BUILDING THE EDUCATION REVOLUTION

Mr PISONI (Unley) (16:56): My question is to the Minister for Education. Now that the official national inquiry has been launched into the cost blowouts of the BER stimulus program, will task force head Brad Orgill and his 30 staff have as much difficulty getting a list of complaints from DECS as I have? I was refused access to documents through FOI, the excuse being that my inquiry was too broad and required too many resources of the department to comply.

The Hon. J.W. WEATHERILL (Cheltenham—Minister for Education, Minister for Early Childhood Development) (16:57): The reason the FOI request was rejected is that the member for Unley was invited to get back to the agency to respond and narrow his request from a request that would have required us to look at every document concerning every school and every document that touched the BER so that we could establish whether anything looked like a complaint. You can bet your life that, if we pulled out just a few concerns that did exist, there would be howls of complaint that we had not carried out a thorough exercise. Therefore, wanting to be thorough, we asked him to narrow his request because, frankly, there is not a file on complaints, because there are just not enough to justify one. Because we wanted to be thorough and answer the request in a diligent fashion, we simply asked him to narrow his request beyond every document that exists in a school or every document that exists in the BER program. He refused to do that so, on that basis, the application was rejected.