Mr ADAMS (8:06 PM) —The purpose of the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005 is to implement the government’s election commitment to establish Australian technical colleges for years 11 and 12 students in 24 regions throughout Australia. These colleges are supposed to offer high-quality training and facilities that will further strengthen Australia’s vocational education and training system and promote pride and excellence in acquiring trade skills. The government says the establishment of these colleges is a step in addressing the skill needs that Australia is experiencing in a number of traditional trades throughout the country.

The bill provides for funding agreements between the Australian government and the colleges that can be tailored to the needs and challenges of each region. While some governance and administrative requirements will be set as standard conditions in each funding agreement, the bill apparently does not prescribe any particular model to operate in any region. There are some hidden problems in all of this. I gather there are changes that would reduce the learning environment for trade qualifications, which means that courses that normally take, say, four years with appropriate on job training and work site experience will now possibly take only three—and who knows what it will be in a few years; it may be two. I think we will be de-skilling the work force of Australia, particularly our young people, by casualising their training so they do not have the rigour of courses that are currently given in the TAFE system right around Australia.

Additional funding is being found for the Australian technical colleges initiative. Appropriations totalling $343.6 million over five years will provide for the allocation of funds to the colleges to support infrastructure development as well as meet the additional costs associated with the delivery of the specialised services that the colleges will provide. Presumably, that money will be taken away from the TAFE training area and from the growth that TAFE should have been experiencing in recent times. That is the reason we have a shortage of skilled people in Australia.

The bill is complementary to the Schools Assistance (Learning Together—Achievement Through Choice and Opportunity) Act 2004, through which the colleges may receive general recurrent grant funding in addition to supplementary funding. The supplementary funding is predicated on staff having to sign Australian workplace agreements which leave unions out of negotiations. For the people that will be working in the colleges there will be no tenure and no job security. Staff will be able to be picked up and thrown away at will—hardly good for stable workplace relations and also hardly good for an environment that good teachers and people can warm to.

The colleges are to have a governing body chaired by a local business person and consisting of local industry and community representatives that will ensure that the skills taught to students will be directly relevant to the needs of local industry, yet the unions that cover the trade skills and know the needs of industry inside out will be totally left out, being excluded from any input whatsoever. Each college which is a non-government school is supposed to be registered as a school in the state or territory in which it operates and accredited to deliver curriculum leading to achievement of the senior secondary certificate of education. But the state and territory governments are not convinced that they need these extra training facilities. It would be far better to expand the role of TAFE colleges and use their excellent resources, equipment and history to bridge this school to work gap, and it is a shame that we have not been able to get governments to talk together to make these things happen. I believe that even at this late stage talks should be going on. These features are supposed to allow the colleges to establish themselves as centres of excellence and to raise the profile and status of vocational pathways in schools, but the colleges are likely to be out on a limb and not part of the mainstream education system. This can only be seen as being exactly the same situation as that of the Australian School of Fine Furniture, which was established in Launceston by the Liberal Party, during one of its election spend-ups, to try to outdo a school run by the University of Tasmania in the south. The school in Launceston has now run out of money and has been bleating for more, and a bit has been supplied by the member for Bass. This school was established on an old model of one craftsman to one student. Although it is a useful way of teaching manual crafts, it is not practical or economic, given the sorts of costs involved in running it.

As with other school based programs, the legislative base for the Australian technical colleges will be underpinned by funding agreements with either state or territory governments or with the Australian Technical College Authority. The funding agreements will contain certain conditions under which funding will be allocated to colleges and will include a schedule of the payments to be made to each college over the term of the agreement. These conditions include forcing staff onto AWAs, which include taking away skills progression and pathway elements for teachers and will also probably include taking away the right to be a member of a union. Ongoing funding may also be contingent on colleges meeting specific eligibility criteria—so if you are not following the criteria on staff recruitment then the staff are the ones likely to cop the displeasure and be removed.

This bill includes, as a condition of funding, a requirement for all colleges to provide reports covering financial expenditure and performance outcomes. This information, to be specified in the funding agreement, will include such information as the vocational education and training options being offered, academic outcomes, school leaver destinations and retention rates. The bill provides for an appropriation of $343.6 million over the period 2005 to 2009 to support the establishment and operation of the colleges. That is not a great deal over four years, especially if they are having to start from scratch, so I think it will be a long time before we see very much of these colleges and I believe this program is likely to be of little use in improving the training and skilling of Australia.

I have some real concerns about the direction of these proposals—and I was also going to speak on the skills bill which was recently guillotined. I will mention some of the points I was going to make on that bill. I believe it is part of a very unpalatable package that is being forced onto Australia by this government. It seems to be giving the Commonwealth the power of veto over state and territory governments in VET planning. In the past this approval process was conducted by the Australian National Training Authority. There were also some severe conditions placed on funding decisions.

The question of choice of source of training could well be difficult for my state of Tasmania. Although the bill tries to provide more flexibility and competition for the providers of training, our state’s small population would make it very difficult for providers to be able to keep standards up and provide the sort of training that suits the employer, as well as being affordable to both employer and apprentice. Centralised standards are okay in bigger states, but, of course, ANTA used to provide that flexibility to the smaller states by sharing training resources. I cannot see how a provider could survive if they had to play the market in Tasmania.

The introduction of workplace reforms poses a similar problem. Because of other legislation, TAFE would be excluded, and there may be a problem in even allowing TAFE to be involved. TAFE has provided an excellent structure to deliver apprenticeships and training places for a very broad range of skills. This proposal is more likely to limit what training can be given in the state if everyone is competing for the basic competencies, because these are the basis of funding and pay for trainers.

To have to adhere to complete implementation of competency based training rather than time based training requires the amendment of state legislation and awards to move to a completely competency based approach to VET, rather than a time based model. This would have a dramatic impact on the structure of the traditional apprenticeship system. Full competency based apprenticeships are strongly supported by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and opposed by the trade union movement. Increased flexibility and reduction in time, without a full competency based model, have been advocated by some states and have found some support within sections of the trade union movement, while being opposed by others.

Another aspect is the fact that opening up the TAFE facilities to private VET providers could, once again, limit the sort of training given. There will be no ability to anticipate trade shortages in an overall package; it will be kept to immediate short-term needs as the market of the day requires. Planning future directions for TAFE will be left to no-one in particular—and I doubt whether Tasmanian TAFEs or any other training organisation with some credibility will survive. It will open everything up to real mickey mouse courses that we are now finding exist around the place. They cannot provide a career path by incrementally increasing skills, as on-the-job experience can mix with skill development and also income. Some of the other conditions pose difficulties for everyone, not just Tasmanians. These new funding arrangements have not been discussed with the states, so there has not been any opportunity to consider the full impact of many of the proposed conditions on the delivery of vocational education and training around the country.

I am disappointed that ANTA is being abolished, because under ANTA there have been many programs that assist in the funding of adult literacy—programs that I, like many other people who missed whole chunks of schooling for many reasons, relied on to gain the skills that I lacked. I am not sure that these programs will be considered as part of the new training schemes, as they are not directly requested by employers much of the time. It will again be left to the volunteers, who struggle to get resources for these programs, to organise who is going to do what and attract students who normally avoid any sort of learning like the plague because they are frightened to be a part of it. We are going to return to a society where those who had difficulties at school will be left at the bottom of the pile because, as hard as they try, there are no programs that cope with their particular problems.

I do not mind any school or training institution being more open to the private sector, and I am sure there are ways and means to help boost the bottom dollar of those institutions, but if we do it at the expense of quality training then we should really think again. Many training areas are reliant on the community anyway to bring in realistic training modules and work very well in conjunction with local business or industry. Why do we want to upset this so much by introducing these measures?

I have been looking at some of the training colleges that provide a haven for those who have dropped through the cracks of the ordinary training systems. Places such as Studentworks, in Launceston, and The Island, in Melbourne, have been highly successful and rely very much on good relations with all groups—federal, state and local governments, as well as unions, small business and industry. What is the future of these colleges under these new funding arrangements? This is not clear.

I do not think individual work contracts for TAFE or technical training staff will have a bearing on the quality of the teaching, and it will only bring standards down to the lowest common denominator. People will be appointed on what they are prepared to work for, not what they have the best skills for. We really need to make some amendments to this bill if it is to work and provide proper access to training for all people. I believe we should delete any reference to AWAs and individual contracts as part of the funding agreement. These contracts should not be related to good trainers, who would be put off by having to bargain for their jobs each year.

I certainly cannot agree with government funding being reduced as a consequence of more developed entrepreneurial business planning, because I think the smaller states would lose out considerably and would probably close down many of the programs already operating quite successfully in their communities. I am still not happy with ANTA being disbanded, without knowing what is to be put in its place and whether it will have some overall standard and ability to coordinate a lot of courses in the country and to look at the overall training that takes place.

TAFE has been an important part of tertiary training, and I am worried that it will lose its connection with other tertiary training institutions where students can access lines between the two. It is unfortunate that we have not built more links between TAFE and universities in Australia. I am unconvinced that any new colleges along the lines proposed by this bill are going to be more than just an expensive sideline to vocational education; the minister is trying to put a foot in the door to privatise college education. I do not believe that will work, Minister. The Labor Party have seen through that and it will be fought very strongly. We want a better deal for our kids, not one that is reliant on part-time teachers and casualised teachers and students who do not feel they have ownership of their jobs or a career path in their workplaces. I oppose the bill.