Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

In beginning my remarks, I would like to comment on a few of the things that the previous speaker said in relation to training kids in the regions so they can go on to jobs in food processing—if those jobs actually exist, which is the big part of this debate that is missing. If we are serious about training kids in the region and getting vocational skills, getting TAFE qualifications, going through the good RTOs and getting a certificate, then let us ensure that they have a job to go to. One of the other problems that we have in the regions, particularly in regional Victoria and New South Wales, is that a lot of these jobs are being performed by people who are here on 417 and 457 visas. We need more than empty rhetoric from National Party members who stand up in this House and say, 'We are training the kids, and they will go to jobs in food processing in the region.' When they go to that job they are competing against somebody who has been brought in here on a visa, which means that they are being paid less than the person working next to them. Within this debate we need to make sure that if somebody stands up here and says, 'That's okay, they're going to get jobs in food processing,' let us ensure they have jobs in food processing to go to.

Another comment that is being made by people opposite is that this is all the fault of the Labor government, that Labor created this mess and that the coalition are the heroes, riding in on their white horses to clean up the mess. It is not a Labor mess. This mess was started by the former Howard government. In 2007, the Howard government extended FEE-HELP to include the VET sector for the approval of diploma and advanced diploma courses. VET FEE-HELP commenced in 2009. This has been a problem that has been a long time brewing. It was a Labor government that introduced the Australian Skills Quality Authority to try to tackle some of the problems that were being experienced in the sector.

There is at least one thing that both sides of the House can agree on, that there is a problem. There is rorting going on and we do need action. There are countless media reports—not just recent media reports but reports that go back some time—exposing the outrageous rorting that is going on within the system. For example, take what has been going on in our contract security industry for many, many years. You will meet a security officer who is working right next door to another security officer. One of them will have completed their training in a day, where they paid for their course up-front. I can remember security officers telling me that it was a tick-and-flick process. They were presented with the exam and they were also given a copy of the exam with the answers. Basically, they had to go through and tick and flick. They got the paperwork that they required from their RTO, submitted that and, on the basis of that paperwork, were issued a security licence.

This is clearly and obviously a rorting of the system. There is no way that this particular security officer could have the skills or qualifications that are needed to work in the security industry. To work in the industry, a security officer in Victoria is required to go through compulsory restraints training to ensure that, if they have to restrain a member of the public, it is done in a safe way. There is no way you can physically learn to do this through a tick-and-flick program. This is a problem that has been occurring for quite some time in the security industry and has started to be investigated by the Australian Skills Quality Authority, an institution that was set up by the former Labor government to crack down on this behaviour.

Another industry which has received some media attention recently is ECE, early childhood education. It is unfortunate that we learn that childcare centres in this country have started their own black list of accredited training organisations providing poor-quality graduates that they are not willing to employ. The ABC reported in September last year that the childcare centres had started an unofficial black list of training providers that they were not willing to use because the graduates were so poor. They argue that there had been an explosion in the number of trainers being offered cert IIIs and diplomas in child care after the government made qualifications mandatory. The childcare centres say that they know some of these organisations have created tick-and-flick systems, where the students were effectively buying their qualification. What we have seen happen is a policy which was about encouraging skills and qualifications in early childhood education being exploited by these providers, where they set themselves up as fly-by-night operations and tick-and-flick organisations. The way the models of these organisations work is that they wait to be caught. If it is an organisation or a training provider in security or child care, they will rip off as many students as they can, wait to be caught, disappear and then set up as another training organisation under a different name the next day. We have to ask ourselves: at what point do we declare the system broken and start looking at a better way to deliver vocational skills in this country?

I should note the comments of some students who have been refused work or have tried to work in the childcare industry after receiving their qualifications from one of these dodgy providers. One particular young woman, who was doing a diploma in early learning, said that half the class dropped out after two years because they realised they were not going to get the skills that they needed to work in the early childhood education sector. For the half of the class that dropped out, not only did they then have debts to pay back to this government but they also were left without qualifications to get them work. This young woman said that, when she started working in a childcare centre, she realised she did not have the skills to cope as she did not have the training that she needed to do the programming for the children and she struggled with the class sizes. This brave woman says that she has such a passion for the sector that she has now restarted her diploma with a better provider. So she will end up with two debts in order to get her qualifications. She says: 'It's not really fair that I undertook a course in good faith and I went through this experience.' These are the kinds of people that we should be working to protect when they undertake study in this country. It is up to this government and our state governments to ensure that the study that students undertake will in fact result in a qualification that will be acceptable to employers.

Another childcare worker, in Melbourne, said that her cert III course involved rewriting slabs of a textbook into work sheets. She said they were assigned homework but were told, 'Here's your textbook, here's your notebook; just fill it in in your own words. You don't need to use your own words, really; write it as it is in the book because, that way, you can guarantee to get the best mark.' If we think about what is involved in early childhood education and what our early childhood educators do in centres, it is a practical job. You need to be working with children. Apart from the programming, which is quite technical and book based, a large part of the role is hands-on. To suggest that, to qualify for an early childhood education diploma, it is good enough just to copy word for word out of a textbook without stepping into a childcare centre is beyond what is acceptable and another example of why reform in this area is so important.

When it comes to skills and ensuring that we have a workforce that is ready and ensuring that we are getting good value for money as taxpayers, I believe we need to start looking at the kind of structure that we have in Australia. We need to start reinvesting in TAFE and the public institutions that we do know deliver good-quality vocational skills and training. In my own area of Bendigo, I am grateful and proud that the new Labor government has committed extra funding to ensure that there are no further job losses at the campus like the job losses we saw under the former government and that some of the courses are coming back. Bendigo is an area of growth and it has quite a lot of new housing developments going ahead, yet Bendigo TAFE last year closed their cabinet-making course. It is a bit hard to build a kitchen if you do not have cabinet-makers. One of the reasons they cited for having to shut down the course is that they did not have enough students enrolled in the course. When speaking to the TAFE, they said that part of the problem was that they were being undercut by a number of RTOs and that some young people were going into those other courses and being promised the world. They were told that they could fast-track their skills and fast-track their certs and start earning money sooner in the industry.

Because we have not had enough action in this area, and because we have these dodgy providers out there, there has also been a knock-on effect in our TAFEs, who are delivering quality. Some may say that this is the demand-driven system. Some may say that this is what happens when you have a market and that those that are less popular will drop out. But those that are less popular—like our TAFE courses—tend to be the courses that take longer, and tend to be the courses where people actually get the skills they need. They are the institutions that we should be investing in and making sure are a priority for funding when it comes to this area.

The proliferation of registered training organisations has, in my opinion, backfired. We are now increasingly seeing report after report, from industry after industry, of people coming forward to say that they have paid for a course but have not received the skills that their employers require. Last year, the TAFE inquiry that was set up by this House came to Bendigo. I can remember hearing from one of the people giving evidence that they had completed an apprenticeship in hairdressing. Yet, when they started their job, on their first day, the principal hairstylist came up to this young graduate and said, 'You can't cut hair. You're going to have to start again. That's not how you cut hair.' This young apprentice had just completed her apprenticeship. She had what she thought were qualifications, and she now had to start again. These are just some of the many examples of students who are being, in many ways, ripped off and taken for a ride by these dodgy providers.

As I said earlier in my contribution, this is not a problem that has occurred in just the last few years. This is a problem that goes back to the Howard government, when they first extended FEE-HELP—which was a good idea, but we needed to make sure that the education providers were ready. It is good that we are introducing stronger regulations requiring RTOs to declare their relationships with sales brokers. It is good that we are seeing more reform in this area so we can catch out more of the dodgy providers, but I would argue that not enough is being done.

I would also argue that we need to do an analysis about whether funding this system in this way—providing FEE-HELP to private, profit-making providers—is actually the right call, or whether we need to go back and start investing properly in our publicly funded TAFEs, and ensuring that they are able to deliver the courses. We used to have a very good structure of skills delivery in this country: a strong apprenticeships scheme, and a strong TAFE sector. That has been eroded away and replaced, in many cases, with a shell of what used to be a TAFE system, a handful of apprenticeships compared with what there used to be, and a dodgy RTO system that is not delivering the skills that this country is paying for, that the students are paying for, and that employers expect.

I believe that the government needs to do more to address these shortfalls and really get serious about delivering skills, whether it be at the apprenticeship level or at the TAFE and vocational level. A start would be to restore the $2 billion that has been cut from skills and training since those opposite have come to office.

See this speech in context