Deborah O'Neill (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

This is a continuation of my speech. I had a few minutes earlier today just before question time, and for those who might be listening and paying attention to this debate at the moment I would just like to lay out the land a little of where we got to just before question time. At one o'clock, when I was sitting in the chair, let me tell you that there was a flurry of activity and a whole lot of amendments that had just landed in this chamber as a result of the government's hasty response to an even more hasty lodgement of a report from the Senate Education and Employment Legislation Committee, which just yesterday put forth a document—quite a detailed document, I will say, but nonetheless fairly rushed at the end so that this government could finally do something about a problem it has been sitting on for two years.

This government is so incompetent and so out of control and so full of hubris. Granted, it does have a new leader with a nice suit and wonderful elocution lessons clearly, but there is a problem with this government and it is a failure to actually attend to the things that matter to Australians. What it wants to do with this piece of legislation just shows how out of touch it is with reality and it just shows where it puts education on its list of priorities. This is the government that wants to put a 15 per cent tax, a 15 per cent GST, on education. Families sending their kids to school under this government come next year would end up having to pay 15 per cent more.

This is the reality of what they think about education, and you see it revealed at every turn in what they have done with regard to the VET sector. The VET sector, for those who do not know, is not to do with veterinarians—horses or small animals et cetera. The VET sector we are talking about is the vocational education and training sector. That VET sector is a critical part of enabling Australians to learn in a skills based way the things that they need to participate in the economy and to get jobs. It is the place where many kids decide that they want to continue their learning. School might not have been a great place for them, but I can tell you I know hundreds—thousands—of tradies on the Central Coast and right across the state of New South Wales and, indeed, the nation who have benefited from the opportunity to go to a high-quality technical and further education college and learn the skills of their trade. It has given them a lifetime of opportunity, great skills and in many cases the chance to grown their own businesses and employ other Australians.

TAFE is a critical part of Australia's history. We have a growing population. We have changed somewhat and we now have some private providers, but there is a bit of a problem that has been going on since 2013, when this government was elected. They have not been watching. They have not been paying attention to what was going on. I will let you know how much they were not paying attention. The report indicates that in 2012 there were 55,000 VET students across the country. Those are students who were engaged in vocational education and training. The cost of the investment in those young people and mature-age people whose careers may have hit a juncture where they either did not like the work they were doing before, had an injury and needed to retrain for another profession or might have just decided that they might choose another career for the rest of their life to meet their community, family or personal monetary needs—the investment in those people—was costing the Commonwealth $235 million.

I do not begrudge investment in education. Those opposite do at every turn. They generally begrudge it. The average cost there was $5,800 per student for the delivery of this retraining opportunity. By 2014, while this government was on watch, the number of people in the VET sector had grown at the most phenomenal rate of 367 per cent. That scale of an expansion of the sector while this government was not looking ended up costing the country $1.8 billion. This was going on while they were in government.