Mehreen Faruqi (NSW, Australian Greens) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to continue my remarks on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2019. We cannot talk about a future that is just and that deals with the climate crisis and not talk about vocational education and training. Over the last decade, we have seen a decimation of our world-class TAFE, with massive funding cuts, increasing fees and privatisation of the sector which saw the entry of shonky providers, and this disaster needs to be reversed. Our TAFEs are vital for people to be able to gain and regain the skills needed for this transition and transformation. This is good for individuals but it is even better for all of society. Failing to fund them properly is incredibly short-sighted, and it's destructive, yet we've seen TAFE being slowly destroyed by the government's neglect, lack of funding and privatisation.

On vocational training the government says one thing and does another. They say they want to encourage people into trades, but then they underfund skills training by tens of millions of dollars. Labor and Liberal just recently teamed up to strip $4 billion from TAFEs and universities by abolishing the Education Investment Fund. Combined with this chronic underspend in skills funding, TAFE and their students are being starved of resources. Data shows us that student numbers have dropped by two per cent and that training hours are down by six per cent at a time when we are meant to be addressing the skills crisis and the jobs shortage. The motivation for the deliberate decimation of TAFE by state and federal governments is no mystery: they are ideologically opposed to the very principle of lifelong public education, particularly when there's a buck to be made for their friends and donors in for-profit education corporations by directing public funds their way.

The Greens are, and always will be, very proudly the party of public education. We are proud to support our TAFEs. The Greens have a plan to rebuild TAFE as the vocational training provider of choice for students. We will remove the Gillard-era contestable funding requirements and make TAFE and uni free for all, removing private for-profit providers entirely from federal funding of vocational training and giving as close to 100 per cent of federal training funding as possible to TAFEs. This is the bold vision that we need for our vocational educational training in Australia.