Terri Butler (Griffith, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Preventing Family Violence) Share this | Hansard source

It's 'World TAFE Day' today—I think it's Australian TAFE Day, but I have to elevate it to 'World TAFE Day'—as you are all well aware and you are, of course, Mr Deputy Speaker. On a day on which we recognise the importance of TAFE, I think it's useful to pick up a few of the points that the member for Bowman just made. He talked about the importance of training people in preference to temporary skilled migration. But there have been occupations on the skills list for longer than it would have taken to train people up in those occupations to remove the need to rely on temporary skilled migration. Bricklayers are the obvious, classic example. Bricklayer has been on that temporary skilled migration skills list longer than it takes to train bricklayers. It's absolutely ridiculous that in this country we have so failed to properly invest in vocational education that we have got occupations on the skills list that have been there for years that could have been trained up domestically. It's not a coincidence, because of course this government has no real interest in investing in vocational education and skills. This is a government that's cut $3 billion from vocational education and skills. At the same time, unfortunately, in this budget that includes $270 million in new cuts.

This is a very, very stark contrast to Labor's approach to vocational education. We want to see more apprenticeships. There are 140,000 fewer apprenticeships today than when the coalition took office back in 2013. We want to see that trend reversed. We're going to do it in a few ways. We're going to make sure there are opportunities for apprentices through procurement practices that require that one in 10 people working on government funded contracts be apprentices, for example. We also want to invest in vocational education. That starts with public TAFE. It starts with renewing and refreshing the equipment and facilities of public TAFEs. We want to make sure people have the opportunity to go to TAFE. We have committed to covering the up-front fees for 100,000 new TAFE students should we win government.

My question on TAFE is: what is the government going to do to make sure that those occupations come off the skills list by actually training people up so that we can have home-grown bricklayers, rather than having bricklayers coming in on 457 visas? My next question on TAFE is: will the government commit to stop making cuts to vocational education in this country and commit to properly funding vocational education with publicly funded TAFE to be at the forefront of that commitment?

Deputy Speaker, you would also be aware that this government, in the MYEFO announced on 18 December or thereabouts, cut around $2.2 billion from higher education. The government did that by basically implementing a university funding freeze to cap funding for the number of places for 2017 for the demand driven system so that there wouldn't be an increase in 2018 or 2019. Universities Australia estimated that that was about 9,500 places that that would be equivalent to in 2018. Universities have, of course, tried to absorb these massive funding cuts. I met with one university just this morning who told me—apropos of the member for Bowman's comments about the importance of the National Innovation and Science Agenda—that one of the ways they'd coped with the cuts was to cut courses in relation to improving teachers' ability to teach science. This is what universities are being forced to do. They're being forced to either not offer places that they'd previously offered for 2018 or, to avoid welshing on the commitments they'd made to prospective students, find other ways to make cuts to accommodate the massive funding cuts that this government imposed in MYEFO at the end of last year and baked into the budget in May this year.

I'd like to know whether the government will relent and lift its freeze on funding, and whether the government has any intention of ensuring that the freeze has some way of taking into account inflation. I'd like the assistant minister to confirm that the freeze means that a university cannot receive more dollars in 2018 or in 2019 than it did in 2017 for places funded under the demand driven system, the non-designated CGS places. I'd like the government to advise the year in which the freeze will end. This is a matter of crucial importance, not only to universities but to future prospective students and their families. I'd also like the assistant minister to advise exactly how the performance measures that were announced at the same time as MYEFO are going to work, and what additional funding will be available to pay universities in respect of those performance measures, and how those performance measures will be assessed in respect of university funding.

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