Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Australia) Share this | Hansard source

Australia has been slipping down the OECD leaderboard in a few areas lately—on internet speed and corruption, we are dropping down bit by bit—but there is one index where we've already made it right to the bottom, to dead last. That's the leaderboard that ranks our capacity to engage in global value chains. As supply chains fragment more and more, and manufacturers start drawing their components from around the world, smart countries are making sure that their businesses, both large and small, can be part of that, because already 70 per cent of global trade is in intermediate goods and services and capital goods, and that is continuing to grow. And us? Well, we rank worst among the OECD countries in terms of our capacity to exploit that change.

There are some obvious causes. The deliberate destruction of the car industry is one, but so is the decimation of Australia's once-proud VET system. The shambolic Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government have had five years to fix the VET system and prepare our nation for this global trend, but what did they do instead? What they always do—they cut it. They ripped $3 billion from training and apprenticeships. Dodgy training providers continue to go bust. Thousands of students have debts for courses they haven't done and in many cases didn't know they were enrolled in. Employers are reporting growing skill shortages. We have 140,000 fewer apprenticeships. Student enrolments in TAFE are down nearly 25 per cent.

Labor announced its TAFE policy back in February, including the waiving of up-front fees for 100,000 TAFE students, $100 million for revitalising campuses across Australia and, importantly, a major review of the TAFE, VET and post-secondary education system, the first review of vocational education and training in more than 40 years. It is long overdue. What happened? Two things. Firstly, the Prime Minister made a number of astonishing claims, including saying that Australia's VET system is better than the German model, which is the global benchmark. It might have been once, but it certainly isn't now, after five years of this short-sighted government. Then the Prime Minister announced his own review of TAFE. Not agreeing with himself, he decided to review TAFE. This is where it gets really weird. He announced a review last week, on Wednesday, 28 November. Remember that date, because this major review will be accepting submissions until 25 January—for two months, over the Christmas break. What kinds of submissions are they going to get? To make matters worse, there was no consultation on the terms of reference, and he has appointed the conservative New Zealand minister who presided over the decimation of regional training centres in New Zealand and a $3 billion black hole in funding to do the review—over a two-month period over Christmas! We know there's an election coming up, so the only way this makes any sense at all is as an excuse to pork-barrel. We need a government that cares about TAFE because of what it does for our population and our business, not a government that discovers TAFE when it thinks it can use a bit of pork-barrelling to win an election.

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