Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

You might consolidate automotive workshops in one particular high school and have a cluster of four high schools. That is possible. Senator McLucas is right. But the problem then becomes: suppose I am at a school and I want to study, let us say, automotive workshops, but it is not offered at my school and I have to go to a different school. That is fine. You might say that kids in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 might have to change schools. But why not then have a specialist place where students can go, where the teachers are qualified, and where all the technical and further education is under one roof? You would think that was a good policy, wouldn’t you? Yes, and they are called Australian technical colleges, and that was the coalition’s policy, and that was done.

What the Labor government has done is very clever. The estimates process that we have just gone through was a fiasco. The government and the poor public servants having to defend the government had no idea how each school, for under $1 million, is going to be able to put forward this marvellous technical and further education program. Obviously a lot of work has to be done, and certainly the opposition will be looking very closely at what happens.

There is a teacher shortage in this country. There is a shortage of people qualified to teach woodwork, metalwork, automotive mechanics and plumbing, and so forth. Yet we are told that somehow, magically, all of these people are going to turn up—I do not know from where. The opposition does support this bill and the centrepiece of Labor’s technical and further education program will be watched very closely by the opposition. Let us just see if it works. I am very sceptical whether this new program will work, whether there is enough money and enough teachers to make it work. Certainly the opposition will be watching.