Rowan Ramsey (Grey, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

They could probably both learn a bit. Where there's the responsibility of raising finance at one level of government, the money is just basically given to the states to spend on whatever operation they are running. I think that's poor governance in many ways.

Most of what I have to say relates to the South Australian experience because that is what I am most familiar with. I have many friends who have given up a significant portion of their lives to work and operate in the TAFE section as lecturers and training providers and have really believed in TAFE. Almost all of them have eventually left, very disillusioned with TAFE in South Australia and mystified as to why it has been driven into the ground and why it has consequently failed, largely.

In 2018 in South Australia, there was a review that was ordered by the federal regulator and conducted by the Nous Group. It found that there were major problems with no less than 16 courses that TAFE in South Australia were offering. The review criticised the heavy funding cuts that had been delivered by, listen to this, the Labor government under Jay Weatherill. It said that TAFE had lost sight of the importance of quality. If confidence was already low in South Australia, that just smashed it. In many ways, it really spelt the demise of TAFE. Smaller facilities were closed completely; larger ones in many places were largely decommissioned.

There was a fellow called Jack Velthuizen in Whyalla, a significant Whyalla identity. I don't think he'll mind me quoting him in this area. He voted Labor all his life. I got on well with Jack. We understood each other. We knew how we each voted, but we both believed in Whyalla and in people. Jack was on the tools at the plant for much of his life, and he then ended up being a TAFE lecturer and was very proud of the metal workshops that were in TAFE at the time. In the end, they were idle, and he was beside himself with despair at what had happened. Jack went on to become president of the Whyalla Football League, a position he held at the time of his demise when he passed away in 2021, which is a fair indication of his commitment to community. I miss him. He was a good fellow. But, anyway, he had become very disillusioned with the whole direction of TAFE. Of course, the problem was that these places had become deserted.

I'd benefited at some level from TAFE training at some time. I think I did my first chem certs through TAFE, but I also did a tree-pruning course. I'm given to reflect that, in many places, they were delivering yoga instructor and dog handler courses and all that kind of thing. Honestly, if you want a business training enterprise, it needs to be focused on being a business training enterprise and getting on with the hard things in life.

In many ways, I think that TAFE lost its way. The consequence of that, of course, was that industry had no confidence. I just heard the member for Bruce speaking about how people trusts TAFE. Well, I'm here to tell the parliament that they don't—certainly not in South Australia. I speak to people in industry about people coming to them with their qualifications and seeking work. When they saw that they'd done their training, their apprenticeship or whatever through TAFE, they basically didn't trust it. They'd say, 'That means they won't be able to operate this, that and everything else, and I'll have to train them from scratch again.' I have used this phrase: who ever failed a TAFE course? That tells you about the quality that is actually offered here in the end. I was speaking only recently to an acquaintance who did a 12-month TAFE course and didn't attend and received high marks in their exam. They passed the course, yet they'd barely attended.

That tells you why the public and industry don't trust TAFE, and it tells us why, then, industry fled to the private sector for training. It's more flexible. It provides services when, where and how you need them. TAFE, by comparison, is a government organisation. The people that work there are public servants and it's heavily unionised. Consequently, it is just inflexible. Trying to get training courses delivered when it suits your workforce rather than when it suits the workforce at the training facility is one of the reasons they've been left behind. So industry have established their own training platforms. I live in Kimba, and just down the road from me, at Cleve—a distance of 100 kilometres or so—the Motor Trade Association have developed a regional training facility for country based mechanics. It's fantastic for the kids on the Eyre Peninsula and further afield that now don't have to go to the city and can access their training out in the country. Master Builders and the Housing Industry Association of Australia have their own training platforms and credentials that the industry trust and that they have designed for their use. This move for free TAFE undermines their efforts and investment, and it's dangerous. It is a move by this government to prop up failed state enterprises, and, as I said, we're on the sticky paper.

And there is no budgeted provision for this expansion of free TAFE. How on earth can that happen? We have a whole raft of government policies now, including housing, the forgiveness—the write off—of HECS debts and extra investment in the NBN, all apparently not costing the budget a cent. These are billions and billions and billions of dollars that the federal government is committing itself to that magically don't appear in the budget papers. It makes a mockery of the Treasurer's claims that this government has delivered two surplus budgets. If that is the case, why is the net debt of the Australian government now higher than before the surplus budgets? It defies any logic at all, and it is an attempt by the government to pull the wool over the eyes of the Australian public. It will be exposed. In the coming months and the coming weeks, there will be increased scrutiny of the government's claims.

This is, in fact, an attempt to nationalise the training and skills industry. It undermines the investment of the housing industry, of the motor trades and of private providers like Career Employment Group, which are a very significant contributor in my electorate to actually piloting people through their training and through their apprenticeships, and they've got to compete with free. And the industry doesn't trust the credentials. I think it's a broken glass that can't be mended. Denita Wawn from Master Builders Australia has said that it unfairly distorts the market, and it does not bring more people to industry.

The challenge is quality. Can TAFE rebuild that? I think it's pretty unlikely on the basis of the current dropout rate. The non-completion rate of free courses at TAFE is 87 per cent. That's telling us something. So far, the government has spent $1.5 billion on free TAFE, and there are 80,000 fewer apprenticeships and trainees today than when they came to office. That's a 20 per cent drop. For women, it's worse. The commencement stats have halved under this government.

So now the government is doubling down and trying to entice apprentices and trainees back into the system—back into a training facility that industry does not trust. I think this is bad government, quite frankly. I think it's undermining the investment and effort of others to build a system that they trust and that they rely on. Unbelievably, the government has not done any work on actually assessing the impact of the free TAFE policies that they've implemented so far, and they are pushing even further. This reeks of a captain's call, and, when captains make bad calls, the ship sinks.

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