Adam Bandt (Melbourne, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

Vocational education and training in this country is in a mess. And it's not the fault of the teachers and educators at TAFE, who are doing their best and doing amazing work to ensure that students and apprentices across the country get the skills that they need. It's in a mess because, for years and years and years, Liberal and Labor decided to treat education as a commodity—not as something that would be good for the population and good for the people receiving it but as a commodity where everything had to be subject to the laws of the market, where you sink or swim and some people make a lot of money at the expense of other people.

As a result, what we've seen over many, many years is the central role of TAFE as the main provider of world-standard technical and further education in this country go down and down and down, and we've seen the rise of dodgy private providers, who are in it for the money and who sign up people as quick as they can, deliver something that is a substandard education, may well go bust a year or two later, and make a lot of money out of the public purse along the way. You see this happening right across the board, in the privatisation of everything from electricity and essential services to universities and the technical and further education sector. Whereas governments once saw a clear role for themselves, to oversee and fund vocational education and training, in recent decades they've taken their hands off the wheel, invited in private operators and set up this crazy funding system that encourages and rewards people to get money from the government for providing so-called education and skills to students as cheaply as they can. And it has brought in the shonks, as it would.

Over time, I've seen that in my electorate, all over the place. Some of these operators set themselves up next to the public housing flats and offer qualifications, certificates and diplomas in courses that people go and enrol in in good faith, because there's someone with a big marketing budget coming in and saying, 'Come and do this course,' and they do it. And then, at the end of it, they get a qualification that it turns out, in the real world, isn't looked on very highly—it is looked on nowhere near as well as a TAFE course or a TAFE qualification—but the private provider has got the money, they've put it in their pocket and they might disappear a year later. They might have enticed people with a free iPad or some deals along the way. But who gets hurt? Well, the student gets hurt because they end up with a piece of paper that doesn't help them find a job, and the taxpayer gets slugged because we've handed out money to a private operator when we could have just given it to the public sector to do a world-standard job.

Over the years, vocational education and training has suffered death by a thousand cuts, and privatisation by stealth. It has taken this government six or seven years to wake up and do something about it. They have overseen cuts to the TAFE system and to the vocational education system, and now, during the coronavirus crisis, we're all waking up as a country, and they're realising, 'Oh, perhaps placing our faith in free trade agreements and just assuming we can buy everything in from overseas isn't the way to go; perhaps we should have spent the last seven years building up capacities and skills in this country instead of attacking our TAFE system.' But they're not the only ones who are responsible. It happened before that as well, because this idea of starting to treat education like a commodity, where everything is subject to the laws of the market instead of just doing it on the basis of public good, was actually something supported by the Labor government. They brought in a scheme that gave private operators an incentive to lure in as many students as possible in order to get government subsidies but without there being a commensurate obligation to provide students something close to useful training. As I've said, it was one of the biggest rorts in the nation's history that resulted in billions of taxpayer dollars wasted, left thousands of students without qualifications and saddled with debt, and did little to build the capacity of the Australian workforce.

The answer, though, can't be to just paper over it by rebranding it with the new National Skills Commissioner; I'll come back to this in a moment. There are some useful steps in this bill, but those who've been around here for a while will have a sense of deja vu, which I will go through in a moment. We've got to do more. Imagine if we treated our primary schools the way the government treats TAFE and we said: 'Oh, well, no, we don't think it's the government's responsibility to ensure that every child can have a place in public schools if they want. Everyone should have to go out and compete, and look to private providers with big marketing budgets coming in. Perhaps we'll just give out vouchers for school systems. We won't see it as the government's core responsibility to provide a public school education for everyone.' There would be an outcry. There would be an outcry if people weren't guaranteed a place in good, world-standard public schools.

But both Labor and the Liberals decided over many years that something apparently is different about tertiary education, just as something, according to Labor and the Liberals, is apparently different about university education. They've turned it all into one big market, but the thing about markets is that there are winners and losers. It's what happens in markets. Markets have their place, but turning education into a market is not the place of a market. Governments over many, many years have gone out of their way to take one of these things that we all have in common—like our utilities, like our education system—and then break them apart and sell them off to the highest bidder. Who ends up getting hurt? The taxpayer, and, in this case, the student.

If you are serious about reforming the vocational education training sector, you would put TAFE back on a pedestal and make it the primary provider. You would not have this scheme that says, 'Perhaps we'll give some taxpayer money to some private operators so that they can go and make a profit out of educating people.' No. We treat education as a public good and we treat the creation of skills in this country as a public good. For years and years now, whether it's by the decimation of TAFE, the corporatisation and marketisation of our universities or Labor and the Liberals signing up to free trade agreements that have undermined our manufacturing capacity, one of the things that has been highlighted by the coronavirus crisis is that we have lost a lot of abilities and skills in this country. We've lost a lot of the capacity to make things here, because under Labor and the Liberals we were told the answer is: 'Don't worry. Just sign up to free trade agreements, even if they make it impossible to do things that would promote local industry.'

Let's take an example of some of the things we could think about doing if we want to tackle the crises that we're facing at the moment. We could say, 'Let's make Australia a world leader in green steel,' which is steel that's produced from renewable energy. Let's say that we've got some projects, like high-speed rail or renewable energy projects, that we want to get built. Let's say that we'll put in place some local content rules that say, 'You've got to buy Australian green steel to put on those.' Let's say that we're going to give preference to Australian companies that employ apprentices to do it. And let's say we're going to use government money to subsidise it. A lot of people would think: 'That sounds like a good use of government money. Let's use it to skill up people and to get Australia to the point where we've rebuilt our manufacturing capacity, where we've got things to sell to the rest of the world that they want from a zero-carbon economy.' Most people would think that is a sensible use of government, of education and of public money.

But it would probably fall foul of a host of free trade agreements, because you're not allowed to give that kind of support and preference to your local industries—or certainly many of our competitors have the capacity to argue that. Under the free trade agreements that the Liberals and Labor have signed us up to, state owned companies in China would have the ability to take the Australian government to court and sue them and get them to change the law, because they have said, 'You have passed laws that benefit the Australian people.' So, we have found ourselves in a situation where we have lost a lot of the skills that we need, because of the systematic attacks on TAFE and the deprioritising of TAFE by Labor and the Liberals and because of the deprioritising of developing Australia's manufacturing capacity, and now that the coronavirus has hit everyone is running around pretending, 'It wasn't me, it wasn't me.' Well, Labor and Liberals, you have been caught with your pants down. This is what three decades of neoliberalism gets you and it won't be fixed just by renaming it as a skills commissioner.

We need to go back to basics and say that the purpose of government is to ensure that education is free and available to everyone who wants it and that it is going to provide the skills that this country needs to ensure that we can have a manufacturing renaissance in this country, that we can have a construction-led recovery where we build half a million public and social housing units over the next 15 years, which would generate 40,000 construction jobs and 4,000 apprenticeships and help to house the homeless. That is the direction that we need to go, so a bit of rebranding isn't going to do it. For those who wonder why we are cynical about this bit of rebranding, back in 2008 the Rudd government established Skills Australia as an independent statutory body to provide 'expert and independent advice in relation to Australia’s workforce skills needs and workforce development needs', which included advice on skills shortages, training priorities, workforce participation and productivity and competitiveness. In 2012, the Gillard government rebranded Skills Australia into the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency, basically the same independent body, with responsibility for advice. Then, in 2014, the wrecking ball that was the Abbott government abolished the AWPA. Labor, as is often the case, opposed the abolition of the AWPA but voted for the bill.

So, in the last 12 years, the parliament has established, renamed and abolished an independent skills authority, and now we are establishing one all over again. We will support this bill, because it is taking some positive steps, but establishing, then reimposing and then rebranding and renaming a body is not the answer. The answer is to say that TAFE is important, that VET is important, when delivered by our public teachers and lecturers, who know what they are doing. We should not turn this into a business or a market. There are many things that of course should be businesses and markets, but government provided vocational education is not one of them.

With the skills crisis and jobs crisis in this country we see nearly four in 10 young people at the moment either without a job or without enough hours of work. It is a national crisis, and it is only going to get worse. It has been bad for a long time—since the GFC. Young people have basically been in recession since the GFC and it is going to get worse, because we have lost a lot of entry-level jobs. If we want to deal with the jobs crisis, the skills crisis, the economic crisis we are facing and the climate crisis, then government needs to get its hand back on the steering wheel and say, 'We are going to do things that are in the country's interest to rebuild our skills and rebuild our capacity here.' That is why we have been advancing a Green New Deal that has at its core a skills and jobs guarantee for young people, where they will be guaranteed a free place at TAFE or university, a guaranteed income that they could live on and a guaranteed job, if they want it, working on some nation-building, planet-saving projects to ensure that we tackle all of those crises and get this country back on track.

We have so many things that we need to do in this country. We have a manufacturing sector to rebuild, which was decimated not only by free trade agreements that Labor and the Liberals signed up to but also by the mining boom, which decimated manufacturing in non-mining states. Everyone thought we could just keep digging things up and selling them off and that it wouldn't come with consequences, no matter how high the dollar was. Well, it decimated manufacturing in places like Victoria. We have to rebuild that. We have to get to 100 per cent renewable energy in this country, as quickly as we can. We have to house the more than 100,000 people who are homeless every day. We have to find jobs for people working in the construction industry. We can do all of this with a green new deal. With a government led plan of investment and action we can meet the challenges we face, we can find decent, well-paying jobs for people and we can restore the skills base in this country.

I'll conclude by saying we're not going to stand in the way of this bill, but if you want to get skills back in this country, which the Greens do, you've got to restore funding to TAFE and you've got to make TAFE the central provider of vocational and technical education in this country.

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