Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

I too rise to speak on the Free TAFE Bill 2024. It's always interesting in this place, the people who come up with the names of bills, like a headline writer in a newspaper. 'Free TAFE Bill' sounds great; it sounds fantastic—free! It probably should be called 'the taxpayer funded TAFE bill' or the 'free for some but not for others TAFE bill'.

I want to talk a bit about how I think TAFE can be better and how we can move forward as a country by making education and TAFE better, based on some experiences I've had overseas, and also talk about that concept we have of 'free'. What is 'free'? It's great when you go down to the pub and someone's put on free beer. It might be free for us, but someone, somewhere, has paid, because everything has a cost, and that cost has to be borne somewhere. It is the same for free parking or whatever it is. The reality is that, for everything we do, for all the decisions we make in this place, a cost is borne in almost every case by the Australian taxpayer. So, calling something free is a misnomer. The cost is borne by the Australian taxpayer.

I come from a very entrepreneurial place. Nicholls is made up of people who often came from a long way across the world throughout history, to make a better life. They've worked incredibly hard, often working on farms and then buying their own farms and setting up food manufacturing businesses. And people work in those food manufacturing businesses. People set up businesses. We're not really a taxpayer funded region like, might I say, the great city of Canberra, where a lot of people are paid for by the taxpayer. We come from a place where people make their own money through their ingenuity and their effort.

Those people, because they work so hard to make it and put so much of their own risk to make it, are really interested in how governments spend that money, and those people are pretty concerned with the way governments are spending it at the moment. I can't tell you how many taxpayers called me, even though it's a state issue, to tell me how hard they work to pay tax, only to see the Victorian Labor government flush $589 million of it down the toilet on a Commonwealth Games that was planned for and is not going to happen. The taxpayers in my electorate, who, as the member for Gippsland said, worked damned hard for that, are very annoyed that government incompetence could lead to that much wastage.

I and many people in my electorate are the beneficiaries of education, and a lot of people in this place are the beneficiaries of education, and everyone in this place really supports education. The member for Gippsland was right when he talked about the fact that this attempt to make a fault line between them caring about education and us not caring is ridiculous. Many of us have benefited from education. I've attempted three degrees, and I've graduated with two of them. My first one didn't work out, but I did have to pay; I had to pay for not completing that course—and I'll come back to that a bit later. I was working on a farm in the nineties and I realised I wanted to move forward in my career in agriculture and that I needed more agricultural education, so I went and did a degree in agricultural science at the University of Melbourne. I took up what was then known as a HECS loan. That's a great agreement with the government where they say, 'Sam, we're going to invest in your education, and when you start earning down the track as a result of our investment, you can pay back that loan.' And I did that. It took me a little while, but I did it.

Many years later, I wanted to get educated again, so I went to La Trobe University, which, fortunately for me, has a regional campus. I wanted to do an MBA.

Again, the government said, 'Sam, we're prepared to invest in your education by giving you, but you've got a capacity to pay, so we're going to get you to pay it back.' At that time, it was called a FEE-HELP loan. That effort of mine to get educated, earn more money and then pay it back into the pool helped other people who did not have a capacity to pay immediately. I did my MBA and I paid that one off quicker because I was earning more money by that stage.

I think a responsible government has got to look at how things are funded. Responsible governments, in the past, have looked at university. Do we have university that is just open slather and free for everyone or do we have an arrangement where we invest in you, but when you've got a capacity to pay it back, you do that. That's what a responsible government does.

I am interested to know, too, where exactly the funds are coming from this so-called free or—as I should say—taxpayer-funded TAFE, because page 3 of the Explanatory Memorandum of the Free TAFE Bill states, 'There is no financial impact resulting from the Free TAFE Bill 2024.' This sounds like magic pudding stuff to me. You're going to make something free, but that thing has a cost which you'll shift to somewhere—but then you're saying there is no financial impact. I don't quite understand that. Maybe I am not that bright—that's a possibility—but, if someone can explain that to me, I would love to know how there is no financial impact resulting from the Free TAFE Bill. Maybe that's one for the minister to come in to this place and talk about.

I don't want to criticise people working in the TAFE sector; I think they're doing a really good job, and there are some good outcomes from TAFE. But in my discussions with businesses in my electorate, particularly in hospitality, manufacturing and agriculture, they don't think TAFE's hitting the mark. They don't think that TAFE is delivering exactly what they need. TAFE does some good things, but I think the structure and the investment needs to change. I don't think the investment needs to go into making it free for people; I think the investment needs to go into making it better for people and better for Australian industry.

I had the great fortune of winning a Churchill Fellowship at the start of 2020. My plan was to go to Europe and North America to study a problem that I'd identified in my electorate—well, I wasn't a member of parliament then, but it was a problem in the region that I lived in. That was the fact that we were having trouble getting students at school to move into business. I wanted to see what countries like Germany, Sweden, Finland and the United Kingdom were doing about that. I got delayed because of the COVID pandemic, but I did get to go last year during the mid-winter break.

I was really impressed with the German system of vocational education. I toured many places: Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart, Fresenius, the chamber of commerce in Frankfurt, and to a terrific technical school, I suppose you'd call it.

What impressed me the most about their system was that students got apprenticeships and, depending on the system, they spent two or three days working in the business—for example, Mercedes-Benz—and, for the remaining two or three days of the week they were getting a technical education at a vocational education school. The other good thing about that was that the vocational education system and the curriculum wasn't so much decided upon and run by the government; it was run by the chamber of commerce. Industry had more involvement in the curriculum than I have noticed that industry has in the TAFE curriculum here. I think that's something we can work on to improve TAFE. The other thing that impressed me about that was the quality of the technical school and the quality of the teaching.

Whilst I don't want to denigrate TAFE, I thought that what I saw in Germany was better than what we have here in TAFE.

I say that as a solution. Instead of investing in and spending the taxpayers' money on making it free for anyone—as the member for Gippsland pointed out, there's no consideration of capacity to pay. You could have a billionaire walk in and do a fee-free TAFE course. You could have someone who has enormous resources or someone whose parents have enormous resources who might pay. It's not targeted at the most vulnerable people, whom we do want to get an education. So, instead of that investment into just making it open slather or free for anyone who walks through the door, why don't we invest in improving the system and look at what countries overseas do in relation to vocational education? I think that's really important.

The member for Gippsland raised some very good points—and I interjected behind him, just to give him some support—about the word 'evaluation'. It's important, and the onus is on governments and ministers in this place, to evaluate the effect of the taxpayer spend. As I pointed out before, many people have made a very critical and poor evaluation of the Victorian government's decision to waste $589 million on a Commonwealth Games that didn't go ahead.

There have been many questions from this side of the House to the minister to say, 'Of the 508,000 enrolments, how many people have completed their course, how many people are progressing through their course, and how many people are dropping out?' There seems to be some real confusion as to whether that data is available or not. Senate estimates seem to have uncovered that there is data available, but then the minister comes in and says, 'They're four-year courses, so we don't know yet.' I don't think that's good enough. I think the minister has to be able to say, 'Here is the evaluation of where those enrolments are up to,' because we, the parliament, and the taxpayers who are working very hard to pay this tax are spending a lot of money on this policy, and they want to know what bang they're getting for their buck. I think that's reasonable, and the minister needs to come clean on some of that. We need more robust evaluation of a policy such as this.

Vocational academic pathways are really important for people. People need to have access to university or vocational education. It's not for everyone, but it certainly doesn't enhance people's lives. It enhances people's earning capacity and it enhances us as a nation. But what's the best bang for buck for our taxpayer dollars in relation to our education systems? Is it just making it free for everyone, or can we invest that money in a better way, looking, as I've said, to Europe? Is it reasonable to say that an Australian who benefits from the education that they receive from the taxpayer should contribute to that education? Not necessarily upfront, because that would be a barrier to entry, but down the track in the way that FEE-HELP and other student loan systems have been set up in relation to other courses. I pose that question.

The coalition won't be supporting this bill, because we don't see it as being a reasonable expenditure of taxpayers' money. There are too many questions about how it would be funded and it fails the general fairness test. It doesn't target money at vulnerable people, it just sort of throws it out there. Again, I'm for investment in Australian education, but let's make it a targeted investment that improves the education system and our students, and benefits our industries as much as it can.

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