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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fourth Parliament, Second Session (54-2)
2021-02-04 Daily Xml
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TAFE SA

Mr BOYER (Wright) (14:29): I have a supplementary question to the Minister for Education. I refer to the minister's previous answer and ask: how does cutting TAFE courses help to ensure that students have access to high-quality courses?

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Minister for Education) (14:29): That's an entirely rhetorical question, and I would make—

Members interjecting:

The SPEAKER: Order! The member for Lee will cease interjecting. The Minister for Education has the call.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: I didn't realise the member for Lee was such an expert in cert IIIs and TAFE courses and everything else.

The SPEAKER: The Minister for Education will respond to the question and not to interjections. The Minister for Education has the call.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: Thank you, I appreciate your counsel. The question is entirely rhetorical and betrays a lack of understanding of how the training sector works as a whole. It betrays a lack of understanding of the interplay between private companies that want staff and, indeed, the not-for-profit group training organisations and RTOs they kept supporting throughout the dim years following Skills for All, that disastrous program that was set up so badly by the former government, and then the dramatic cut in funding that the former government put in when they basically cut the not-for-profit and non-government training sector completely out of all subsidised training—90 per cent out.

Yet still some of these companies, because they wanted a quality product that met their needs and expectations, kept funding these GTOs and RTOs, even though it cost them a lot more than it might have cost them to do the same training at TAFE. What does that tell you? It tells you that there was a quality there in the marketplace that they were able to fund, that they were willing to fund, because they felt it better met their needs and their aspirations.

Their alternative, of course, was to follow the member for Port Adelaide, the deputy leader's training model of giving everything to TAFE SA when they had a 16 out of 16 failure in their accreditation under ASQA—a catastrophe for the TAFE brand and a catastrophe for confidence in training in South Australia given to the people of South Australia and those students and those businesses and industries courtesy of the Labor government, as it was then.

Quality training can happen at TAFE and it does happen at TAFE now, meeting the national training package's expectations, which we have decided is actually important. It was part of our election policy that quality was going to be a key part of it, that the expectations of the TAFE executive would be entirely and collectively required to be related to quality. Indeed, the board has a quality committee. The board has appointed a senior executive to ensure quality.

The fruit of that labour, and the labour of well over 1,000 hardworking TAFE staff who worked on this project, was to deliver a package that met the needs of industry and that met the needs of the training package requested by ASQA in the national arrangement. We are comfortable now that TAFE is delivering that quality package. We are also comfortable that, when a not-for-profit is established by a series of businesses and industries in South Australia, the not-for-profit is supported by those industries who choose to send their students there and it meets the expectations of ASQA. There is a reasonable change that that too will meet the quality expectations.

If the member for Wright and the Leader of the Opposition and the opposition as a whole think that non-government training providers are unable to deliver a quality product—and maybe that is the reason why they cut all funding to it about eight years ago, maybe that is—then I think they should go and talk to the hundreds and hundreds of staff in non-government training providers in South Australia and industries that want those training providers to have an option to them. Indeed, I encourage those opposite to have a chat with some of the GTOs about how they do their work.

Sometimes TAFE works really well hand in glove with some of these providers, but the key things are: are the students getting the quality they want and are businesses and industries getting the students they want? If those things are being met, then the government is doing its job of supporting a good training market in South Australia.

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