Andrew Robb (Goldstein, Liberal Party, Minister for Vocational and Further Education) Share this | Hansard source

What we have not heard is the detail. Which schools are going to get the $500,000, $1 million or $1.5 million? Which schools will have to wait until 2018 for their piece of the pie? Who decides which schools get what? What are the criteria? Are we going to see Latham’s hit list again by stealth? Will schools miss out because they are private schools or because they raise money through fundraising? Where will all the trained teachers for these schools go? On average there would be about 70 teachers per school. Surely, seven or eight teachers would be required for a trade centre of any consequence. That is about 20,000 new teachers with technical and university teaching qualifications. Where are the 20,000 teachers going to come from? Where is the detail? What school funding will cover more than one trade? Are the schools going to cover different trades so that students have to pick and choose? None of this has been thought through. What we have is typical Labor: they tell us what they are going to do but not how they are going to do it. This has not been thought through. This is policy on the run. This is tricky policy designed to give the impression of doing something significant. It allows them to run around the country and make little announcements implying that they are going to create a trade centre in each school for $500,000. What a total joke that is.

These colleges are going gang busters. They are something we are very proud of. We have nearly 2,000 students enrolled around the country in the first six months of the operation of these colleges. We have enormous demand—for example, in Bendigo we cannot keep up with the demand from local businesses. In the last few weeks hundreds of parents and prospective students have turned up to information nights at colleges all around the country. These are a wonderful investment in the future. This is a visionary initiative of the Howard government. We must reach a situation where a high-quality technical education is as valued as a university degree. One of the biggest mistakes we made as a community 20 or 30 years ago was to close the dedicated technical schools around Australia.

The states have failed to meet this critical need because the Australian Education Union will not allow it. They are philosophically and fundamentally opposed to specialisation in schools, and they are tweaking your tail. The unions are spending $30 million on trying to get you back into office and you are doing their bidding. You are stopping any specialisation that might take place in schools—in this instance, technical education. In the meantime tens of thousands of young people born with strong technical and creative talents are condemned to be treated as second-class students in largely academic schools. You know it, and you are doing nothing other than talking down this great initiative. They need an environment where what these young people are good at at secondary school level is celebrated. We need to build self-esteem, self-belief and motivation. They need to feel good about themselves. At the year 11 and 12 level, we need not only the literacy and numeracy skills but also for these young people to feel the self-esteem and the self-belief that comes from these technical colleges. These three additional technical colleges in greater Penrith, north-eastern Perth and southern Brisbane will make an important contribution to the lives of young Australians and to our ongoing skills needs. Hopefully the state governments will follow suit, and hopefully in time those opposite will see the benefit and the great value of providing specialised technical training at a secondary school level. I suspect that the politics behind this initiative will disappear after the next election. I commend the bill to the House.

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