Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege for me to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 today. The reason for that is quite simple: I believe in training and in skills and I think it is important that this parliament does everything in its capacity to enhance and support that. To that effect, Labor will not be opposing the bill. But it is interesting to note a number of things that bring about the amendment to this bill. This is the third cost blow-out for the government in relation to—what I would call at this stage—their failed Australian technical colleges. They must be failed because they have not yet succeeded. There can only be one or the other; it is an on-off technical point. If they have not succeeded, they must have failed. The first round of funding was $343 million, which was not enough. It had to be increased to $456 million, and that was not enough. Now it has been pushed out to $548 million. The government might try to explain away as to why there have been these additional costs, but they are not really additional costs; they are cost blow-outs. They are a failing on the part of the government to understand in the first place why it did not need to introduce these colleges.

It goes to the intent of why these ATCs are there in the first place. The Australian technical colleges were put in place not as a solution, not for an outcome, not for training needs, not for skills and not to do something in the national interest; they were quite simply put there as a political tool. It was about an election outcome. Let us be clear about that right from the outset. There is no way from anything I have read, anything I have seen or anything I have heard, particularly not from government members or the Minister for Vocational and Further Education—in fact, the more I listen to them the more I am convinced that this was about an election outcome—that success is measured in students, results or outcomes in the national interest. Success is measured in whether this mob got re-elected, and in that they did succeed. Their primary goal of setting up something which would cost the taxpayer half a billion dollars to get them re-elected was successful.

However, we need to do something for young Australians. We need to do something for skills and for the crisis which everyone acknowledges is real. On that score the government have failed, because they are not interested. That is the reality; the government do not care. They would not spend five minutes looking at what people really need but they would spend $500 million looking at what they need for an election outcome. That is what disappoints me—the lost opportunities, the waste of taxpayer dollars, the false hope that the government put out to people in terms of providing something extra. We could put this money to good use, and I will deal with that as I consider the bill today.

This is a failed program by the government. The amendment bill before us means that there will be three new ATCs. I would have thought that the government would have concentrated on the existing ones and the ones that have not opened yet, rather than setting up new ones. There will be new colleges in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney. I welcome them. If, in the end—no matter how painful and how much it costs—there is an outcome for skills and for young people, I welcome it. I understood what this initiative was about. In the heat of an election campaign, there was desperation and the government needed to do something. We all understand that. There is no question that people understand what this government is about. But if there were an outcome and some students had some skills at the end, you could give it a tick and say, ‘We’re at least getting something.’

Probably one of the best submissions, or tenders, put forward to the government was from my electorate of Oxley. If you look carefully and closely at the government’s guidelines on Australian technical colleges—and this is about what they say, which is different from what they do—you find that they talk about skills, working with industry and partnerships. They use all the usual terms to try and convince people. They talk about outcomes and areas of need. I could not find a higher area of need than the western corridor in Queensland. The government want to talk about partnerships? We have got it all. We have the TAFE institution of the year in my electorate. I looked at the guidelines and thought: ‘This is fantastic. Finally, the government will acknowledge that we need to do something in the western corridor of Brisbane and we are going to deliver something on the ground.’ I was excited. I did not agree with their policy, because I understood what it was about—it was about the politics, not the outcomes—but I thought, ‘At least I’m going to get some money in my area.’ Guess what? There is no funding for the western corridor. I do not want to be cynical about this. As John Howard always says: ‘We’ll let the record tell the story. We’ll let the record stand for itself.’ Why is it that 90 per cent of ATCs are in coalition marginal seats?

See this speech in context