Andrew Hastie (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Do you have one? I do not think so, and I am sure that if you did it would not be worth reading for either pleasure or instruction. Instead, it seems that you guys are trapped in your own version of Groundhog Day, except, unlike the film, in which Bill Murray adapts and grows better each day, you guys seem to be travelling along the same plane of mediocrity.

So, today, when this question was posed—how is the government failing in vocational education?—I honestly thought you were being ironic, reflecting on the previous six years under the Rudd-Gillard-Rudd governments. But I will reframe it for the purposes of this MPI, and I will ask the question: how has the government been helping students in vocational education? This question is quite important to me in Canning, as I have the second-highest number of male tradesmen in the country. I also have the third-highest number of cert III and IV holders in Australia. I have a lot of industry. I have agriculture. I have mining. I have fruit growing, among other industries. So vocational training is an important part of Canning.

My predecessor Don Randall was very proud back in February 2014—I have the local news article here, from Fairfax, in fact, the Mandurah Mailwhen he talked about funding for the Coodanup Community College. It has been built. It is situated in the heart of Mandurah, which is in the heart of Canning. The centre caters for students from Coodanup, Halls Head Community College, John Tonkin College, Mandurah Catholic College and others. What we are seeing here is coalition policy. Back then $209 million in funding was promised, and we have seen that come to fruition in the Coodanup Community College.

Those opposite asked about the government and what we are doing in vocational education. The facts speak for themselves. The government has invested more than $6 billion in the vocational education training sector through funding and concessional loans. This includes $1.8 billion in payments to the states and territories and $1.4 billion that we spend on programs to support apprentices, language, literacy and numeracy and the VET sector more broadly. Importantly, we have the Australian Apprenticeship Support Network in which the electorate of Canning has two associations. We have contributed $831 million to that program. We have also given $433 million to help people build language and literacy through AMEP and the SEE program and, more recently, the Industry Skills Fund, where we have given $80 million to help industry with training, which is a very important part of our VET program.

When you have sound policy the incentives embedded in those policies drive behaviour. So what we have seen is 3.9 million people participate in the VET sector in Australia last year. People are voting with their feet. People are enrolling in a broad range of VET courses at various stages of their lives. The project that this government has inherited has been one of reform, after the six years of waste that we experienced under the Labor government—and that really goes to the heart of the question. We saw a lot of bad policy over the Labor years—my colleague the member for Forrest mentioned the pink batts program. The VET FEE-HELP program is just one permutation of the pink batts program. It has the same DNA: bad spending, which encourages bad behaviour. So we have introduced a range of the reforms to stamp out unscrupulous behaviour and enhance protections for students and taxpayers. This year we are helping to put the VET FEE-HELP scheme onto a more sustainable footing for the future, with reasonable, sensible funding that will grow the economy, protect Australians and look after Australians into the future, without saddling them with a huge debt.

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