Reverend Fred Nile’s Christian Democratic Party has delivered another political victory to the New South Wales Coalition government by backing a parliamentary report subjecting TAFE to the cold commercial winds of the free market.
Recommendations by an all-party report into technical education were carried by the combined vote of Liberal MPs and committee chairman Paul Green of the Christian Democrats, while Labor MPs and Dr John Kaye of the Greens submitted minority reports.
The majority report will give Premier Mike Baird’s cabinet the green light to commercialise technical education, allowing private tenderers to compete with TAFE for students.
The plan is laid out in Education Minister Adrian Piccoli’s “Smart and Skilled” blueprint. (These days, every Coalition policy is branded with a PR moniker; for example, the plan to amalgamate councils is called “Fit for the Future”).
Under “Smart and Skilled”, students will be able to use their taxpayer-funded grants to receive training at any approved training organisation, TAFE or privately owned ones.
It’s all a question of providing “choice”, argue Coalition MPs, but the reality is otherwise. The truth is that education at all levels — from preschool to universities — is being deregulated, and private providers are being encouraged to profit from the education system.
“There is no going back to a situation where TAFE has a monopoly on government-funded training,” wrote chairman Paul Green of the Christian Democrats in the report’s introduction.
“The committee believes that a contestable training market will benefit all parts of the sector over time, driving up quality and efficiency, and ultimately benefiting students, industry and the economy.”
However, in Labor’s minority report, former union official Daniel Mookhey wrote that “Smart and Skilled” policy was already having a “calamitous” impact on the NSW technical education system.
The number of students declined drastically in 2015, he said, and the number of available courses has fallen. The major reason was the dramatic increase in student fees, although Piccoli and TAFE managing director Pam Christie continue to dispute Mookhey’s assertions.
He criticised the federal government’s licensing system for private providers, saying too many “dodgy” firms were being allowed to operate.
“They are saddling unsuspecting students with unprecedented levels of debt by engaging in unconscionable conduct,” he said.
Greens MP Dr John Kaye said Liberal members on the committee and the CDP’s Paul Green accepted the assumption that a competitive market would provide access to future students and protect quality education. “This assumption is false,” Kaye said. “The fundamental reality is that education is not a commodity. It cannot be successfully traded through a market.
“It will leave TAFE in competition with an industry that is increasingly dominated by participants who place profits ahead of student outcomes,” he said.
TAFE reached the pinnacle of its success under prime minister Gough Whitlam in the early 1970s, when fees were scrapped and proper funding provided. Since then, federal and state Labor have led the rush to the bottom, with fees being reinstated by former federal education minister John Dawkins, and NSW premier Bob Carr hoisting TAFE fees by more than 100% in his 2003-04 budget.
In 2008, then-Victorian premier John Brumby became the first state government to offer public funding to commercial providers competing with TAFE.
Kaye accused the NSW Coalition of following the “disastrous path” of previous Victorian governments, where TAFE had been relegated to an under-funded “bit player confined to the margins of a dysfunctional and corrupted trading market”.
He singled out committee chairman Paul Green, who last month voted with the Coalition to deliver all-day trading on Boxing Day to Sydney’s major retailers.
“Paul Green sided with the government to ensure that the Smart and Skilled training market continues to undermine TAFE without any limits on how much of the total state government training budget can be privatised,” he said.
“Paul Green might feel he has pulled off a clever deal but he has deserted students … He has betrayed the hundreds of TAFE teachers, students and community members who in good faith shared their experiences with this inquiry in the belief that we would take them seriously and come up with a lasting solution.”
The NSW Greens should contain their rage. Nile’s self-styled Christian Democratic Party is imploding at an ever-faster rate.
At the North Sydney byelection, the party’s “star” candidate, Nile’s second, wife Silvana Nero, managed to snare only 341 primary votes, or 0.46% of the votes. She lost her deposit, and victory went to Liberal Trent Zimmerman, the first openly gay man elected to the House of Representatives.
Her 81-year-old husband, the “grandfather” of the NSW Parliament, is on the record as referring to homosexuality as a “mental disorder” and describing it as “immoral, unnatural and abnormal” — which sounds like the CDP itself.
‘“immoral, unnatural and abnormal” — which sounds like the CDP itself.’
Playing right into Erica’s hands Alex.
If previous Governments, State and Federal hadn’t squandered resources on useless programmes and staff, the TAFE (and all other education systems) could have been in far better shape, staff could have been more competent, and students, employers and the community in general could have been much better off.
The way TAFE has been defunded and downsized and downgraded by this government’s deregulation and funding of for-profit companies is wicked. Education never thrives in a for-profit commercial regime. TAFE had a history of talented and skilled teachers who turned out well trained tradesmen and latterly women, who understood that they were training the next generation of skilled tradesmen.
In a few years, people will wonder why plumbers, electricians and carpenters make so many mistakes and are so unskilled and it will be because their training was lacking too short. Already buildings are not properly inspected.
Anonymous barbsyd, that’s an amazingly broad statement when you say, “Education never thrives in a for-profit commercial regime.” It would help those wishing to evaluate your assertion if you enlightened us on your qualifications and experience in education, wouldn’t it.
TAFE’s problems have been exacerbated by various bureaucrats whose efforts were concentrated on building empires which enhanced their prestige and ‘justified’ higher salaries and perks for rhemselves and earned the gratitude of employees they appointed resulting in the bureaucrats receiving loyalty no matter what they did or how well they did it.
We don’t have to wait the “few years” you suggested to see the calamitous effects in trades. The best students do well despite the poor training they receive but many who aren’t up to scratch are already being “passed”, and others who’d make excellent tradies are being pushed into aspiring to academic courses which often prepare them for little other than the dole queues.
These disasters arose primarily with the support of Faux Left “progressives” from affluent pampered middle class backgrounds who aren’t a match for the teachers who once made Australian education among the best and fairest on the planet.
TAFE was created under Gough Whitlam, Alex. It reached its pinnacle many years later under Keating, the only PM to boast a TAFE qualification. The current decline is much more complex than you suggest. The Carr increase in fees has very little to do with it.