Sunday Age 16 September 2012 Australian Financial Review 17 September 2012
As Victorian TAFEs prepare to sell campuses, increase fees, cut courses and sack staff to cope with state government cuts, the Gillard government has threatened to withhold almost $435 million in ”national partnership” payments under a COAG agreement signed off in April.
Commonwealth Tertiary Education Minister Chris Evans says that Victoria’s TAFE cuts are ”destroying” the vocational sector and undermining the state’s COAG obligations.
We don’t want to take money out of the Victorian TAFE system, but there’s clearly no point in us pouring money in if they’re taking money out on the other end. The COAG agreements set targets for both the number of people being trained and the quality of people being trained, and both these things are fundamentally undermined by the fire sale of TAFE.
Victorian Skills Minister Peter Hall hit back, calling the threat ”another example of the Gillard government failure to provide Victorians with their fair share of funding” and accused Canberra of trying to stall national reform:
The Victorian government spends more than any other state or territory on training. We have more students enrolled in publicly subsidised vocational education than any other state … Yet the Gillard government refuses to discuss Victoria’s plan to implement the national partnership.
With substantial education funding cuts announced in NSW and a major shakeup of TAFE mooted in Queensland Evans noted the states had “budgeted for those {COAG] reward payments . . . So they seem to assume we’re going to keep on paying them and rewarding them when this sort of activity occurs. That is clearly not the case.”
Meanwhile Australian Industry Group chief executive Innes Willox said that while there was no doubt TAFE needed to be more responsive to industry, the states had gone too far.
What you’ve got now is the development of quite a disturbing trend among the states to cut education funding – but vocational education funding in particular. There will be very significant short-term consequences for industry because we won’t see the flow through of graduates and apprentices in core trades like electrical engineering, plumbing and welding that we need for our economy. We’re already facing skills shortages as a result of cutbacks in the ’70s and ’80s. We don’t want to repeat that mistake.
