Zoe McKenzie (Flinders, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Free TAFE Bill 2024, disingenuously titled as the bill appears to be unfunded. So we can't be so sure about the free bit, and we are none the wiser in relation to the 'who will be paying for it' bit as well. I can tell you who probably will be paying in terms of worse outcomes, wasted endeavour and unmet skill needs: the Australian people.

We see the risk of enormously wasted talent. Labor's own talking points on TAFE include that, of the 500,000 enrolments in so-called fee-free TAFE, only 13 per cent have so far resulted in a completed qualification, which means 87 per cent are yet to complete or have dropped out. Last year the South Australian skills minister let the cat out of the bag, providing evidence to the South Australian parliament in late October that the dropout rate for fee-free TAFE was around 13 per cent.

The detail of the bill, of course, reveals what we already know—a free TAFE place is not exactly free. A free TAFE place 'may not be free of all fees'. You'll find that in the small print—part 1, clause 5, 'Definitions', 'FT place'. This is what the bill says:

FT place means a free place in a course at a TAFE institution or a course provided by another VET provider.

Then there's a note in smaller print:

An FT place may not be free of all fees. The fees covered will depend on the terms and conditions of the relevant FT agreement.

So, according to their own provisions, the free TAFE place may not in fact be free, or indeed, according to this provision of the bill, it may not even be at a TAFE. George Orwell would be so proud of this one.

This legislation, together with the Prime Minister's recent announcements regarding apprentices, shows you just how much vocational education is an afterthought for this Albanese government. We heard it yesterday in question time—university, university, university; cuts to HECS fees for current debt-holding university students or graduates. Yes, let's make all the tradies pay to wipe 20 per cent off a first-year lawyer's HECS debt. Lovely!

Almost no-one in Labor has run a business—certainly no business which requires vocational and training skills. It's obvious in all of their policy settings. If they had, they would see the devastating effect this measure in this bill is having on choice both for employers and future employees, as well as on the quality and quantity of graduates in precisely the skill groups and trades that this country desperately needs.

Let me give you a local example of the chaos this kind of measure is making in my community. Just before Christmas I went to visit Sharyn. Sharyn runs a private training organisation just over the boundary of my electorate, and I visited her RTO, Nepean Industry Edge Training, a couple of times to talk to her students and to understand what guides their career choices and their hopes for the future. But, just before Christmas, Sharyn called my office in a state of panic. She was distressed because of an announcement made by the Victorian government regarding changes to their Skills First funding program that changed which qualifications would be subsidised by the Victorian government to meet Victorian skill needs, the number of funded places available and the subsidy amounts to support students.

Sharyn was told that, overnight, funded places for her training organisation, NIET, would go from 180 to no more than 50, even though she had in place a two-year contract with the Victorian government which had allowed her to invest in upskilling her staff and to purchase new training equipment for students' needs. For the previous decade this training organisation, NIET, had had a thousand funded places, so the drop-off from the previous year had already been financially challenging. But this overnight change would in fact be devastating.

Sharyn was also summarily advised that the amount of money the Victorian government offered per student would be reduced by 35 per cent. Even for students who had been enrolled in 2024, there was no grandfathering under the funding agreement which had been on foot, and they were still completing their courses in 2025. This change in funding would occur overnight. Sharyn, at the time of receiving this advice, had 180 places offered to support students in the individual support, early childhood and ageing support industries.

You have to step back for a minute and think about what is actually happening here. Each year, under this program, NIET provided qualified, job-ready graduates to disability services, child care and aged-care facilities across my electorate. It equally provides high-quality skilled people in hospitality and tourism—the stuff the Mornington Peninsula thrives on. But overnight the Victorian government had made this business unviable. Why? Because a broke Victorian government wanted to pass the buck to the Commonwealth, citing the illusion of free TAFE.

What does this mean for the peninsula? It means the loss of hundreds of urgently needed staff. What does it mean for NIET and for local employment in Frankston? NIET has to lay off six permanent and 15 casual staff. This move, literally on the eve of Christmas last year, threw NIET's students into limbo, and two weeks notice was given. NIET tried to facilitate transition to the nearby TAFE, but it was already at capacity. Students accustomed to small, tailored and flexible classes at NIET were told that TAFE class sizes were capped at 17 to 20 per group, with classes held three days a week—always during business hours—with two days being taught online, even though they are local students and learning to care for disabled and elderly people, which is a hands-on, face-to-face, practical role.

When I met with Sharyn in December, she was bereft. Her team were struggling to hold back tears as they spoke to me about what this might mean for their students. NIET is a family place where middle-aged women, in particular, returning to education and training after raising children or getting back on their feet after a separation have found peace, purpose and a sense of family.

Sharyn and her team were desperately trying to find a way to work with their students to get them to qualify before she had to exit the NIET premises. Over Christmas, Sharyn and her colleagues developed a plan for those students. She needs to find a replacement tenant for the premises on which NIET has a five-year lease, so she's going to operate for the next six months. She'll run at a loss to do this to make sure that her students get to finish their qualification. Their only alternative was to do nothing until the end of April and then try and enrol in TAFE in its next incoming cohort, on 29 April. Six months from now, the Mornington Peninsula will have lost the potential for hundreds of graduates that would have been picked up by so many businesses in desperate need of quality staff.

There is currently a waiting list of 6,000 individuals for care packages in Frankston and the Mornington Peninsula. NIET has over time been a reliable supplier of high-quality and job-ready aged-care staff to Australian Unity in Mornington and AutumnCare in Frankston and Mornington and provides ongoing training to around 250 disability support workers employed by Focus Individualised Support Services, who are based in Mornington at the Coolstores.

NIET also provides ongoing medications training to PCAs in aged-care centres and to disability support workers. Sharyn's employers often comment on her students. They stand out during placement because they've been taught the soft skills of communication and to be proactive and person centred carers. They've also got confidence in using equipment such as lifting machines and in giving dignity to clients when providing personal care such as showering and toileting. Many students they get from other training organisations haven't used any of this equipment before, and NIET students have had to teach them on the job.

There are aged-care facilities on the Mornington Peninsula which cannot operate at full capacity at the moment because they lack the qualified aged-care workers they need. Sharyn told me of people in similar positions to her who have had to do some of the hardest months of their life over the Christmas break, reconciling with the debt and the administration left to them by this overnight change from the Victorian government and the skills deficit their communities will be confronted with, all while listening to Labor cry 'fee-free TAFE', which, by the way, was never free. Just the materials at the nearby TAFE were more experience than what NIET was charging many of its students. Indeed, the students who looked to transfer to TAFE under NIET when it lost its Victorian government funding found they were all going to have to pay $460 at the fee-free TAFE, whereas at NIET, at their actual course, it was free because it had been subsidised under this Victorian government program now abolished.

When you look at the performance of TAFE under this government, it is a good idea to look at some facts. TAFE numbers are lower than they were under the coalition. In fact, the year the Albanese government introduced free TAFE, 2023, was also the year that saw nearly record-low enrolments—since 2020. I'm not here to condemn TAFE as an institution in any way. I love TAFE. I was once a TAFE student. I have the most extraordinary, high-potential TAFE in Rosebud, in my electorate. It's the only tertiary institution we have, even though technically we're meant to be metropolitan Melbourne. It's just that no-one has invested in it for years, so our young people tend to be drawn towards the shiny new facilities in Frankston or, worse, up the freeway in the city to take up the 'university, university, university' pressure that their peers, parents and, indeed, this government constantly puts on their shoulders.

Since being elected, I have been in constant contact with our local TAFE and vocational education providers. I set up a hospitality roundtable which is now maintained and sustained by the sector itself. Chisholm TAFE, local employers, employment agencies, the private RTOs and the shire: we all get together and talk about what is needed to keep our kids learning and working on the peninsula. But it always comes back to the same issue—the lack of state government funded public transport. There's no point to a TAFE down the road in the industrial estate in Rosebud if no-one can get there.

They also raised concerns about attitudes to trades and trades training even though Flinders is a trading hotspot. We have the second highest number of trade professions of any electorate in the country. You can't blame tradies for wanting to be on the Mornington Peninsula. It's paradise. A vibrant, skills based tertiary system is what will sustain Australia's economy in the 21st century. There is enormous demand for skills in construction, the care economy and agriculture. We need to train as many people as possible and provide the best public policy settings to ensure that most people can get the education to meet the country's needs.

But the answer is not one-size-fits-all TAFE; it's in choice and flexibility. This chamber may need some reminding about the coalition's commitment to vocational education. I had the honour of working with Brendan Nelson when he was education minister in 2004, which some of you with long memories will know was the year of the 'trades election'. I had been Nelson's vocational education adviser since the year prior, and I was laser focused on how to increase uptake in trade training and how to make apprentices and trainees feel appreciated by the Australian population, valued, recognised and respected for their choice. Our commitments to vocational education at the 2004 election were based in the heart of liberal values. In his speech to formally launch the Liberal Party's campaign in September 2004, John Howard said:

There's a golden thread that runs through so many Coalition policies and that is that great principle of choice. Greater choice for families to choose how they will balance their work and their family responsibilities. Greater choice for entrepreneurial Australians to start and expand their small business. Greater choice and opportunity for young Australians to develop their talents to the full. And importantly, greater choice for Australian parents to decide how and where their children will be educated.

Does that sound familiar? It should.

Further in that speech, John Howard went on to describe what the coalition's policy on vocational education was going to be. He reflected:

Australia is facing a national skills shortage in traditional trades such as carpenters, welders, auto-electricians, motor mechanics, brick layers, chefs and hairdressers. This is in part a product of our great economic success. It's also the legacy of some bad decisions we made a generation or more ago. This country made a big mistake 30 or 40 years ago when it turned its back on the old system of having technical skills.

He went on to talk about the importance of those technical skills and then to announce a raft of policies to address the skills deficit we were facing. He talked about our drive to tackle skills shortages and to revolutionise vocational education and training. He announced the 24 Australian technical colleges that we would establish to accelerate national skills development in traditional trades. He talked about where they would be located, from Darwin to Northern Tasmania, Adelaide, Perth and here in Queensland. May I say, two of those survived their de-creation, or their abolition—should I call it that?—by the Rudd government, and they're both in Adelaide. They're run by the Catholic Education Office, and they're great. He announced the introduction of Commonwealth scholarships for new apprentices in priority trades after their first and second year of apprenticeship. He announced an intention to extend youth allowance to apprentices, putting them on the same footing as university students. He also announced $100 million to build an Australian network of industry careers advisers to make sure that, when students went to advisers to ask what they might do in the future, trades were kept front and centre.

At the end, he said:

We must do more to encourage them—

young people—

to entrench that culture, and to bring on more—

apprentices—

That's why I'm especially pleased to announce a series of measures at furthering entrenching the enterprise culture within this country.

The Prime Minister went on.

I know these measures like the back of my hand because I'm the bunny who wrote that policy for the 2004 election. It was the election when you'd see John Howard walking around, quite often with a hammer in his hand, just to constantly reinforce the message: 'We appreciate your choice of an Australian trade qualification. We need you to choose more, and we need to back you in.' That's what a Peter Dutton government will do if given the chance—back in the trades and get us back on track.

See this speech in context