People believe things because they want to believe them. The idea of the huge state educational bureaucracies is just one of those things trotted out regularly. I had a look at the figures some years go for Victoria. There were about 40,000 teachers, 10,000 student support service officers (lab assistants, library aides, the school office person, and so on) and only 2,000 people employed by the central department and the regions, ands some of the latter were teachers too; e.g., visiting teachers for the deaf and so on. That makes the bureaucracy less than 4 per cent of the employment.

The story is similar with funding. The recent Bracks review reported that Victoria spent $5.74 billion in schools and $700 million in departmental support. The departmental figure was broken into $226 million for corporate expenses and $474 million for school related expenses, the latter including such things as student transport ($100 million), VCAA ($46 million), tech support for schools ($43 million), and so on. In other words, the bureaucracy costs 3.5 per cent of the total, leaving 96.5 per cent for students.

I apologies for quoting facts.

Alan B. you seem to have an extremely poor understanding both of my position and of the situation.

The Lehman Brothers didn't have unlimited credit. Nor do state governments. The Federal government does, but that doesn't mean it has "unlimited funds to allocate all over the place". Spending money has economic consequences. When the sum of public and private sector spending is too high, you get too much inflation. But sometimes (including now) we have the opposite problem: the sum of public and private sector spending is too low (which results in unemployment and economic decline). That's quite an easy problem to fix (just spend more) but the amount we can spend before it becomes too inflationary is not unlimited, so efficiency is still important.

Ditch the stereotype of the school halls scheme and look at the facts! The vast majority of BER spending was good value for money, the exceptions being disproportionately in NSW and Victoria. The government seems to have taken the Orgill report down, but a news report from when it was released is at: http://www.smh.com.au//breaking-news-national/ber-gets-thumbs-up-but-not-in-vic-and-nsw-20110708-1h655.html
AIUI the governments of those two states decided it didn't have the capability to manage the implementation of BER in state schools, so contracted it out to the private sector. In those circumstances, it would be highly misleading to use it as evidence of intrinsic inefficiency of state government bureaucracies. You can't form reliable conclusions based on the worst examples alone, particularly when their actual involvement turns out to be rather limited. Of course we should learn from the failures, but we should also learn from the successes, and what happened in WA does not support your narrative.

You're right about double handling being wasteful, but you're too quick to dismiss the suitability of state governments to the task. When I freely admitted that I couldn't find the link (to media reports I'd read or heard a few years ago) you demonstrated your unthinking arrogance in two ways: firstly by trying to turn it into a personal attack, and secondly by failing to consider the possibility that it could be correct.