Finance

Home page

Finance

Julia Gillard admits school mistakes

16 July 2010 03:26 (UTC +04:00)

Baku-APA. JULIA Gillard has conceded the delivery of her school-building program was flawed but she has assured voters she has learned from her mistakes, APA reports quoting theaustralian.com.au website.
After months of defending the $16.2 billion Building the Education Revolution scheme she oversaw when she was education minister, the Prime Minister said yesterday that errors had been made because the program had to be designed in haste to protect jobs during the global financial crisis.
In the future, Ms Gillard said, she would allow individual schools to manage building projects and embrace "a commercial hard-headed" view.
Ms Gillard made the comments at Canberra’s National Press Club yesterday after a speech she used to portray herself as an economic conservative and a pragmatist devoted to economic growth, job creation and education.
She also stressed that Labor would not produce expensive promises in the forthcoming election campaign, guaranteeing all pledges would be fully funded and that they would have no effect on the budget bottom line.
"Those expecting an old-style spend-up campaign can forget it," the Prime Minister said.
Tony Abbott later said Ms Gillard’s pitch was a failure and pointed to her mismanagement of the BER as evidence of why Labor should be tossed out of office.
The BER program, part of the government’s economic stimulus package, is delivering a hall, library, gymnasium or other building to every primary school in the nation. Over the past year, The Australian has uncovered widespread evidence of price gouging and rorting, with state education departments struggling to deliver the same value for money being achieved in private schools, where principals are managing its rollout.
Although initially dismissive of the reports, Ms Gillard appointed former banker Brad Orgill to examine the program for evidence of waste earlier this year. With Mr Orgill’s report due next month, the Prime Minister yesterday guaranteed it would be made public if it were received before the approaching federal election.
Asked yesterday why Australians should re-elect her after Labor’s failure to deliver many of its 2007 election promises and its bungling of several programs, Ms Gillard said she took her "fair share" of responsibility for the Rudd government’s successes and failures.
"I was vice-captain of the team and I had direct responsibility for some important portfolio areas," Ms Gillard said.
"What I would say to Australians about those things is there have been some lessons learned."
In the case of the BER, she said, the scheme was conceived early last year in an atmosphere of urgency, with the government anxious to support jobs and prevent a recession. "We used the structures that were there in order to support jobs," she said. "Looking back now, . . . of course, there have been lessons learned."
Ms Gillard said it was now clear to her that it was necessary to apply commercial expertise to the rollout of major building projects.
And, in a clear movement towards the Opposition Leader’s promise to devolve power to local communities in the delivery of health and education, Ms Gillard said she believed in "empowering people locally".
"This government’s done more to empower school principals than any government has in the past," she said.
"And of course, for the long term, when we’re delivering capital in a more routine fashion, not in the urgent window of a global economic storm, I’d want to deliver that school capital relying on school principals who I want to empower more generally.
"I would say to Australians, not everything’s gone right. Some things have gone off track. But I’ve learned some lessons as well and I’ll take those lessons with me as Prime Minister."
Asked whether she expected Australians to take her on trust, Ms Gillard said all elections were about trust and that voters had to weigh up political leaders and make assessments. "I’m happy for Australians to go into the election whenever it’s held . . . and have the question of trust in the forefront of their mind and ask themselves the big question: Who do they trust to lead this nation forward, not back?"
Responding to her speech, Mr Abbott said discussion of the BER was "a glaring omission" from Ms Gillard’s formal speech, which he said lacked candour and detail.
"As an attempt to boost the Prime Minister’s economic credentials, the speech was a failure," Mr Abbott said.
"I think that if they present to be the economic conservatives or the fiscal conservatives, yet again people will just laugh at them."
Asked whether voters should be suspicious of Ms Gillard’s background within the Labor’s Party’s Left faction and as a radical student activist, the Prime Minister said she was 48 years old and, like everyone, had changed her views over her lifetime.
"I’ve changed," she said. " I’ve lived an adult life and I believe most aspects of my adult life are now increasingly well known by Australians."
She said the government would sustain the discipline it had brought to the budget throughout the election campaign and focus primarily on lifting productivity and workforce participation.
"Any commitments made in the upcoming campaign will not add a single cent, not a cent, to the budget bottom line," she said.
"The upcoming campaign will have strong elements of clean and green but it will be very, very lean."
Ms Gillard said lifting productivity was crucial to the nation’s future, stressing she would be a prime minister squarely focused on education as the key to building a "high-productivity, high-participation" Australian economy.
"Education is central to my economic agenda because of the role it plays in developing the skills that lead to rewarding and satisfying work," she said.
"It’s difficult to think of any investment that will generate returns as enduring as our investment in a child’s eduction."
She also said all economic policy would aim to create more jobs and ensure more people were in work.
"Getting a job, holding a job, developing skills and experience, getting the next better job or starting your own business is what propels an individual’s life forward and gives families security and choices," she said.