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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2023-10-18 Daily Xml
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TAFE SA

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (12:55): On behalf of the member for King, I move:

That this house—

(a) acknowledges both the Malinauskas and Albanese Labor governments for their strong backing of TAFE;

(b) congratulates the Malinauskas Labor government on being the first state to sign up to the interim National Skills Agreement in 2022 that delivered 12,500 fee-free VET places to South Australia, with 10,500 going to TAFE SA; and

(c) welcomes the strong commitment to value and invest in TAFE SA as a high-quality and respected VET provider for the South Australian community.

The timing of this motion is fortuitous in the sense that just yesterday the Premier and I were joined by the member for Adelaide outside Adelaide Botanic High School—in fact, the part of the school that is being extended or upgraded to accommodate another 700 students from the start of term 2 next year—to talk about the announcement made in the last 24 hours by the Prime Minister, the federal Minister for Skills, Brendan O'Connor, the Premier of South Australia and me.

The announcement was for a $2.29 billion agreement over five years to provide 150,000 subsidised training places for this state, which is an enormous uplift in terms of new money over and above the number of places we would be offering in South Australia had we not signed this National Skills Agreement, which I would like to remind the house is actually the first of its kind in a decade.

Unfortunately, the former state government could not find their way to reaching agreement with the former federal government on a national skills agreement, so I am very pleased that, in a very short period of time, we have actually signed two National Skills Agreements. The first agreement, which is referred to in this motion, is for twelve and a half thousand fee-free places for South Australia, ten and a half thousand of those to be delivered by TAFE and 2,000 to be delivered by a range of for-profit and not-for-profit training providers. I am pleased to inform the house that they have basically all been used; in fact, I think at the last count 12,400 had been accessed, which is fantastic news.

Most pleasingly, though, and the question that I always ask when I visit any training campus, and in the context of the motion that we are debating here today, whenever I visit a TAFE campus, I always approach any students who are studying by virtue of accessing a fee-free course to talk about how important it was that it was free in terms of their ability to access it and to actually undertake the course. It was my desire and the federal government's desire that these fee-free places were able to attract people who would otherwise not be able to afford a course, instead of simply attracting people who would have otherwise paid a subsidised rate.

I am pleased to say that the feedback was overwhelmingly that it was the difference. In fact, I was at the TAFE SA campus in the city just this morning to talk to some students who are studying cybersecurity and ICT, including a number who were studying a cert IV under fee-free TAFE. I asked both those students, 'How important was it to you that the course was free?' and they both said, without any encouragement from this minister, that they would not have been there if it were not for fee-free. To me, that is a wonderful thing to hear and shows the importance of this. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from13:00 to 14:00.

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