The Federal Government’s proposed takeover of vocational education and training would spell the end of TAFE and destroy quality skills training in Western Sydney, says the Greens candidate for Macarthur Ben Moroney.
A document prepared for the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting in March outlines a plan for the Federal government to take over the VET budget for every state, coupled with massive deregulation of course prices and forcing TAFE to compete for all funding against private providers.
The plan comes while the liability of the government’s income-contingent VET loan scheme VET-HELP is predicted to blow out to $4 billion due to widespread rorting and exploitation by unregulated private VET providers.
“After the 2012 National Skills Agreement and the Baird Government’s so-called Smart and Skilled program, the last thing South West Sydney TAFE needs is more privatisation,’’ said Mr Moroney, a Campbelltown resident.
“Still licking their wounds after their attempt to deregulate universities, the Coalition have set their sights on TAFE as a more vulnerable target,’’ he said.
“Forcing TAFE to compete for every dollar of its funding with dodgy private companies is only going to accelerate a race to the bottom that will see quality of education drop and course fees go up.
“The Coalition’s privatisation plan will hurt students and the industries that rely on quality vocational training, with the only winners being a handful of big training corporations that plan to profit at public expense.
“We’ve seen what privatisation and competitive tendering have done to TAFE in NSW: 80,000 students and 4,000 full-time jobs gone since 2011, with students enticed into second rate private education.
[social_quote duplicate=”no” align=”default”]“Deregulating fees will raise the cost of courses even further, locking more of our potential skilled workers out of training at a time when NSW is facing a dire skills shortage and the Macarthur region is seeing high unemployment.[/social_quote]
“This move will take TAFE and a dependable, honest job out of the hands of Western Sydney youth, as well as shutting the door on second chance education and retraining for our workforce in a time of huge uncertainty for the national economy.
“It defies common sense how even an ideologically driven Coalition government could look at the last five years of privatised VET and the four billion dollar blowout of their loans program and think that more privatisation is the solution.
“If the government wants to fix VET, it can start by tearing up the broken national skills agreement, showing the third party providers the door and directing its funding to publicly run high quality education in our TAFEs,” Mr Moroney said.
