Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am delighted to participate in this debate on the Higher Education Support Amendment (Extending FEE-HELP for VET Diploma and VET Advanced Diploma Courses) Bill 2007 to endorse the government’s actions, its commonsense and practicality in recognising that there are many different ways that people may choose to get to the same ends. We have a circumstance where if a student decides to go down a university pathway they are treated in one particular way but where they could gain an equal qualification through their local TAFE or other training provider. It is a qualification which is equal to that university outcome but which has a different set of circumstances. One of the key things is the up-front fee requirement of state government TAFEs and of other training providers before students can commence study while university students are of course able to access the Higher Education Contribution Scheme for accredited courses. I was one of the first people in Australia to pay HECS. I started my part-time studies at Griffith University in 1987 while I was working. If I remember rightly, I got too enthusiastic about the payment schedule and overpaid my HECS debt, so I got a nice refund at one stage. I understand how university students have an advantage over TAFE students.

As is the wont of the opposition, they will promise the world and, based on their track record, no-one can believe anything they promise. When we came to office in 1996 barely $1 billion was put into vocational and technical education in this country. We are spending $2.9 billion this year and over the current quadrennium the best part of $12 billion. It has been this side of the House that has sponsored the way forward for acquisition of skills by mechanics, cane cutters and all the other people who do things for a living. It was this side of the House and not the Labor side that gave voice to the genuine concerns about market responses of governments, like that of the New South Wales government a few years ago when it increased TAFE fees by 300 per cent. What sort of signal do you send to young people who are deciding whether they want to do hairdressing or bricklaying or to become a chippie when they find that not only do they have to pay the fee up front but the fee for some of these courses has increased by 300 per cent? These are the sorts of things that came out of New South Wales, which has the biggest economy in Australia but also the worst performing economy in Australia. Is it any wonder? They see TAFE students as milch cows and revenue raisers. They turned them into general accounts rather than treating the time that people take to educate and train themselves and gain skills as a very important investment.

At the same time, the TAFE sector has become enormously stodgy and unresponsive in various parts around the country. It was the students who had to work for them rather than the other way around. Employers, who are the ones that trigger the training by hiring apprentices, had to work around the way that the TAFEs wanted to operate—36 weeks a year and 20 hours of student contact time per week. That approach is not the real world but it is the TAFE world.

The government has a very much reformist program to deliver a better outcome. At the same time, we are saying to people who want to go to a diploma level of attainment similar to a university degree or above—in TAFE and training system parlance it is a certificate V or certificate VI qualification—that we think they should be offered the chance to get access to FEE-HELP. Through this bill, we are extending that to these diploma and advanced diploma vocational education courses.

On this side of the House we have the real people who have come to this place with qualifications they earned in the community. I see that the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Education, Science and Training is in the chamber. He is the only mechanic I know of here. There might be a few amateur ones, but he is a qualified one and he is on this side of the chamber, not on that side. They are the people who represent the union leaders, 70 per cent of their frontbench being former union officials. They are not the ones who represent the workers. We are. This measure, I think, proves this again.

This measure is one of a suite of measures. In the Skills for the Future package, announced almost a year ago by the Prime Minister, there was an additional vote of the best part of $1 billion. There is the Australian technical colleges program, which now is a $500 million program and has 28 colleges around Australia. It provides opportunities for kids to learn the trades and gain skills while they are still doing years 11 and 12 at school and, perhaps because of their own ambition, they will not just be a tradesperson; they will re-educate themselves and gain further skills by taking on a diploma or advanced diploma course. There are people in this country today who are engineers with university qualifications who seek to understand how to build the things they design. It is important that those people know that when they aspire to improve their credentials—which benefits both their families and the community—the government is willing to back them all the way. The Skills for the Future package was in part about that.

The measures in the education revolution budget that was announced by the Treasurer in May this year are further evidence of this government’s commitment, not simply to the high-intellect end of town but also to those who have the intellect and the skills to be good tradespeople. We have put the taxpayers’ money where our mouths are.

FEE-HELP is a loan scheme which eases the up-front financial burden on eligible students. It assists them to pay their tuition fees. These fees, as I have said, go to the service provider, and state governments see TAFE students as a massive milch cow so I certainly hope that the response from state governments is not to jack up fees. If we are going to start helping students to pay these fees, the last thing I want to see is state TAFEs starting to ramp up the costs and saying, ‘You beauty! Commonwealth-state relations will be enhanced in our favour if we charge these students more.’ I suppose in one sense that is the potential downside of our engaging in this, but I know, because I chaired the meeting, that the state TAFE ministers agreed in November last year to do more—to provide a greater range of courses and to provide greater competition in these higher end things. I guess the deal was that they would do that provided we could come through with FEE-HELP. We have kept our word at that ministerial council level.

In the end, we are about encouraging excellence amongst students. We want to pay the amount of the loan direct to the student’s education provider and the student will then repay their loan through the taxation system once their income is above a minimum threshold, just like the Higher Education Contribution Scheme. Of course, if anybody wants to make a voluntary repayment they can do that at any time.

We believe this legislation will remove some of the barriers which exist for students who have chosen to pursue a higher level qualification through the vocational education system. We believe that it brings a certain amount of equity to the two. I think this confirms what the Prime Minister and others have been so passionate about—that is, to defeat forever this logic that seems to have come into our society over the last 20 or 30 years that if you do not have a university degree you are a dud. We want to put vocational education qualifications on the same footing in attainment as the best of university outcomes. There will be those who say, ‘The great brain surgeons must be held up on a platform way above the best of plumbers.’  I guess that might be true unless the water main in your front yard breaks. That certainly happened to me in Brisbane. I said to the plumber who came out that particular Sunday afternoon in the middle of the Labour Day long weekend in May a couple of years ago, ‘Mate, I’m glad you didn’t take on brain surgery, because you’re a good plumber and you fixed my problem fast.’

The point is that we on the government side have been absolutely zealous in our ambition to restore the sense of attainment, dignity and importance associated with the vocational trades. While the 2006 figures show that there were 623 full fee paying students studying at these higher levels within the Australian Qualifications Framework—we know the uptake of the scheme is fairly modest in the sense of these higher end credentials and, therefore, the financial impact is probably going to be modest as well—we have nevertheless offered an extra $40-plus million over four years to accommodate the qualifications. We suspect the numbers in the FEE-HELP scheme will gradually increase to about 500 students by 2010-11. We are factoring in the notion that not every student will want to do it, but also we are recognising that those who choose the vocational education system in which to attain these higher levels of qualifications should not be disadvantaged in their efforts by not being able to access the FEE-HELP scheme.

I know that the Minister for Vocational and Further Education, Mr Robb, has circulated some further amendments to the original bill in response to the Senate Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Education, which looked at these things. I welcome those further amendments. The amendments are basically saying that there are some people at the vocational graduate certificate and vocational graduate diploma levels who deliver professional skills which build on the technical skills that they have obtained through the vocational system. There are various certificates, diplomas and advanced diplomas. In a technical sense these people have reached a point of personal attainment and qualification equivalent to any higher education graduate certificate or graduate diploma. They sit at levels 8 and 9 in the Australian Qualifications Framework—above a bachelor degree but below a master’s degree.

I see the member for Rankin in the chamber. He has a PhD—he is probably going to speak after me—and I am sure he would understand the importance of the hard work to obtain a PhD. I am in awe of people who have done that. The key thing is that, if people who have gained a qualification through the vocational framework want to qualify themselves even more, we are all for that. The rub-off in society is—and I know the member for Rankin has written lots of papers about this—the great economic advantage that comes our way with the qualifications that are gained.

There are some who would have perhaps been disadvantaged by the original draft of the bill, so we have taken the Senate committee’s advice on board. One of the examples that has been given to me is the excellent state owned TAFE in Western Australia, Challenger TAFE. They have a vocational graduate diploma in maritime management. It provides students with the skills to manage the business and legal aspects of shipping. In Western Australia, when it comes to the shipping and fishing industry, the TAFE sector—and Challenger TAFE is at the heart of this—is world’s best practice. If world’s best practice is being offered, and other countries around the world are seeking the advice of places like Challenger TAFE, then it is important that Australia recognises that. So we have these further amendments that the minister has provided and I am pleased that the opposition agree that they make sense.

I must declare a personal friendship with Jeff and Michelle Lee, who run the Royal Brisbane International College at South Bank—in part in concert with the University of Canberra. Michelle is over in Changping, north of Beijing, right now doing what she does well—that is, flogging Australian education overseas and encouraging more students to come and study. I hope she makes a dollar at it! I also know that the Royal Brisbane International College has provided a vocational graduate certificate in business administration, which provides high-level skills to managers in the tourism and hospitality sectors. Until these further amendments came into this place, they might not have been able to be assisted by the FEE-HELP amendments that we are making to the Higher Education Support Act.

The government is saying that, after years of strong economic management and of gearing this country up to the point where we are at a threshold of even better years ahead of us, we need to find new ways to further invest in what will sustain our good, strong economy and our economic circumstances. This is about growing trade skills and growing the vocational education sector. This measure will add further to those. So, on top of that original budget allocation of $221 million, an additional $40.142 million has been added, so all up there is an enormous amount of money being dedicated to assist students through FEE-HELP.

Reflecting on the Royal Brisbane International College’s effort in tourism and hospitality management, it is absolutely vital that these sectors have well-qualified and capable people. The House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Workforce Participation recently tabled a report which looked very closely at the folly of employers in the tourism sector not seeing the value in training their staff and training them well. Here is a perfect opportunity for them to take up the challenge. They should not see those who come through their businesses and work for them as just the current crop of people who will then cycle on. Tourism and hospitality should not be seen as something that you do until a real job comes along. Instead, people in the industry should be seen as a commodity worth investing in. They should be seen as groups of people with passion and ability and they should be able to gain a qualification that will stand them in enormous positive stead all around the country.

Consider this government’s attention to the task of repairing what was a very parlous set of circumstances that we inherited in 1996. At that time, there were about 30,000 people in the vocational education system as apprentices, and now we have over 180,000, or whatever it is—the officials do not need to get involved; the number of apprentices is something in that order. There are over 400,000 people in the vocational system, which is up from around 100,000 when we came to office. It is pretty obvious to me that people actually get the fact that the best investment you can make in your business is in your people. As people make this investment, what is absolutely important is that the training sector is as responsive and as agile as it can possibly be. The power to choose the best provider of that training is in the hands of those who receive that training and, indeed, those who sponsor that training as employers. It is important that we understand that not one apprentice can be created unless somebody actually decides to invest in their business in this particular way.

It is more than just about apprenticeships, though; it is about higher level skills. It is about this government getting parity through the higher education support scheme—the HECS scheme, the FEE-HELP scheme. It is about getting parity between those who want to seek higher level qualifications through the vocational sector and those who are getting them through the university sector.

There is one last thing that is worth putting on the record, and that is an ambition only exercised by a handful of institutions around this country—currently four of them in Victoria. How sad it is to think that there is still this sort of highbrow arrogance about universities versus TAFEs. Organisations like RMIT and others in Melbourne are in fact offering a double outcome for the same effort—a TAFE qualification and a degree qualification out of the same effort. They recognise that the skills and the effort taken to gain the credit units that you need to get your degree may well be very complementary to or exactly the same as the skills and effort taken to gain a diploma or higher diploma—a technical underpinning through a technical qualification—at a TAFE. If we can get more institutes adopting the kinds of models that we are seeing mainly in Victoria, we will start to see a lessening of this highbrow sandstone university view of the world.

I am really speaking like an ex-Griffith student now, aren’t I—a real radical? But we need to see more of this respect for, and understanding of, the effort that it takes for people at different education levels and different experience levels to achieve technical outcomes through a vocational course. Their skills and experiences are just as valid as those of someone who may well have the academic qualifications but not the practical skills. Marry those two skill sets together and you will get a mighty capable workforce; marry those two skill sets together and the world will beat a path to our door; marry those two skill sets together and you will get a greater sense of cooperation and respect, and perhaps some shorter pathways to problem solving in the years ahead. I see this bill and the amendments that the government have put forward to it as being valid, strong steps taken by this side of the chamber to ensure that Australia is ready to be unleashed on the rest of the world in the 21st century.

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