Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the remarks of the member for Wannon, who, like me, is a regional Liberal who understands absolutely the importance of representing our rural and regional communities. He has a wideranging brief across so many issues but with complete understanding of the disastrous nature of this government's policy when it comes to skills and training. So, yes, I'm delighted to speak on the Free TAFE Bill 2024 to say how disappointed I have been by what we have already uncovered about this bill. I'm going to outline our issues with the bill shortly, but I want to make it very clear that the coalition do value TAFE, and we value the students that go to TAFE; it's all about the students. And it is time for Labor to stop using TAFE as a shield for their incompetence. That incompetence is writ large in this bill.

I regard my role as the shadow minister for skills and training as an enormous privilege. As Deputy Leader of the Opposition, I get to pick my portfolio, and I picked skills, because I understand that skills is a critical area of policy for the future of our nation and the future of our young people. When I finished school, I couldn't think of anything worse than sitting in an office, so I went to my local training provider and pursued a vocational qualification in aviation. And it changed my life. That's why I love skills.

There's nothing more motivating than meeting the next generation of workers who are on the tools, on a worksite, in a TAFE, in a school classroom—anywhere. I studied at a TAFE in Belconnen to get my pilots licence, and that training changed my life, so I not only value TAFEs but know what it's like to study at them. The minister may want to try and attack me as anti-TAFE, but, as far as I can see, only one of us has actually studied vocational education. Skills policy is personal to me, and that's why I'm so disappointed with what we've seen in this bill.

I want to start with what we were told would be in this bill by the Prime Minister. In a media release announcing the free TAFE policy to be enacted by this bill, Anthony Albanese claimed:

The Albanese Labor Government will introduce legislation to establish Fee-Free TAFE as an enduring feature of the national vocational education and training system, funding 100,000 Fee-Free TAFE places a year from 2027.

He backed that in his 'Building Australia's future' speech when he claimed:

Today I am proud to announce our Government will lock-in free TAFE and make it permanent, nationwide.

We will legislate to guarantee 100,000 fee-free TAFE places, each and every year.

I thought this was a big commitment for the government to make. It's a decision to permanently fund a program that has cost the taxpayer around $1 billion over the past two years. Making it permanent would be a huge financial commitment.

As soon as the bill was introduced, I went into the official documents, and I was shocked by what I saw. 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 means Labor has not allocated any funding to making free TAFE permanent at all—'no financial impact'. Further, a footnote in the legislation indicates that under Labor, free TAFE courses may not be free for students. So, despite Anthony Albanese promising to make free TAFE permanent, Labor's Free TAFE Bill neither guarantees free TAFE places will be permanent nor guarantees they will be free! We've uncovered that the Prime Minister has badly misled the Australian people about making free TAFE permanent. Clearly, this hasn't been done. The Prime Minister is trying to cash in on TAFE's brand to boost his bad poll numbers, but you can't claim that you're permanently funding 100,000 free TAFE places and refuse to allocate a single dollar.

Having uncovered that Labor's commitment to make TAFE free permanently is unfunded, the coalition will oppose the Free TAFE Bill in the parliament. Australian students deserve better than fake pledges on skills and training. The coalition will oppose Labor's free TAFE legislation because it is unfunded. It could permanently increase Commonwealth spending by $500 million a year.

It permanently commits the Commonwealth to fund free TAFE before it has even reviewed its existing product. Senate estimates confirmed there has been no review conducted into Labor's fee-free TAFE expenditure to date, which totals almost $1 billion from the Commonwealth. Only the Labor Party would seek to legislate a commitment to permanently fund a program without telling Australians how much it will cost or reviewing it to make sure that it actually works.

I'm so disappointed in this, I really am, and I know that colleagues on our side—and, look, I'll be generous, on the Labor Party side—enjoy meeting people who've walked many miles in the shoes of those who are doing skills and training. It actually is something that we all appreciate. But there's a difference between meeting those people who are undertaking skills and training and having walked a mile in the shoes of the people who've done skills and training.

As I look behind me in the ranks of the Liberal and National parties, I see so many people—I'm not even going to begin, Mr Deputy Speaker Vasta; you know them too—who have lived real lives, have worked really hard and have gained trades and qualifications. Some have gone on to university. Many have run their own small businesses. But when I look at the Labor Party benches, I see people who've never risked a dollar of their own money in a business that might not succeed and who don't understand what it's like to not know what is happening in the next week, the next month or the next year because of the uncertainty they face under this government's cost-of-living crisis.

That's why we have to be really careful about every dollar that we spend. That's why we have to say, 'Look, if a billion dollars is being spent on fee-free TAFE, it sounds good, but is it working? What does it actually look like in the real world?' I've heard some horror stories.

Sussan Ley (Farrer, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Women) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Really. The member for Petrie reminds me of when I was with him only last week. There are people who say that TAFE courses are being put on, but no students are turning up. This is because it's a fee-free product and somebody has decided that it's good to offer it in that particular TAFE at that particular time, but nobody actually asked students whether they wanted to study there. Or you've got hardworking people at Workforce Australia who know that they've got to get long-term unemployed people into work, so they allocate them to a TAFE class, thinking that that's the answer. But maybe it's not the answer, because it might not be the course that that person wants to study.

And remember this, and it's a key principle and tenet of the Liberal Party: if you don't pay for something, you don't value it. So, if you're told that your TAFE is free and all you have to do is turn up—you actually have to do some work, and then you have to get a qualification at the end—and if that's all that it is but you haven't paid for it, you don't see it as something that makes a difference to you in your life; you don't see it as something valuable. Your idea of your pathway into a job might be completely different from this one that's been articulated for you by fee-free TAFE.

We value the role that industry led training plays in this country, and I've made it clear in my remarks that, having studied at TAFE, I'm not anti TAFE, but we value the fact that we've got private providers who do an incredible job and who have much higher pass rates than the ones that we've been able to find from the government. Their pass rates, their failure rates and their dropout rates under fee-free TAFE, to the extent that they've informed us of those, have been extraordinarily low. It was the minister's own question time briefing that demonstrated that the dropout rate of only 13 per cent is extraordinary.

I was quite horrified to hear that, and I then thought that if there's going to be a new policy that comes from this then it needs to have proper evaluation and it needs to have proper consideration. It's not good enough to invest this much taxpayers' money into something that isn't developing the skills and training pathway for the youth of today, because young people of today and those who undertake skills and training are worth much more than this. They're worth a government that understands what they need, what they deserve and how to best equip them for a future in the workforce.

Debate adjourned.