Damian Drum (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I want to commend the member for Dunkley for putting this motion on the books today. It's a great opportunity to talk about a range of educational settings within my electorate. Firstly, in relation to TAFE college and training, we have an amazing TAFE college, GOTAFE, based in Shepparton in the Goulburn Valley. But it needs to have an enormous amount of money spent on the facility. We potentially need $100 million spent on GOTAFE and its five or six different campuses.

The Victorian state government has simply stopped spending money on our Shepparton campus. When you go inside and look at the motor mechanic, there are trucks there that simply cannot get their bonnets off because they don't have enough headroom. When you're learning to be a mechanic, you need to have access to the electronics that enables you to dial into Berlin, and Berlin will then tell you what's wrong with the car. That's what the modern mechanic needs. You can't get that sort of training in Shepparton, because the state government won't invest in the TAFE college to give them not world-leading but basic training to be a mechanic. We need a state government that stops talking about the rubbish and starts supplying some funding so that these TAFE colleges have the correct facilities. We know that apprentices are at an all-time high right now, and all those apprentices are getting half their wages paid by the federal government. Again, the Victorian state government can talk this rubbish up; however, it's the coalition that is helping them in every way.

The Greater Shepparton Secondary College, which is also a member of Hands on Learning, is one giant school that the Victorian state government built for Shepparton. So there's only one government secondary school for parents to choose to send their children. That school would potentially need a trade school added to it and a smaller campus for children who come from a region with a small primary school, who would do better in a smaller setting rather than be forced to go to school with 2,500 students. So we might need a slightly different nuanced approach. We all know that Greensborough TAFE had to shut down. We also know that the truth behind that is that the state Labor government at the time privatised registered training organisations and made the TAFE colleges ridiculously too expensive. Effectively, it's their own policies that have led to these outcomes.

The second part of the member for Dunkley's motion goes to Hands on Learning. I want to congratulate the people behind this amazing educational facility. Many schools have adopted Hands on Learning: in Victoria, 98 schools; in Queensland, 10 schools; in New South Wales, eight schools; and in Tasmania, 48 schools. In Shepparton we have Gowrie Street Primary School, along with the Greater Shepparton City Secondary College. In Echuca we have the Echuca Primary School, the Twin Rivers School, the River City Christian College and also St Joseph's College. Nathalia's primary school also has Hands on Learning.

The opportunity for those kids who are struggling academically to go and learn in a different fashion—often it means going out to a shed at the back of the school; learning how to work in a team; learning how to make things, using their hands; being tutored by potentially tradies, sometimes retired tradies. It's an opportunity for these kids to develop their self-esteem to work in a team, to build their self-esteem so that they can effectively take that new learning, that new structure, and get the confidence that they need. So while the setting for Hands on Learning may be in some building out the back, it's a front for this opportunity to develop these skills within the individuals in a different way to sitting in the classroom and learning in the same way that 70 or 80 per cent of students learn. This is a different way of learning, but it's just as critical, just as important, and the outcomes are stunning.

I would urge our government, our ministers to look at this as a way of continuing to grow Hands on Learning. Victoria is obviously doing a great job, but maybe some of the other states could pick up the running with Hands on Learning.

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