

Principals and school councils were largely shunted from the process, told by officials what they would be receiving, whether they liked it or not.

In contrast, the non-government sector has self-managed projects and achieved value for money. The comparison is simply staggering.

It is obvious the quick fix is for the government sector to be treated like the non-government sector and self-manage projects. However, the federal Labor government never entertained the notion that government schools could be trusted to manage projects themselves.

The Coalition has a strong case to prosecute when it comes to its alternative plan of allowing schools to self-manage projects, and the policy announcement has been very well received by the sector.

Leonie Trimper of the Australian Primary Principals Association was reported as saying the government sector was envious of the non-government sector’s ability to self-manage projects, and the notion that principals and schools should self manage infrastructure should become standard practice.

Given that the former Howard government trusted schools to self-manage projects under its Investing in Our Schools program, it is hardly a revolutionary idea. However, the really clever part of the Coalition’s plan is that schools will be given an extraordinary incentive to self-manage their projects and focus on making savings. This is because schools will be entitled to retain any savings made to use for other priorities on their wish list. These funds are now sent back to the same state governments that mismanaged them in the first place.

This could be a very significant amount of money. If estimates are correct then government sector projects should be coming in at two-thirds of what is presently being spent. Hence some government schools with a $3 million grant could save as much as a $1m for other projects.
Imagine what needy schools could do each with a lazy million, without any caveats on how it must be spent. Some of these schools have been neglected for years by the state governments that have primary responsibility for their infrastructure.

This is precisely the source of the growing anger and disappointment about this program. Rather than closing the gap between government and non-government sectors, it is now wider than ever, courtesy of the Australian taxpayer.

Parents aren’t stupid; they drive past the local non-government school and see the excellent buildings under construction and have a clear comparison to the often prefabricated buildings peppering the government school sector.

No two ways about it, the Building the Education Revolution has been a crime against the taxpayer. And it is not going to stop under this newly minted Gillard government because it was the PM’s program. Crean’s response to the idea that schools should be entrusted with funds directly is strange from someone tasked to properly administer taxpayer money. He accused the opposition of potentially opening up the government to litigation from cancelled contracts, leaving buildings half finished.

But surely if a school is not getting value for money, or indeed is being outrageously ripped off, then it is necessary for the government to immediately cancel contracts and initiate litigation: something the Gillard government wants to avoid at all costs.

Crean and the taskforce his predecessor established to investigate waste should be hauling contractors and state governments into the courtroom to extract compensation for schools that have been ripped off blind, not to mention the rest of us taxpayers.

Assuredly if the government wins the next election then this matter will eventually disappear from the public consciousness, as such things eventually do, while the judicial inquiry into the program promised by the Coalition will obviously never occur.

Australians will never know for sure how much money was lost in this program or who is
responsible, and Gillard will have escaped unscathed.

But rest assured, if Labor wins this coming election, there will be more mismanagement to come from the Gillard government and we will all be paying the price.

The Weekend Australian, July 17-18, 2010

AS the dust settles over the prime ministerial demise of Kevin Rudd and the hype surrounding Julia Gillard subsides, the questions remain: who is she and what does she stand for?

The fact that Gillard was parachuted into the job of prime minister by the largely “faceless” union backroom boys has led to the inevitable claim that she is a puppet of the union movement. Gillard recognised she needed to move quickly to counter that impression and declared at her first press conference: “I would defy anyone to analyse my parliamentary career and find that I have done anything but made up my own mind.”

Gillard’s biography would lead one to conclude that she is a committed member of the Labor Left. Her student activities included president of the Adelaide University Union, president of the Australian Union of Students in the early 1980s, and a campus convenor of the Socialist Forum at Melbourne University.

In her first parliamentary speech in 1998 she spoke of her time in the student union: “It inspired me to spend eight years as an industrial lawyer defending trade unions and working people.” And she declared: “I will remain fiercely committed to working with unions.”

Gillard was given her first real opportunity to live up to that commitment when she produced the workplace relations policy for Labor in opposition in May 2007. The original document was widely believed to have been crafted by the unions, as it was much more pro-union than John Howard’s laws were pro-employer.

The alarm bells rang within Labor’s sensible centre, whose leading parliamentarians predicted a battle with employer groups over her hardline provisions, which initially banned all individual agreements, with only collective employment agreements seemingly available.

The lack of detail in Gillard’s policy as to the proportion of employees that could force employers into negotiations with unions led to the conclusion that if only one employee among 200 requested union representation, the union automatically became a party to the workplace agreement with open access to all non-union employees, including their wage and employment records.

Such was the level of concern raised by Gillard’s policy that Rudd drafted a replacement document that significantly watered down the union influence in time for the 2007 election.

Gillard was rumoured to be humiliated at the time. Her message was clear, however, when she suggested that employers could get “injured” if they opposed her workplace reforms. Later dismissed as a joke, it had all the subtlety of Rudd’s joke to the miners that in opposing the mining tax, they should remember Labor has “a long memory”.

As education minister, Gillard initially supported unprecedented union influence, endorsing the right of unions to enter schools and recruit students as young as 14: “I think it is important we are getting information to young workers about what their rights are in the workplace . . . it is important for secondary school students to have information on the rights of workers,” she said.

However, at least since last year Gillard has sought to reposition herself more towards the Labor Right. There was an effort to distance herself from the teachers’ unions with a faux fight about the MySchool website. It was not lost on the unions that the information from the national tests used to establish that website resulted from reforms of Liberal education ministers Brendan Nelson and Julie Bishop.

Gillard’s makeover from Left to Right included the embrace of a number of the Coalition’s education and industrial relations policies. Key elements of the Coalition’s education platform for the 2007 election, including a national school curriculum and greater autonomy for school principals, were part of Gillard’s education revolution.

The Coalition’s blueprint for capital funding of government and independent schools has been followed, with the fatally flawed exception that Gillard decided to put the federal funding for government schools in the hands of state governments and not school communities, which led to massive waste and rorting.

In workplace relations, Gillard retained the Australian Building and Construction Commissioner, established after a royal commission instigated by Tony Abbott. The unions loathe the ABCC and Gillard trumpets this decision as proof of her independence from union influence.

Her biography on the parliamentary website does not mention the word “union” once, which may itself be a sign that she will try to govern from the centre if not from the Right.

Yet it is hard to imagine that Gillard’s skirmishes with the unions had much substance, given that the unions have now thrown their support so comprehensively behind her.

Lest there be any doubt about who made the decision to dump Rudd and install Gillard, the precocious but talented Paul Howes of the Australian Workers’ Union gave a running commentary on the evening of the coup.

To understate the case, the unions clearly believe Gillard is not hostile to their interests.

The point of all this is that the public should know what values and beliefs will underpin the new Prime Minister’s policy decisions and who or what are her greatest influences.

The still unanswered question is whether Gillard is the left-wing activist who entered parliament to fight for union interests, or has she now changed her focus to that of the broader national interest?

Former Labor leader Mark Latham has said that Gillard was committed to her left-wing values and ideals, but that she changed after the 2007 election and became a pale shadow of Rudd.

Latham has been rightly criticised for his leadership of the Labor Party, but he can and does provide invaluable insights into the inner workings of the Labor machine.

Moreover, before he became leader, when he and Gillard were close, Latham engaged in some inventive policy work, although whether these ideas, especially about the importance of nurturing communities, rub off on the new prime minister is unclear.

Gillard claimed that she needed to replace Rudd because the government had lost its way and therefore it was in the national interest that she did so. When pressed for an area of policy differentiation, she identified population policy as a key difference, insisting that any population growth had to be “sustainable”.

Her case rested on the false premise that Rudd had unquestioningly endorsed a much larger population of at least 36 million people by 2050. While Rudd did give one interview supporting a “big Australia”, the opposition used it to verbal Rudd, claiming he supported an unrestricted population growth.

To counter this claim, Rudd appointed Tony Burke as minister for population.

His role was to develop a comprehensive population strategy that took into account challenges and opportunities, including the social and economic infrastructure and the roads, housing and service delivery network needed, the impact on regional towns and communities and the impact on the environment, water, and urban congestion.

In other words, Rudd’s policy was based on sustainability.

Prime Minister Gillard, in adopting the opposition’s misrepresentation of Rudd, merely changed Burke’s title to Minister for Sustainable Population, clearly already part of his brief. In fact, there was and is no policy schism with Rudd.

It seems likely that Gillard will call an election for sometime in August. The Australian public thus has only a matter of weeks to find out whether she is a true believer from the Labor heartland, a true centrist, or just another politician practised in the art of spin and ultimately beholden to the unions who put her there.

The Weekend Australian, July 03, 2010

True, if you think of teaching and research as a simple commodity, such as wheat or coal, a commodity to be traded in competitive markets.

This is largely how tertiary education has been treated by recent Coalition and Labor governments. Funding cuts have forced universities to behave like big businesses, where vice-chancellors are now little more than overpaid chief executives who spend virtually all their time fund-raising.

But there are never enough funds, particularly for regional universities, which are so important to local communities and which can be vital in decentralising population away from our increasingly congested metropolitan hubs.

In regional Australia, universities add much-needed diversity and opportunity, as well as being important regional employers. They change the value mix.

In the regions they provide an opportunity to integrate academic knowledge and understanding with regional skills, knowledge and understanding. This integration enriches our regional communities, which in turn enrich each state in the commonwealth.

Regional universities enable regional Australia to be more than a passive receiver of teaching and research. It is the very give and take that ought to lie at the heart of education, sharing ideas to generate the growth of new knowledge and understanding and its practical application.

Regional universities are part of the balance that ensures that regional Australia is not serviced by capital city Australia. They help to ensure that regional Australia is a full and active participant in our nation.

For many, this quite rightly means combining with TAFE to be “dual sector” universities supporting both trade and professional education needed for vibrant regional economies.

Sadly all this opportunity for regional universities to energise a dynamic regional Australia is lost when universities are treated as businesses, with faculties and departments seen as key profit centres.

This focus on marketing, re-branding, customer service, business cases, export awards and the like, so beloved by the Howard government, has to date been accepted holus bolus by the Rudd Labor government.

In spite of her intelligence, the overloaded Julia Gillard, Minister for Education, Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations, Minister for Social Inclusion and Deputy Prime Minister, has largely failed to act.

Most critically, in regional Australia she has yet to give local universities the support that links education, employment and workplace change in order to meet the twin challenges of access and diversity that are at the core of our rapidly evolving regions.

This is critical because regional Australia is home to the farm and the quarry: the twin engines that have done most of the work to give Australia a remarkably smooth ride through the global financial crisis.

But the farm and the quarry are workplaces undergoing rapid change, a transformation which, to be effective, requires an ability to rethink and reshape. Such innovation is a capability inherent in higher education and research.

It is a vital part of the hardiness required by regional Australia whose wellbeing requires the capacity to thrive as form and substance change, sometimes exponentially.

Now gaining thicker and thicker coats of dust, the Denise Bradley Report into higher education in 2008 largely put regional universities to one side. Gillard, in spite of her record as a champion of the underprivileged, has not challenged this. Some would say, why should she when most federal seats are in the capital city heartlands where the big universities live?

It is a blind spot of a Melbourne-educated lawyer which could blight both Gillard’s prospects and the future of our regions. They need inclusion in the upcoming election debate, a debate at present dominated by arguments about who is best to manage the economy and enlivened by shouts about who is best to keep refugees out.

This is especially the case as the recent federal budget largely ignored higher education and, in so doing, missed the chance to revitalise and re-position regional universities as key engines for change.

This is a reminder to our Deputy Prime Minister that regional Australia requires her attention. And that attending to regional universities would be a good place to start.

On the other hand, Gillard could leave it to the maverick MP Bob Katter from the vast north Queensland seat of Kennedy and his fellow independents to try to make the running about funding the regions and especially our neglected regional universities. But Gillard shouldn’t leave it too late, particularly if the next federal election is as close a run thing as the Tasmanian and South Australian state elections.

Then there wouldn’t be time to woo the independents with promises to return more of the tax dollars from the farm and the quarry to regional Australia.

Now is the time to drive social inclusion and workplace change by properly funding cash-strapped regional universities so that they can support the constituencies of the farm and the quarry with much valued teaching and research.

If the farm and the quarry engines are not sustained, this year may see Labor lose power federally and a double dip recession engulf those big-city electorates and our regions as well.

But if Julia and Kevin are truly smart, then supporting regional Australia and their higher education institutions may be just the way to make effective use of what is left of their great, big, new, resource “super-profits” tax.

The Weekend Australian, June 5-6, 2010

The former Midnight Oil frontman said of Labor’s insulation program: “We’re seeing a relatively small number of complaints in the system, given the scale of the system, about 0.5 per cent of complaints given the totality of the system. It has been a very successful program . . .” Two weeks later he was demoted and the program was cancelled.

As Coalition education spokesman Christopher Pyne pointed out last week, Julia Gillard and Kevin Rudd are running a very similar line about the much hyped Building the Education Revolution program, citing complaints in a mere 0.76 per cent of schools.
By the government’s own measure, Gillard has done an even worse job than Garrett. Yet the school hall rip-off continues at a cracking pace and Gillard continues to preside over the disaster-riddled education portfolio.

It is astonishing enough that it took five deaths and 120 house fires for the government to act on the insulation program, but when it comes to the BER, the government seems perfectly comfortable that millions of dollars are evaporating from the program almost daily.

Gillard describes the problems as small bumps in the road. On the face of it, her response appears uncaring and arrogant.

Announced in February last year, the BER started life as a $14.7 billion stimulus spend designed to provide additional infrastructure support to Australian schools. This was a very exciting announcement, especially for the public education sector, long neglected by the states and desperate for any capital investment.

At the time it was claimed that, in addition to improving education, the money was also meant to stimulate the local economy and create jobs in communities.

From the outset, the program’s design was flawed.

Unlike the previous federal government, which gave money directly to schools for projects, the Rudd government opted to entrust the states with the roll-out and, as a result, it has been the public education system that has lost out big time in this once in a generation spend.

In turn, the states have handed over the projects to a handful of multinational construction companies that have pocketed the windfall along with their suppliers.

Local tradesmen and suppliers have largely missed out on contracts, or have been given minor jobs.

Often, wealthy independent schools have been able to manage their own projects and squeeze every dollar, but it is a regional public school that is forced to take delivery of a prefabricated library delivered on the back of a truck, with barely a cent left for outfitting. In one well-reported example, the building, once delivered, didn’t even fit the foundations.

Almost two months after the program began, the first problem was reported in the media. Since that time complaints have exploded, climaxing in the extraordinary situation towards the end of last year where the government announced a $1.7bn blow-out in the primary schools component of the package. At that time, the guidelines were also revised (not for the last time) to include the words “value for money”.

With almost 99 per cent of complaints coming from public schools, it seems the great champion of public education, the Labor Party, has dropped the ball.

All the while in the media, Gillard routinely has laughed off complaints. Similarly in parliamentary question time, she derided the opposition for raising significant concerns from its electorates.

Meanwhile, the widespread discontent has continued to spread. Along with other media outlets, this newspaper has continued to publish many examples of systemic price gouging, rorting and waste.

To top it all off, just last week even the well performing federal Treasurer, Wayne Swan, admitted rorting was occurring in the BER.

Little wonder then that the federal auditor-general extended his investigation into the administration and reporting requirements of the project. He is due to report next month.

So what has the government been doing about all this? As with Garrett’s insulation stimulus, it seems it has been seriously inactive until significantly caught out.

This year we have discovered that hundreds of projects were being audited in NSW, although little is known about the findings after the process was concluded. This was in response to the negative media reports coming out of the state; a transparent attempt at playing catch-up long after decisive action was needed.

Similarly Queensland has had some high-profile BER disasters, including the failure to put the $490 million first round of the primary schools program out to tender. The stories emerging in some of these schools are heartbreaking.

In response, the federal opposition has this week set a challenge for the government to begin a judicial inquiry into the program. If the federal government is correct and it is largely running well, then it should not have anything to fear.

Rudd made his name attacking the previous government over the AWB scandal concerning the UN oil for food program in Iraq. The Howard government initiated the Cole royal commission to investigate the claims in an open and transparent way.

It is time for the federal Labor government to demonstrate some courage and send a clear message to the taxpayers of Australia that the good management of billions of tax dollars is more important than petty party politics.

Rather than denying what is increasingly obvious, which is what Gillard still seems intent on doing, Rudd has an opportunity to seize the moment and show he is prepared to acknowledge there are problems and work to fix them.

Agreeing to a judicial inquiry is the obvious first step. It might also be a chance to put his very ambitious deputy back in her box.

The Weekend Australian

A remarkable demonstration of political acrobatics last week by the Deputy Prime Minister proved to be the straw that broke the camel’s back. First was the backdown on youth allowance, an admission that country kids can’t be expected to live at home while attending university. Then there was the duck-and-weave on award modernisation when Gillard was forced to make further interventions in a system that she had previously described as faultless. And the week finished as she finally tripped over a $1.5 billion “bump in the road” (Gillard’s words) as her schools building program blew its budget in breathtaking fashion and her guidelines had to be amended to demand that “value for money” be a consideration for the first time.

Three policy disasters in a week proved too much for even the Canberra press gallery and opposition education spokesman Christopher Pyne took the opportunity to mount a brutally clinical assault on her credibility. It paid off. Increasingly, most observers agree that Gillard has lost her Teflon shell and is under pressure like never before.

For some time I have been following the intensely personal match-up between the Education Minister and her energetic opposition number. Gillard clearly has a strong personal antipathy to the younger Pyne, who has been in parliament five years longer than her and has been harrying her in the media and parliament.

In February she called him a mincing poodle. As political journalist Glenn Milne pointed out, imagine the outcry if Pyne had responded by calling her a brindle bitch.

More recently she has demonstrated her increasing obsession in the house, providing critical commentary on Pyne’s website and arguing that he isn’t working hard enough on his portfolio areas. Yet nobody is buying it.

Whenever she is criticised, Gillard sounds increasingly shrill; her instinctive response is a personal attack. She would be better served to have a good look at the policy issues for which she is responsible. Despite admitting that there is a problem with her new youth allowance rules for country students, her solution will help only 5000 of those country students, and only those who are in a gap year. There is, for example, no relief at all for students getting ready for their year 12 exams.

What sort of incentive do these students have to do well in this most crucial period in their lives if they won’t be able to afford to go to uni? Gillard needs to engage in a serious rethink of her youth allowance policy so young people in rural and regional Australia can have some confidence they won’t be left behind.

Award modernisation should be a big political winner for the Rudd government. The Work Choices election in 2007 gave Gillard as much of a political boost as anyone could ask for in dealing with this portfolio. However, even after last week’s backdown, the talkback radio waves are still buzzing with angry small-business people genuinely scared that Labor’s new rules will leave their businesses unviable.

Finally, to the schools stimulus debacle. Gillard must be too used to being given an easy ride by the press if she thought that there was any chance they would buy her spin that the $1.5bn blow-out was a result of the “overwhelming success” of the program. For an Education Minister who talks about the importance of numeracy, it was downright embarrassing. Apparently the whole school halls program was funded on the basis that, when offered $3 million to have a new building on their grounds, 10 per cent of schools would say no. How extraordinary.

For several months the federal Coalition has been railing against this program with charges that state skimming is rife. Some private firms are indulging in practices best described as profiteering, while some schools are finding they can’t use local builders because they aren’t state government-preferred tenderers. This means city firms are doing jobs hundreds of kilometres away, at great cost.

The opposition’s relentless campaign managed to attract the interest of the Auditor-General, who is investigating the waste and mismanagement. This week we have learned the Auditor-General will be joined in his investigation by the Australian Electoral Commissioner, who is looking into whether the compulsory Nation Building Stimulus Package signs that come with these buildings breach commonwealth electoral laws.

When it comes to spending billions of dollars of public money and creating policy that will affect the lives of millions of Australia’s young people, the detail matters. In the past week, it has become clear that Gillard is unable to get the detail right.

As Pyne has been saying for months, Australia deserves so much better than a part-time Education Minister.

The Australian September 03, 2009

But increasingly concerns are growing in the education sector that she may be out of her depth when it comes to delivering in her very large portfolio areas. On last week’s Q&A program on ABC1, in which she was up against Malcolm Turnbull and three young political activists from across the spectrum, her most problematic political failing was on display. She is all style and very little substance. Long on rhetoric, but short on delivery.All foam, no beer.

Am I going too far with the cliches? If there is any politician who deserves to be described in cliches, it is Gillard. She has added more to the cliche lexicon than to the education system.

They all got a run on Thursday night, starting with the biggest cliche of them all: the education revolution. As climate change activist Sara Haghdoosti pointed out, a revolution implies “seismic, enormous change. This isn’t it”. Quite right. Most of the education revolution has involved nothing more than the abolition of old programs and their reintroduction with new names.

Hence the Howard government’s $700 tuition voucher program for students who fail to meet national benchmarks in their literacy and numeracy tests was cancelled, and that money was instead spent on the National Partnership on Literacy and Numeracy. Rather than giving the money to parents, Gillard is giving the money to state governments. Apparently she feels they are better at managing it. As someone who has been observing the Queensland and NSW education departments for some time this is a remarkable leap of faith.

The members of Q&A’s panel also took umbrage at Gillard’s Youth Allowance changes giving extra so-called scholarships to everyone who is getting Youth Allowance, at the expense of 30,000 students (mainly from the country) who work for a gap year to earn eligibility for Youth Allowance so they can afford to move to the city and go to university. As debating champion and aspirational Liberal Mitchell Grady said:

“Julia has seen an inequality and decided to try and solve it by creating another inequality in a different spot.”

The Building the Education Revolution program was brought up by the panel too, with Malcolm Turnbull renaming the spending as the Julia Gillard Memorial Halls. Most of the young people involved in the debate pointed out that if this much money was available for an education program, then it would have been much better to spend it on teachers.

The fact is that the Building the Education Revolution was never about education, it was about providing stimulus to the building industry. Unfortunately within months we have seen an outcry from principals, school communities, the building industry, the education union, the media, and just about every political party.

Problems include overspending, underspending, state skimming, profiteering, project managers getting millions for shuffling papers, schools with halls and gyms being forced to accept second halls and second gyms. There is very little value for money being delivered in the program.

Nor does it surprise that the Auditor-General has announced he will be conducting a full investigation into this spending, a humiliation for the Minister only three months into the delivery of her program. If it were anyone else on the Treasury benches in charge of this debacle, their career trajectory would be in serious freefall. If some of the Q & A panel were in the press gallery, we might see Gillard held to account.