John Murphy (Lowe, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

This evening I wish to raise a matter that should be of grave concern to any government that purports to have a genuine interest in education and wants to do something about Australia’s growing skills shortages. The government would have us believe that its most recent budget will result in an education revolution. It has tried to make us believe that its new-found enthusiasm for education is not something it has cooked up overnight in a cynical vote-grabbing exercise in an election year. No amount of disingenuous sugar coating in this year’s budget will make up for the decade of disinterest and neglect shown towards our education providers by this government. Nowhere is this more apparent that in our TAFE colleges.

My attention has recently been drawn to the circumstances of the Open Training and Education Network—OTEN—located in my electorate of Lowe, which enrols more than 37,000 distance students in over 250 TAFE NSW courses. OTEN has successfully home-delivered education to thousands of older students, those engaged in full-time employment as well as full-time parents or carers. It has also provided unique educational opportunities for Indigenous people, people with disabilities, young people in juvenile justice centres and those in remote rural communities. These are all groups who, despite their willingness to learn, re-skill or rehabilitate, often slip through the gaps of education.

We should all be proud of OTEN’s achievements. The corollary of this is that we should all condemn anything that will threaten the work of OTEN or TAFE generally. Many TAFE teachers have explained how a decade of the Howard government’s indifference, sometimes outright hostility, to TAFE has impacted on my local TAFE college OTEN. They have told me of: (1) constant rounds of funding cuts by the Howard government, years of job freezes, voluntary redundancies and forced job losses in student and admin support; (2) recurring organisational restructuring to off-set reduced funding and restructurings which, I am told, are for the worse—indeed, following a restructure in 2003, OTEN lost its learning materials production unit; (3) a shift from enrolment based funding to completion based funding, which disproportionately disadvantages distance students and threatens the viability of distance education providers; (4) the devastating impact of the federal government and industry driven national competency based curriculum—the costs of producing distance based learning materials for every subject have skyrocketed as a result, without a proportionate increasing in funding; and (5) the unsustainable workloads imposed upon OTEN teachers and increased casualisation of the workforce.

TAFE students, for whom we should be doing much more, are getting much less from the Howard government. The changes I have just mentioned have resulted in the slashing of essential face-to-face practical sessions and supervised exams. Being starved of funds has resulted in student services being slashed. What a disgrace that 3,700 OTEN students who require disability support are only being cared for by one full-time and four part-time consultants. The Howard government’s ambivalence to TAFE has resulted in federally funded tutorial support schemes for Aboriginal students being withdrawn and handed to private providers. This, too, is a disgrace. How will private providers support publicly enrolled Aboriginal students? It makes a mockery of the Howard government’s attempts to engage in ‘practical reconciliation’, which now amounts to nothing more than empty rhetoric.

Last, but certainly no means least, the funding crisis has led to the imposition of student handling charges, and in many cases very substantial fee increases. Fees are a major deterrent for students accessing TAFE courses. It is a disgrace for the government to starve TAFE colleges of funding, with the hope that students will make up the funding shortfall. The public is entitled to know how this will stop the most vulnerable members of society from slipping through the gaps. How will it offer people a chance for social and economic participation, when that opportunity would otherwise not exist?

In speaking on this matter tonight, I have not intended to merely strike at the heart of securing more funding for OTEN; I have sought to bring to the attention of those here in the House tonight the need to do more to support educational providers whose work is undoubtedly valued, but sometimes forgotten or taken for granted. The centenary of public distance education in Australia is fast approaching, and it has been a decade since OTEN moved into its purpose-built facility. We should all hope that this will be the year where a decade of the Howard government’s neglect of TAFE, and OTEN, comes to an end. This issue is too important to ignore, and I will be placing further questions to the minister on the Notice Paper on the Howard government’s disgraceful failure to support TAFE, and OTEN in particular. These institutions, and their students, deserve better than the treatment they have received to date from the Howard government.