Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

So when you said in your press release today that there will be major changes to Australian apprenticeships in the coming months, you did not actually mean that there were going to be any. So let us put all that to one side, because plainly the government does not have any plans to make any changes other than changing the name.

If we can move to the operation of the technical colleges, first of all I want to ask some questions about some of the stand-alone Australian technical colleges. By that I mean the ones the government intends to set up as independent schools without support from either the state governments or the Catholic system. I will take the example of the proposed technical college to be set up in Townsville next year. I see the member for Herbert has just come in; I am sure he will be interested in the minister’s answers.

The minister has announced that the college will commence operations in 2007, but I just want to understand how this college is going to be financed. The current AGSRC secondary school figure is about $9,000 per student. Could the minister just confirm that that is the Australian Government School Recurrent Cost secondary school standard, about $9,000 a student? Of course, as the minister would be aware, this is a cash figure; it does not include liabilities for superannuation and so on. Nevertheless, as the minister would know, it is a conservative figure when we look at the costs of actually running a senior secondary school. We all know that students in years 11 and 12 are likely to be more expensive than that, and I would ask the minister to confirm that that is his expectation. Some people suggest that the estimates could be between 20 and 50 per cent higher than this average provided for secondary school students.

So, first of all, I would like to know what cost estimate the government actually has, particularly for these schools that are not going to have the support that will be coming to those technical colleges in cooperation with the state government system or the Catholic system. Could the minister give us an idea of the actual figure he is working to for the cost per student in these colleges, like the one in Townsville?

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