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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-10-17 Daily Xml
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National Skills Agreement

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (14:40): My question is to the Minister for Education, Training and Skills. Will non-government training providers receive subsidies equivalent to those received by the government provider under the new skills agreement in return for delivering the same courses?

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (14:40): I thank the member for Morialta for his question. I will have to take that on notice because, as I said in the answer to the member for Morialta's earlier question, we have the envelope of funding now: big uplift, 150,000 places, 50,000 over and above what we would have been delivering. We now do the work of the Skills Plan, where we work with all parts of the South Australian economy in terms of what we need in terms of new workers, particularly for those priority projects for South Australia. We will work with for-profit, not-for-profit as well as the public training provider, TAFE, in terms of what they believe they can deliver out of that envelope of 150,000 places.

In terms of the specific question around what subsidy will private providers attract compared to what, for instance, TAFE might attract or not-for-profit training providers might attract, I can't answer that off the top of my head. I am happy to find out. But I want to reject any insinuation—and I am not suggesting of course that the member for Morialta is doing this—that in some way we are taking a position that is anti-private providers, because we are not.

I can tell you that as the minister in the chair I pushed hard when we had the first twelve and a half thousand fee-free TAFE places or fee-free places—ten and a half thousand of which were TAFE, 2,000 of which were for-profit and not-for-profit. That is, TAFE didn't feel that it was able to deliver them all, then we should absolutely be making sure that they were available to other parts of the training sector as well, and I will maintain that philosophy.

I am not here to try to sew everything up in a nice bow for TAFE, but we are serious about rebuilding it. We have said that from the start and we are making that investment. I think it is important that we remember that in a comparatively smaller jurisdiction like ours with very big workforce targets in a number of key areas that we do need all parts of the training and skills sector to be working together if we are to be serious about getting on top of the demands that we have both now and into the future.

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