Parliamentary Committees

Select Committee on Skills for All Program

The Hon. J.M.A. LENSINK (16:13): I move:

That the report of the committee be noted.

I would first of all like to acknowledge the members of the committee, the Hon. Mr Darley, the Hon. Ms Franks and the Hon. Ms Lee; our secretary, Anthony Beasley, and our research officer, Stephen Atkinson; and to particularly thank the Hon. Ms Lee for chairing the committee in my absence. I make those acknowledgements at the start to ensure that I do not forget. The Select Committee on Skills for All was established on 3 June 2015, obviously to look into the Skills for All program.

It had some 10 or 11 terms of reference that were quite explicit and are available for anybody to read. This particular program, I think, will have to go down in the annals of history. It could easily be the subject of one of those satirical programs that are often on the ABC in the tenor of Yes Minister, given how poorly managed it was—a classic case of over-promising a huge amount of money that was expended not in accordance with any particular outcomes and was hastily called to an end to the detriment of the training sector, particularly the non-government training sector in South Australia.

The original Skills for All white paper promised the creation of 100,000 new training placements with 'the largest investment in skills in the state's history', which was supposed to be $194 million over six years. In anyone's language this is a whole lot of moolah. The key goal was to increase our labour force participation by between, as it stated, two and three percentage points, which was in order to meet an Economic Development Board growth rate of 3.2 per cent. The program was shut down three years ahead of schedule, and the government quite boldly stated that this was because the targets had been met. The key target, of course, being that it had spent all the money.

We had a very unedifying situation in May 2015, where a whole lot of registered training organisations had scaled up to meet the program targets to design new programs, put on new staff, have students enrolled and so forth and were given next to no warning about the fact that the program was being axed and that the funding would cease. Clearly, that had a range of negative impacts on those training providers and on the students who would have liked to participate in those programs. What we also discovered was that the funding that was still available was being very much directed towards the TAFE sector, so that TAFE was receiving money at the expense of non-government providers.

We heard from a large number of witnesses. The evidence was very consistent that there was a distinct lack of controls on the original program, which led to some courses having no enrolments at all. There was poor matching between the types of courses that were offered to particular employment outcomes, and general chaos ensued as a result of the manner in which the government had let the money flow out and then had cut it short without any warning at all. Regional providers, I think, were probably particularly disadvantaged. There were issues for the agricultural skills sector. A lot of non-government providers, I think, were also subject to unfair competition from TAFE, which scoped their activities and then provided very similar courses and was able to drop its prices to try to attract those non-government provider students.

At the same time, there have also been internal difficulties within the TAFE system with ongoing negotiations between the particular union and TAFE itself. I would have to say that TAFE were very unimpressive witnesses. We had a difficult time with them. Even though they were the key stakeholder, the major stakeholder in terms of this inquiry, they did not actually provide a written submission to the committee, which I think was unsatisfactory.

We had quite an exchange with the chairman of the TAFE board and then, when we asked particular questions in the follow-up that we requested as a committee, those replies were very tardy in coming forth. We just about had to threaten the TAFE board with being in contempt of parliament if they did not produce the information that we requested. That was the means by which we eventually were able to obtain that information. I would have to say that they did not cover themselves in glory in many ways as witnesses to this committee.

There are a number of recommendations, quite a large number of recommendations for a committee: 29 in total. I would like to thank everybody who made a submission, either in person or a written submission to the committee. I commend this report to the council.

Debate adjourned on motion of Hon. T.T. Ngo.