Lindsay Tanner (Melbourne, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Finance) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006 is directed at an issue that I think is close to the most fundamentally important question facing the future of Australia. It is a misconceived strategy on the part of the government. But the elements that are producing this approach are real, they are serious and they are something long overdue for our nation to come to grips with, and that is the future of learning in this country; the future commitment of Australia as a nation to underpinning all economic activity with skills, with learning and with a change in culture so that we as a society can continue to prosper, can continue to be a first-world nation with a diverse economic base, with a strong manufacturing sector, a strong services sector and a strong interrelationship with the rest of the world.

When you look at the basic statistics of learning in this country you see there are a number of extremely embarrassing elements. Most notorious is the fact that in recent years we have been the only country in the OECD, the only country in the developed world, where public expenditure on universities and TAFE—on post-secondary education generally—has been falling. We are the only country in the developed world where that is occurring.

There are other statistics too that we should be very concerned about. For example, in Australia only about 67 per cent of people in the age group 25 to 64—therefore, the dominant working age group—have year 12 or equivalent qualifications. That might sound like a reasonably healthy number, until we compare the equivalent levels in other developed nations, which are overwhelmingly well ahead of us. Nations like the United States, Canada and the stronger nations in Europe all have levels in the vicinity of 80 per cent or more. We are stuck at 60 per cent. In other words, on one of the most crucial measures of the level of aptitude, the level of skill and the level of capability to participate in and add value to the production process, we as a nation are significantly behind comparable nations around the world. There are many other aspects of this picture that we could look at to see that Australia is underperforming in learning and that unless we change course, unless we really dedicate a much greater degree of effort and priority to our national commitment to learning, we will start to fall behind the rest of the world.

It is well understood now, even in those who are not particularly engaged in politics or broader social and economic analysis, that the structure of work has changed dramatically in modern Western societies. In particular, the extent to which there are unskilled or very low skilled jobs in large numbers has changed dramatically. So the kinds of jobs that were there in their hundreds of thousands or millions when I was in the process of leaving school are, in many cases, simply gone. The purely unskilled job is rapidly becoming a thing of the past.

What that means of course is that we have to change to reflect those changes. They have been driven primarily by technological change, the fact that things that human beings used to do are now being done by machines or computers. That has spread from physical work, from manual labour, all the way up the chain into all kinds of other activities including skilled, manual labour and brain work, office work and clerical work. It have had a profound impact on the production process as a whole. And some of these changes are more dramatic than we really recognise. Even relatively mundane things like the introduction of the mobile phone have had an extraordinary impact on the way people work—the way we do business, the way business activities are structured, the way work is structured and the way we relate to each other economically. Some countries have been good at adapting to these changing realities and some have not. Sadly, largely, particularly in the last 10 years under the Howard government, we are in the latter category.

Although I concede that the underlying imperative in the community that has driven the government to propose the Australian technical colleges is a legitimate one and a real one, and therefore the impulse which has generated this response from the government needs to be acknowledged, I think it is a misconceived response. I think it is a response that is largely designed to enable the government to play politics with the states. It is designed to enable them to pretend that they are doing something and to try and denigrate the state governments, which of course are all Labor governments, rather than produce a big-picture, serious, comprehensive, all-embracing and open solution to the problem, engaging with the states and leading and driving the states.

Let’s face it: the state governments are not perfect. They certainly stand to be criticised over the years on a number of fronts on these issues, so I think a bit of Commonwealth leadership would be very helpful. But it has to be genuine, it has to be constructive and it has to be engaging. It should not be about simply playing politics. Essentially, that is what the Howard government’s Australian technical colleges strategy is about—simply manipulating the politics and contributing a relatively modest amount of money to ultimately a mickey mouse program which has had a very vexed commencement and is really not likely to lead to very much in the way of substantive change.

This is part of a broader pattern with the Howard government that to me is perhaps close to the most distressing feature of this government. I tend not to get angry too often, and there are not that many things that have made me really emotionally angry about this government. There are plenty of things I disagree with and plenty of things I think are wrong. One of those things is the vilification of asylum seekers, the vilification of a group of people. The way that asylum seekers have been treated has particularly angered me personally.

But the other thing that stands out for me is the deliberate denigration of learning by this government, particularly under the former Minister for Education, Science and Training, now the Minister for Defence, the member for Bradfield. He developed this technique of dog whistling to people who have not been to university, particularly less educated older people who grew up in a different era, when very few people went to university. The former minister developed this technique of appealing to them and essentially sending out a message saying, ‘Look, it’s the taxes of all you hardworking real Aussies that are paying for all these people in universities, these ivory tower types who are not in the real world, who don’t really contribute very much and who are off on all these wacky things—and we all know the sort of rubbish they get up to, don’t we?’

That message has been very overt. It has been supplemented by statements from the Prime Minister to the effect that leaving school after year 10 is perfectly reasonable, that it is a great idea, not a problem. In some cases, that is not unreasonable. Of course, in bygone eras most people did. There is nothing wrong with that and there is nothing wrong with people who 20 or 30 years ago did leave school after year 10 and in many cases went on to develop skills on the job or in different forms. But that is in the past, and it is certainly the wrong message to be putting out to 15-year-olds now—a totally appalling message.

But underneath this has been a deliberate attempt to reach out to a particular mentality that is widespread in the Australian community, which has long been there, and that is a resistance to learning and education, a denigration of learning. There is a set of values that is based on the idea that practical people do not need knowledge or learning, that things like books are basically for pointy-headed oddballs and that knowledge and the acquisition of skills and capabilities, particularly through academic learning, is somehow second rate, dirty or peculiar. That kind of mentality is a reflection of Australia of the past. It has been one of those quirks of our national character that we have been able to afford, to tolerate and I suppose in many respects to consider to be just one of those quaint, interesting little things that characterises us as a bit different from some other countries.

We can no longer afford that attitude because it is going to be a recipe for long-term economic disaster in this country. Increasingly in modern Western societies, and broadly in all economies, we are going to prosper only on the basis of genuine skills, knowledge and capability. This means that not only will people have to be literate and numerate but their problem-solving skills, their analytical skills and their ability to absorb complex information and to make decisions and choices—all of those things—are increasingly becoming important to an ever-growing proportion of jobs. I look even at simple things like the modern motor vehicle and the job that a skilled mechanic now does to repair or maintain a car compared with what that was 30 years ago. The degree of complexity and the degree of sophistication involved in that task is light-years ahead of what that task was 30 years ago, and you can see the same thing in manual jobs, in mental or brain based jobs and office jobs throughout the entire society.

So it is absolutely appalling that we have leading figures in the government sending out these powerful signals saying: ‘Learning doesn’t matter. Learning is really for oddballs, for nerds, for those pointy-headed types who aren’t practical.’ That is an appalling message and is something which the Howard government stands to be condemned for. If there is one thing that is going to ensure that Australia prospers and that we have a broadly based, diverse economy with a strong manufacturing sector and a strong services sector that will continue, it is going to be a profound national commitment to learning in all its forms: learning on the job, learning in TAFE colleges, learning through apprenticeships, learning in universities, learning in schools and learning in preschools. We need a national crusade to inculcate a much stronger commitment in our community to the values around learning.

The great irony about the government’s position on these things is that, although most of us on this side of the parliament would not give much credit to former Prime Minister Sir Robert Menzies for many things, the one thing that I think he deserves enormous credit for and that history will judge him and his government very kindly on is substantially increasing the commitment of our nation to learning, most obviously through the federal takeover of universities but also through the creation of a set of values in the postwar generation of valuing learning and of understanding that for personal advancement, for family advancement and for national advancement learning is fundamental.

I am profoundly grateful for the fact that I grew up in a family with parents whose view of the world was profoundly influenced by that Menzies’ message and who, therefore, brought up a family where commitment to learning was a very strong value. History suggests that that occurred in many parts of Australia in many families. Although there would be many things we would criticise the Menzies government for, I think sending a powerful set of signals to the Australian community valuing learning is something it needs to be recognised for. The Whitlam commitment to education, which I think is equally or perhaps even more profound in the context of changing Australia’s attitude to learning, was built on the initial work that Menzies did. So I think it is both sad and reprehensible that the current government panders to antilearning prejudice in our society.

The final observation I want to make is to return to the more specific aspects of the bill to indicate that, although this is not the solution, it is certainly directed at a very serious problem. I call on the government to engage in a wider dialogue with the community and with the states—because they have some things to answer for on this front—to deal with this problem. The problem is that, increasingly, with things like the abolition of technical schools in my home state of Victoria, the merging of secondary education into a single one-size-fits-all approach—well intentioned though it was—has become a giant mistake in retrospect. What it has done—and I expect similar things have occurred in different forms in other states—is create a set of secondary education institutions that are totally permeated with signals to teachers, administrators and students that are all based on university entrance. The way the school now operates is built around the ultimate objective of maximising university entrance. That in itself is not a bad thing—it is obviously a good thing—but inevitably there are a substantial proportion of students who either do not want to go to university or have different aptitudes that will get reward and advancement in pathways other than university. They are ending up as second-class citizens in many respects in our school system.

I have a special school in my electorate called The Island, which is designed for students who have either been expelled or left school, typically around the age of 13. It has usually 60 or so students, overwhelmingly boys, and it has four streams: an automechanical stream, an engineering stream, a woodwork or furnishing based stream and a hospitality kitchen stream. They all rotate through those streams. It is designed to replicate school but in a way that is intended to prepare them for apprenticeships. The reason that these young people end up in The Island is that they are totally alienated by the school that they have been in, because they have a set of aptitudes and orientations focused on a combination of hand and brain skills—they are mechanically oriented or interested in traditional trade things—but they are taught in a context where, because university entrance is the ultimate goal of achievement for everybody, those things are inevitably downplayed and the sorts of things they are exposed to are predominantly things they are not really into.

It may not sound that dramatic. But I thought about this the other day and about doing a reverse role-play to illustrate it. When I was at school, I did woodwork in, from memory, first form and second form, which is now year 7 and year 8. Frankly, I was not very good at it. I did not really like it. I do not know whether there were rankings done in the class but, I suspect, if I was not bottom of the class, I was not far off it. I did not like it, I was no good at it and I did not have the kind of aptitude that meant I could naturally warm to it. Of course, as soon as I got an opportunity to avoid doing it, I did. I asked myself what my schooling would have been like and how long I would have hung around if 90 per cent of the subjects had been of that kind—things that I was not focused on, oriented towards, particularly good at or interested in—and if only a tiny proportion were things that I was good at or interested in. I suspect the answer is that I probably would not have hung around or I would have caused trouble or difficulty.

That is the experience that these young people have in our education system. We should not need to have a school like The Island. Great though it is, it is a manifestation of failure in the education system. When you talk to the young people at that school, as I did on a visit a year or two ago, one of the things that strikes you is how bright they are. These kids are not failures. These are not kids who are dumb or who have some problems; these are kids who basically have an orientation and a set of aptitudes that are not being adequately catered for in the school system. Although there have been some attempts in some states through greater VET in Schools programs and some recognition of apprenticeship programs in schools, it is not enough. The one thing I would say about the technical colleges approach of the government—misconceived though it is—is that at least it is an attempt to deal indirectly with what is a very serious issue and a very important question.

We have to do two things as a society. We have to absolutely reinvigorate this nation’s commitment to learning but also ensure that that commitment is to learning broadly defined—learning that is inclusive; learning that acknowledges that we are in the business of producing great professors and great plumbers, that we need people with skills and capabilities right across the board and that in varying dimensions everybody needs to be treated equally. Everybody needs to get equal recognition, even though specific institutions will be different, the way we organise things will be different and funding arrangements will be different. In an overall sense, we as a society should be saying to people, ‘We don’t particularly mind what you do; we just want you to engage in learning. We want you to better yourself, to improve your circumstances, to improve the circumstances of our society and to put yourself in a position where the children that you may have in the future will get a better start in life because of what you’ve done’ whether through a TAFE college, a university, an apprenticeship or whatever—that is detail.

We have to radically alter our attitude in this country. We do not want to see any more celebrities standing up and boasting about the fact that they have never read a book. To me, that is an insult, and people who do that should be absolutely condemned for the social vandals that they are. We do not want to see this in this country. We want to see people who are promoting commitment to learning, but we also need governments that ensure that the opportunities for learning are sufficiently diverse and inclusive and that people with all different kinds of attributes and aptitudes have genuine opportunities to learn and are not being pushed into kinds of learning that they are not suited to or not interested in. That is where we have gone wrong in the past in this country. I think we need a real revolution in learning in this country. This is not it, but at least the government is starting to address the question in some way. (Time expired)

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