Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Jagajaga asked me, 'What did the New South Wales Minister for Skills say?' Well, he was very interesting on this matter. Yesterday, before we found out, courtesy of Fairfax Media, that there was this draft proposal for a takeover wandering around through COAG processes, the Minister for Skills in New South Wales very helpfully came out and told us in the media that he thought his federal colleagues were hopeless at running the VET sector and had made an absolute dog's breakfast of getting the VET FEE-HELP issue under control.

The Prime Minister, who wanted to make much of this in his answer in question time today, just skipped a small period of time—two years. Actually, it is a bit over two years now, where we have seen, under their watch, VET FEE-HELP grow from around $700 million in 2013 to around $1.7 billion. We have had three ministers grappling with this issue over that time and failing to actually rein in the problem. This performance, if you like, across three ministers—and I think the whole government needs to take responsibility for it—is not marked down as a fail by us alone. It has also been marked down as a fail by their state colleagues. I cannot imagine anything clearer or more damning. Not only the Minister for Skills in New South Wales but also Tasmanian government basically said, 'Over our dead body. We are not going to let that lot get hold of our TAFE system.' So the reality for this federal conservative government is that they cannot find a friend anywhere for their own performance, let alone expanding that performance to a complete federal takeover of the sector.

Labor is absolutely determined that TAFE will have a strong future in this country. The Prime Minister, being asked directly by the Leader of the Opposition about TAFE and the implications for TAFE in their proposed takeover, did not mention the word 'TAFE' once. That is the track record of this government. They very rarely talk about TAFE as the public provider in the sector.

It is our view that a balanced VET sector is built on the back of a strong and dominant public provider, through TAFE. To deliver that you need to ensure that they are not treated just like any other training provider, because they are not. They have a far greater responsibility in having a direct capacity to deliver government priorities and directions for ensuring that regional and rural Australia have access to quality, affordable vocational training and education. I think the minister at the table particularly, but also other members opposite, would well understand how important TAFE is in their communities. But they never talk about how they are going to make it sustainable into the future.

In fact, this proposition in this leaked document would be devastating for TAFE. I am not just saying that as an assessment or from an analytical approach. I would invite the minister to look at what happened in Victoria under the conservative government, which completely deregulated the system and took away the base community funding that TAFE used to ensure it could deliver in rural and regional Australia, and TAFE was decimated. The Andrews government is working hard to rebuild it. But I will tell you what: when you destroy it—and you can do that quickly—it takes a hell of a long time to build it up again. (Time expired)

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