THINK you must now have heard the worst of Kevin Rudd’s colossal waste of your billions?

Think nothing could top Rudd’s spending $1.5 billion on free insulation so dodgy that he must spend an estimated $450 million more to pull it out or make it safe?

Then check out this shack above.

It’s actually a school library being built at Stuarts Point with cash from perhaps the most scandalously wasteful of all the Rudd Government’s “stimulus” packages.

How much would you pay for it, do you think? $150,000? $200,000, tops?

Ha! Try $931,000, sucker. And that’s out of your pocket, too.

For a contrast, check what you’d get for less than a quarter of the price if the school had cut out the Government middlemen and simply picked a whole house off the shelf from a builder.

Ezyhomes, for instance, offers a 182sq m house called the Outlook (below), with a huge central area just right for a reading or teaching area, as well as three bedrooms you could use for the books, or knock out to make bigger spaces. Add toilets, kitchen and veranda and you’d still have change from $220,000.

Or check what the Australian Construction Handbook of 2008 says you should actually pay for a single-storey primary school building - around $1300 per square metre, actually, or about a tenth of what Stuarts Point’s library costs.

This is not a lone example, either. All round the country you’ll find the same astonishingly inflated prices for buildings knocked up in a hurry under rush-rush-Rudd’s Building the Education Revolution, set up last year to hurl $16.2 billion into quick-quick building projects for schools to “save” us from a catastrophic recession that the Reserve Bank now admits was just one of our milder downturns.

This waste is worst in the $14 billion of that money that went on primary schools, which were given just a couple of months to ask for, plan and start building their choice of hall, library, shade or classroom.

And what you saw with Rudd’s disastrous free insulation scheme is now unfolding with these BER projects. Too much money chased too few builders, who naturally quoted mad prices for jobs they barely cared if they didn’t get.

So Eungai Public School in NSW spent $850,000 for just a two-room classroom. Berwick Lodge Primary, in Victoria, was quoted $200,000 by a Government project manager to move a sewer and stormwater drain - more than three times what private contractors told the principal the job was worth.

A Wollongong school couldn’t even buy a school hall for its $2.5 million, even though the one it was quoted was less than half the size of the hall a nearby Catholic school had built for half the price.

Nor does this scandal stop at the overcharging. Many schools asked for or were offered buildings they didn’t really need, and said yes only for fear of missing out on a freebie.

For instance, Yapeen Primary School, near Castlemaine, was given $150,000 of BER money even though it has just two students and may soon close.

Coincidentally, perhaps, the principal has twice stood as a Labor candidate.

The reports of overcharging and waste in this massive program, administered by Deputy Prime Minister Julia Gillard, are so overwhelming that the auditor-general is now investigating where the money went, and is also asking primary school principals to say in confidence whether they got value for these billions.

I’m yet to speak to a builder who thinks they did.

“I’d say a figure of $1000 a sq m is a very good ball-park figure (for school buildings),” the prominent head of one of the country’s biggest home builders told me, asking not to be identified.

“The price for this Building the Education Revolution stuff is phenomenally much higher than that. There’s been a feeding frenzy and people could charge what they liked.

“You could get a couple of houses off the shelf for a fraction of the price of what they’re paying for (a small library).”

The Opposition estimates that of the $16.2 billion being spent, as much as $9 billion will be frittered away, and no one can be sure that’s not just spin. After all, this Government’s mismanagement of spending already rivals anything Gough Whitlam ever perpetrated.

More copy and paste; no solutions, as usual from our in-house liberal party stooge.

Have you asked yourselves why more don't join you?

It's only a little bit obscure. For instance, in a Google search for an "Australian political forum" it comes up top of the list, which is good as almost any advertising you can get.