Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing and Science) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As you would know, Deputy Speaker Georganas, on Tuesday, 4 September the Marshall Liberal government handed down the Liberal Party's very first South Australian budget for 16 years. Sixteen years is a long time in the wilderness, and you would have thought that they had learnt a thing or two, but this was a budget made up of cuts, closures and privatisations. Just today, we see the state's prisons locked down because of the threat of privatisation of the Adelaide Remand Centre. We could talk about their cuts to health, where the effects will be seen in our electorates in the future.

It's also the budget that announced the closure of seven TAFE campuses. The Marshall Liberal government want to shut down the Port Adelaide campus, the Tea Tree Gully campus, the Urrbrae campus, the Roxby Downs campus, the Coober Pedy campus, the Wudinna campus and the Parafield campus. The Parafield campus, which is based at Parafield Airport, adjacent to my electorate, teaches aviation maintenance courses. It would seem to be a good place to teach those courses. Of course, if those courses aren't picked up then those TAFE students, or anybody who wants to study that important skill, will have to move interstate to continue their studies.

So we've seen the short-sighted closure of seven different TAFE campuses around the state. It is primarily an assault on the job opportunities of young people and people who may have been made redundant as part of the automotive closures, or something like that, who are seeking to and need to upgrade their skills. This is the reaction from the state Liberal government: closure of TAFEs, closure of courses and closure of opportunities—closure of employment opportunities in particular.

If I were the member for King or the member for Newland, who both have margins of less than two per cent, I would be very worried. Paula Luethen in King and Richard Harvey in Newland should be bashing down Steven Marshall's door and trying to get him to reverse these cuts and closures. If they can't do that then they're going to be held accountable. They're going to be held accountable in the northern suburbs, and they're going to be held accountable in the north-eastern suburbs. There's an opportunity at the next federal election to send those members a very clear message, not just about federal politics but about the state Liberal budget. It is a budget that has TAFE closures in their local areas, with the closure of skills, the closure of job opportunities and the closure of progress in our state.