Sharman Stone (Murray, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I, too, rise to support the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment Bill 2015. I note the bipartisan support for this bill, and I think that this must be a very special day in the House in the great Australian parliament, given that it is the second bipartisan-supported action since question time.

It is completely understandable, when all of us, from all sides of the Australian political system, know what a terrible situation has been developing over time in relation to the Australian national vocational education and training system. We have an incredible series of great institutions in Australia who have built up reputations internationally and domestically as offering the world's best education, but this sector has often been populated by shonks who have damaged the reputation of Australia's education and training. They have also damaged those who took up many of these courses. Students have been damaged in their career progression, or they have even been so disheartened by their treatment and the debts that they have accumulated that they have become less employable. That is a great tragedy for the Australian community.

It is high time that someone—and of course it had to be us—looked very closely at this national vocational education and training system and put some rigour and quality standards and assurance practices into the system. We are now going to have new quality standards that will quickly address the problems with VET providers and their courses. I know that the opposition is supporting this bill, and their various speakers have been describing all of the terrible circumstances and cases that have been brought to their attention. Why didn't they do something about it? This problem has been well-known for quite a while.

We have an opportunity to start again, in a sense, to weed out the shonks who have made themselves a lot of money posing as the registered training organisations in our education and training sector. We will be extending the registration period for RTOs from five to seven years, but we will not have to wait until their re-registration before we can look closely at how they are performing. We will be able to look at their performance, their quality, the experience of their students, and their courses well before they are up for re-registration. We are going to enable the Australian Skills Quality Authority, ASQA, to focus its attention on investigating and acting upon high-risk and poor-quality providers. They will be given additional resources and a focus to do that.

One of the sad things that has come about as a result of these shonks who operate in the system is that a lot of international students have been attracted to Australia by the promotion of their courses, and they have experienced course outcomes that have been far from desirable. But, many of them were not really looking to do that cooking course, the hairdressing course or the aged care course; they saw these courses as pathways to migration, or permanent residency. That pathway is quite inappropriate when it comes to these education and training courses, and the operators. In fact, what should be coming out of these courses are good employment skills—skills that are relevant for a modern economy. They should not be a surrogate for a back door, or a new way to enter a back door, into Australian citizenship.

I have to say that our welfare system has also played its part in encouraging the huge growth of poorly designed courses with ad hoc curricula and poorly qualified teachers. For a very long time, you had two options if you were long-term unemployed. If you were looking to comply with the requirements for continuing to receive the Newstart allowance and you went to one of our specially selected employment service providers, they could either find you a job—hopefully they did—or they could put you into a course. Unfortunately, so many of these courses—whether they were in rural or regional centres, or metropolitan Australia—were in things like events management, health and beauty, or management. Management was very popular. A semi-literate or illiterate person was expected to become qualified in a certificate I, II, or III such that they could step into a management position, without their literacy, numeracy, or English language skills having been addressed during the course. There have been a lot of unfortunate outcomes in our system—until we addressed them—which have unfortunately given our vocational education training sector a bad name.

Along the way, we have also threatened the viability of our TAFE sector. Our TAFE sector has, in the past, been responsible for producing some superbly qualified tradespeople, whether in the building sector or in manufacturing skills. But, if they have to compete with an RTO offering courses at a fraction of the price, and with a fraction of the time required to complete the same certificate or apprenticeship, then, obviously, the RTOs will win out, and win consistently.

I want to describe to you one case study that has come to my attention. In my electorate, two young people from the Goulburn Valley had this experience—and I know that it was the experience of many, many others. They both wanted to become qualified builders. Building was in the family. Their father was a qualified builder-tradesperson. They signed up to a Skills Victoria RTO and, in turn, they were directed to a builder who would employ them while they undertook their apprenticeship. There was a trade school that they were required to attend one day a month. Now, a trade school sounds quite impressive. You can imagine classrooms, equipment, very qualified instructors, and the class populated by students or young apprentices doing the same course as you. But in fact this trade school was sometimes held in a footy club anteroom or some other casual space. There were students from a whole range of different courses or skills work—perhaps scaffolding, tilers, painters and decorators—all in together with the building apprentices.

This so-called trade school would run for one day a month. If they had been enrolled in TAFE to do their apprenticeship, they would have been expected to attend for one week a month. You can imagine why this alternative was so popular with the employing building company or tradesman, because they got a very low paid worker who they only had to release one day month, not one week a month. The apprentices were virtually not supervised at all in terms of occupational health and safety standards. These particular young people found themselves dismantling and demolishing buildings full of asbestos. This was of enormous concern for their future health. The owner of that business did not feel this was a problem, since it was, he said, what he had been doing most of his life.

Assessing the competencies of these two young men as they undertook this course was done by on-site 'verification'. The owner of the business, the builder, or the teacher from the RTO would come to the site and ask the apprentice to pose beside some scaffolding, say, with a hammer in their hand or some other tool, and photos would be taken. The trainee was not asked whether they had in fact had anything to do with that piece of work on the building site, whether the scaffolding had been anything that they had participated in. It was simply a photo showing the student standing beside a piece of scaffolding, and the box was then ticked to say that they were competent in scaffolding. You just had to hope for a good day so that the photograph would come out clean and clear. Some apprentices involved in this sort of very unfortunate practice were able to complete a year's worth of trade school theory within a day or two. What normally would have been expected to take a year, they could complete in a day or two. As I said before, apprentices from all different trades were with the same teachers in the same room—for example, in the footy change room.

A trade apprentice would have a qualified teacher for their specific trade, learning together with students from that same trade, using proper equipment in an appropriately set-up site, such as you would find at a TAFE campus. Some apprentices working in the Skills Victoria situation could fast-track their apprenticeship and finish within two years, when at TAFE that same apprenticeship would take four years. So you walked out of that experience, often exposed to quite dangerous occupational health and safety situations, with a piece of paper saying you were a fully qualified tradesperson. You could even go and start your own business, perhaps, in building. The young person was virtually unemployable in the trade, because it would very quickly be established that they had next to no skills and, of course, very little experience.

This was a very difficult and sad situation. It worked well where someone just wanted cheap labour—an apprentice in effect doing a builder's labourer job but not at builder's labourer wages. We had to stop this. Too many young lives have been put on hold while students have had to start again. Those young apprentices who thought they would become qualified builders but ended up with a useless experience have had to go back and try a university course or a TAFE course. In a sense, they have lost precious years of their early lives.

This bill will make sure that that sort of experience will not be commonplace or acceptable into the future. It is particularly important in rural and regional Australia, where we have such a shortage of qualified tradespeople and people working in the health services sector, in tourism and especially in hospitality. We have jobs going begging across the Murray electorate, particularly in the Murray and Goulburn valleys. At the same time, one in four of our young people aged 18 to 25 are unemployed. Goulburn Ovens TAFE has struggled to make ends meet, with further cuts to their budget under Victorian governments. While they knew and understood the terrible damage being done to young apprentices through many unconscionable and shonky RTOs, the Goulburn Ovens TAFE was not always able to attract students or to offer the courses they wanted to. We have jobs going begging and we have the unemployed. This is a terrible situation.

Bendigo TAFE, previously called BRIT, has a campus in Echuca which is probably one of the best-looking TAFE campuses you could find anywhere in Victoria, but it is virtually redundant. There are virtually no courses taught at Bendigo TAFE in Echuca. Apparently its board or its governing body have decided that it is a bit of a bother to extend their educational offerings to Echuca, a regional city some two hours drive from Bendigo. Instead, they have partnered with Holmesglen college; they are quite excited about that. Meanwhile, in Echuca we have some of the highest levels of drug dependency, particularly ice; we have homelessness; and we have extreme levels of youth disappointment in the unemployment rate. Here is an institute with a glorious campus in the middle of Echuca without appropriate courses being offered or any staff to go along with those courses.

The community college just across the road struggles to teach cookery in a tiny room in an old historic building. The cookery course is oversubscribed. There are too many local young and older people wanting to do cookery to fit into the room. Within the Bendigo TAFE campus across the road is a magnificent commercial cooking facility that is empty, unused. This is the disgrace of the system that we are now finding out about.

This bill is going to make all the difference. I am so pleased that it is now receiving bipartisan support. We must have quality standards assured. Our training and education sector has suffered too much with neglect, with years of misunderstanding and mismanagement. I strongly commend this bill to the House.

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