IS THE BUILDING EDUCATION REVOLUTION ANOTHER DISASTER FOR LABOR

THE $16.2 billion schools stimulus scheme is set to become enormous waste of Taxpayers money with about $5bn to be wasted in overcharging, needless bureaucratic costs, pointless over-design of buildings and fee gouging by managing contractors.

Sources confirm there has been a systemic problem with the cost of buildings provided to public schools, with most paying double -- in some cases up to 10 times -- what they should be for buildings. Of the $11.27bn handed to the state governments to deliver schools to public buildings, about $5bn has been wasted, when compared to construction rates achieved by Catholic and private schools and industry benchmarks.

According to NSW Department of Education internal costing benchmarks, the state government expects to pay $4271 per square metre for classrooms and $5400 per square metre for libraries. The Catholic Church has set total maximum building cost benchmarks at $2426 per square metre for classrooms and $2451 per square metre for libraries. These costs are absolute and factor in a 40 per cent margin for all non-construction costs such as fitouts, design, site preparation and water and electricity installations. The modest "cookie cutter" school hall being delivered to hundreds of NSW public schools is costing $5400 per square metre.

For school halls, the Catholic Church pays $2541 per square metre, which includes all construction and non-construction costs. The Queensland and Victorian governments are rolling out BER projects based on similar costings to those used by NSW.

Last week, NSW Department of Education director-general Michael Coutts-Trotter told the BER Senate inquiry that under the scheme public schools were paying "between 2 per cent and 3 per cent" more for buildings than they were before the BER, indicating the state government has long been substantially over-charged for school buildings.

The NSW Education Department has said it conducted 103 audits into BER buildings and found "no evidence of overcharging". But the reason for this is that when auditing the cost of projects, it compares the buildings against its heavily inflated internal cost estimates. The extent of gouging is illustrated by examining the delivery of 189 prefabricated buildings to schools across NSW under the BER program. Those buildings are designed, manufactured, delivered and installed by manufacturers BRB Modular and Eastern Nomad for a fee of up to $339,000 each. This is a standard rate that the companies insist was in place prior to the BER roll-out.