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House of Assembly - Fifty-Fifth Parliament, First Session (55-1)
2025-10-14 Daily Xml
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TAFE SA Bill

Second Reading

Adjourned debate on second reading.

(Continued from 3 September 2025.)

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta) (12:16): I indicate I am the lead speaker on behalf of the opposition—perhaps for the last time—on this bill today, as the Hon. Dennis Hood is our shadow minister for training in the other house. I am very grateful to Dennis for the work he has done to understand this bill, its intentions and its motivations, to consult with stakeholders on behalf of the Liberal Party, and to consider the implications of these measures and what they will mean for our industries, our training sector and the TAFE organisation, and come forward with our position, which I am happy to set out on his behalf in this chamber.

I say therefore at the outset that the Liberal Party is inclined to support this bill, although the shadow minister for training—as I said, the Hon. Dennis Hood MLC—will be putting forward some amendments on behalf of the Liberal Party in the upper house that will, if accepted, improve the legislation. I will explain those amendments for the benefit of the minister, advisers and those on the government side who might have the opportunity to consider them, and therefore between the houses we will share those with the government and table them in the Legislative Council and I hope that the government will consider them with an open mind.

We are inclined to support this bill, not potentially because it is perfect legislation—after all, what is?—but because we have formed a view that it is a clear improvement on the status quo. That is our party's view; as a former minister with responsibility at the time for the TAFE SA organisation, that is also my view. The reforms in this bill are not the only options available to the parliament that would improve the act, but the approach the government has taken is as a result of the review that they commissioned upon coming to government.

It is my view that it would be folly when dealing with an act of this nature, the foundational legislation for our state's public training provider, to attempt to implement ideas from the opposition benches without the resources of government. So we work with the government. We seek to be a constructive opposition. We judge the bill on its merits as being better than the status quo and we will offer improvements as appropriate.

I will spend a little time considering why we view the bill as useful in the context. Sir, as you would recall—we were both here—the current TAFE SA Act was designed at a time when it was assumed that there would be a fully contestable training market within which TAFE SA would operate as the government business to ensure that gaps within the training market were being filled. That was the plan. To be clear, this was not some sort of libertarian bureaucracy-bashing endeavour of the Liberal Party; this was the considered policy opinion of the Labor government at the time and the federal Labor government at the time, led by Julia Gillard, that was pushing the state Labor government at the time in this direction.

I remind members of the stream of Labor ministers for training during that 16-year stretch: Jane Lomax-Smith, Steph Key, Paul Caica, Michael O'Brien, Jack Snelling, Tom Kenyon, Grace Portolesi, Gail Gago and the now member for Port Adelaide at the end. The member for Wright can probably take some pride in the fact that I believe he is now set, if he holds on for another five months, to be the first Labor training minister or minister responsible for TAFE to have held onto that for a full term since Lynn Arnold 40 years ago, a point, no doubt, that his office can take with some level of pride, and I hope they put something on their wall.

At any rate, the minister at the time, Tom Kenyon, in introducing the bill in April 2012, highlighted also the strong push towards this model as a result of national ministerial discussions championed and pushed under the prime ministership of Julia Gillard. In introducing that bill in April 2012, Minister Kenyon, as the then Labor minister, highlighted three particular outcomes achieved by introducing a statutory corporation model for TAFE SA, and I will take a moment to quote them. I note that Associate Professor Rea also quoted some of these in her report. In retrospect, I wish I had reread her report prior to rereading this Hansard; it might have saved me the trouble of finding it, but nevertheless, he said in 2012:

Firstly, by establishing TAFE SA as a statutory corporation, TAFE SA will be provided with greater commercial autonomy and accountability through a board of directors, and flexibility and independence from government processes. This will enable TAFE SA to be even more responsive to market needs.

I identify in commentary that I am not sure that anyone would suggest it has fulfilled that ambition. Secondly, Minister Kenyon said:

…by establishing TAFE SA as a statutory corporation, greater separation of the roles of TAFE SA and the Department of Further Education, Employment, Science and Technology (DFEEST) will be achieved. This is important in the development of the demand-driven and market-based model introduced by Skills for All, to ensure that the relationship between the funder and the provider of the training is transparent for all participants of the training system.

Two to three years later, that ambition was rendered completely unfulfilled, as indeed the opposite took place as TAFE's needs subsumed 90 per cent of the training budget after the Skills for All debacle was concluded. Indeed, the intention there was only rectified in 2018, when TAFE SA was removed entirely from the skills department and had different ministers in different departments responsible for supporting the training sector and TAFE SA as a participant within that sector.

I was responsible for TAFE SA as Minister for Education. Minister Pisoni, the member for Unley, was responsible for the training sector. During that time, we were able to fulfil the ambitions of the training sector and the government's ambitions for the training sector by having a minister dedicated to that and, separately, TAFE SA organised by a minister who was focused on fixing its quality issues and supporting the organisation to recover from the situation it was in and then be a participant able to operate effectively within the training sector.

I highlight that briefly as a diversion. It is certainly not considered a problem by me or the Liberal Party that TAFE is now back within the training portfolio necessarily. From a structural point of view, there are significant obvious complementarities, but there were a lot of things that had to be done between 2018 and 2022 to enable that to operate without the risk of returning to a system where TAFE subsumed the training budget to the detriment of the rest of the sector. TAFE's budget having been fixed prior to 2022, we are now in a situation where it has been able to be more closely integrated. The third thing that Minister Kenyon said, as was then highlighted as an opportunity created by the bill at the time, was:

Thirdly, by establishing TAFE SA as a statutory corporation, the State will meet an important requirement of the Commonwealth government's reform of the VET system. The proposed governance changes for TAFE SA satisfy the Commonwealth's National Skills Reform agenda. The direct implication is that VET FEE-HELP (income contingent loans) will be available to VET students from South Australia who study at least diploma level where study is publically subsidised through approved training providers.

Of course, we have been through about three—or possibly six or seven, depending on how you count—different federal funding models since then, so that third ambition is no longer relevant. In short, it did not work out, and the Skills for All framework, upon which the whole body of reform depended, collapsed upon itself spectacularly. Five years' worth of funding was used up in about two years and, all of a sudden, the market that had grown so quickly was left without any oxygen, without any money.

TAFE SA has never been able to support itself as a market player in a level playing field with other non-government providers. There has never really been such a playing field; unlike those other providers, never having had their status as public servants amended the TAFE SA staff benefited from entitlements and job protections—not incorrectly, because that was the job that they had signed up to but, to say the least, they were a lot more generous than any in the non-government sector.

In many cases it was impossible for non-government providers to retain staff when TAFE SA was advertising the same job with potentially 30 per cent more pay, with 29 non-contact days on top of leave and one year's guaranteed opportunity to look for a new job if they were found to be redundant, with a significant loading of about 30 or 40 per cent if they were HPIs. There were a series of benefits that made it appealing for staff to try to work for TAFE SA rather than the non-government sector.

On top of that, at the time—I think this was about 2014-15—the direction of funding to TAFE SA and the exclusion of the non-government sector led to 90 per cent of the training budget going specifically to TAFE SA. Because TAFE SA was underwritten by government, the government of the day—under then minister Gago—responded to the industrial obligations to those staff by, as I said, channelling 90 per cent of the training budget into the TAFE SA organisation specifically, enabling it to pay its bills. However, it left the private and not-for-profit sector utterly suffocated.

Many, many RTOs—not-for-profit and private providers alike, providers of significant reputation and quality including household names like the Master Builders Association who, I think, every member of this house respects for the work they do—were forced to close their doors for good. Trainers moved elsewhere and got other jobs, the depth in the market diminished, and the credibility of the sector plummeted, as did in-training numbers, especially apprenticeships and traineeships.

The distortions in the VET for schools situation was highlighted by the fact that large numbers of people were doing VET programs in high school and counting towards the numbers—a significant proportion of numbers at that point—but not actually completing them to the point of being able to get a parchment, just fulfilling the requirements of the Year 12 program. Thus they used up their entitlement to a training subsidy, which meant that if those students, having completed year 12, then wanted a subsidised program they had already used up their entitlement—an extraordinary waste within this system to the detriment of the sector and to the detriment of the students who were to benefit from it.

Many people still hoped, during this time, that at some stage it might be possible to return to a contestable training market—including then Labor ministers—right up until about 2017, when the government of the day decided that this was to be an election point of difference they hoped might save them some votes ahead of the 2018 election. I will be frank—and this became increasingly apparent to me during my time as minister—that the distortions and disruptions in the market and the impacts of some of those debacles—in 2015 Skills for All, in 2017 the quality crisis and others—really made this ambition pretty much impossible.

TAFE's unique industrial obligations, along with its obligations to serve the state's needs by offering services non-government providers could not sustain themselves, and along with still significant historical cost challenges, meant that it has pretty much always had to be supported with preferential funding compared to non-government providers: a ratio as high as $4 to $1 per training hour has been described to me but I think $3 to $1 is more common. I am not sure exactly what it is now, but the same training is much more expensive at TAFE, from a government subsidy point of view, than it is at a non-government provider.

The question for me has always been whether the quality is there. How can we ensure that the most number of students possible, the most number of businesses that need their skills met as possible, are able to get the best quality service provision for their training needs as we can get for the government dollar?

At any rate, I do not want to get into a political argument about why this is the case or what can or should be done about it. I just make the point that as we consider this bill we are well and truly past the point where anyone can pretend that the contestable policy ambitions of state and federal Labor governments in 2012, which led to our current legislative framework, have any foundation in reality.

The current act was designed to serve in an environment for training operators that was subsequently destroyed over the next five years. To be clear, this is actually pretty common ground between us all. I might express it slightly differently, but I have restated things that have been admitted by current ministers.

The Minister for Education would probably have different emphases. He would probably view more kindly the tenures of at least some—maybe not all—of his Labor and formerly Labor predecessors. But in 2023, the minister announced in one of The Advertiser's splash and spreads with Andrew Hough, on 6 August 2023, that Labor had got it wrong and reforms would be introduced to turn TAFE into a statutory authority from a corporation chasing profits. I quote from the article:

In a rare public admission of Labor failures, Training and Skills Minister Blair Boyer will on Monday admit the state government wrongly 'corporatised' the embattled agency in 2012 to chase profits.

I made the point at the time to the esteemed journalist, my constituent Andrew Hough, that in 11 years of corporatisation TAFE SA had never actually turned a profit, no matter how it was chasing them, but nevertheless in relation to serving the state's needs the annual charter provided to TAFE SA by the minister and Treasurer set out their requirements for the organisation as the government's public provider of VET and its role in assisting the government and meeting its strategic objectives for technical and further education.

The charter sets out the nature and scope of commercial and non-commercial services. Meanwhile, it has a performance statement as well, which sets out targets for the corporation to pursue, including training activity, load pass rate, qualification/completion ratio, employment outcomes and student satisfaction.

However, I think this gets to the minister's point in moving this bill. Absent specific instruction in the charter or the performance statement or other appropriate direction from government or the minister or the Treasurer or, in the case of when the department is split with the training sector being under a separate authority, the purchasing minister's requirement of the TAFE SA organisation as a provider, the strategic considerations of the board are legally required to act in accordance with the corporations act and therefore in the best interests of TAFE SA as an organisation. That can, of course, from time to time, be defined differently to the state's best interests.

I think the basis of the minister's intention today is really to remove those obligations of the corporations act from the board's consideration so it can focus instead on the objectives set out by the government and minister of the day and the functions ascribed within the act. We will support the bill.

That said, as the current minister has done over the last three years, and certainly when I was the minister we worked within the framework that exists, supported by some outstanding public servants and an extremely motivated and high-functioning board to deliver necessary reforms to set TAFE's budget on a sustainable footing and to ensure that quality was front and centre. I will come to the critical importance of that work, but suffice to say it is possible to work within the framework of the current act.

While the act has had its issues and we are supporting the reforms—I think I have said that a few times, so leave anyone in no doubt—the truth is that there were several issues that had a much, much bigger impact and created much larger problems for TAFE than the responsibilities imposed on the board by their reflections of the corporations act.

The findings of the Nous review into quality at TAFE, tabled in this parliament in 2018, along with the Moran-Bannikoff review into the state's strategic capabilities tabled at the same time, were truly damning when it came to the governance of the organisation during this period—this period being, in particular, the years leading up to 2017 and the failings under the ASQA audit.

Those reports were commissioned by the member for Port Adelaide (and she was the minister), published during my time as the minister—tabled in this house and then published, to be clear. I will come to them later, but I highlight that many of my reflections to come are not necessarily just those of a shadow minister, as I was from 2016 to 2018, looking for chinks in the armour of the government or complaints to make about the Labor Party at the time, they were in fact based on the reflections of the Moran-Bannikoff review, the Nous review and also the advice of senior officers of the Public Service of South Australia, including within TAFE, all of whom were appointed under the term of the Weatherill Labor government.

Just as big a factor as the issues with the act, when the Marshall Liberal government was elected in 2018 and I received my briefings as an incoming minister, was the discovery of the cynical manner in which successive Labor government treasurers had treated the TAFE board as an uncomplaining source of budget fixes for those Treasury problems. Blunt cuts and efficiencies and fanciful revenue projections that could never have hoped to have been achieved were baked into the budget papers year upon year to the benefit of the treasurers' forward projections but to the detriment to the TAFE SA organisation, the training sector in South Australia, the businesses and industries that needed a skilled workforce, and the students, young people and mature workers who wanted to be upskilled, who should have been able to benefit from a more effective, more streamlined, high-quality training sector and TAFE organisation.

When I was appointed minister, I was frankly absolutely stunned to learn of the scale of the former government's budget decisions that were never communicated to the public prior to the 2018 election. They were imposed on TAFE SA's budget by Treasury and never highlighted or identified to the public by the TAFE board, the minister or, indeed, the government. Successive sets of efficiency dividends and cuts, including three years worth of savings that were not achieved from previous years but were then rephased into the 2018 to 2021 period by the member for West Torrens's 2017 Mid-Year Budget Review and his own new efficiency dividend imposed at the same time, added to a total of $97 million in budget cuts to the TAFE SA organisation across the forward estimates. As I say, to my knowledge they had not once been articulated to the public prior to the 2018 election.

That included $6 million for the 2017-18 year, which had been blown out of the water by industrial rulings. When the skills crisis took place in September to December 2017, the AEU took TAFE to the SAET to seek a cancellation or a postponement of a structural reform TAFE was trying to do at the time to reduce the amount of work they were doing in low-activity and low-public-value course offerings. The industrial rulings by the SAET were in the AEU's favour, and therefore the $6 million that the Labor government had been trying save at the time through cancelling those courses was not able to be achieved as a result of the SAET's rulings, so those $6 million of savings remained in the budget.

The savings and cuts baked into the budget which TAFE expected to be delivered were not $6 million a year, however. That was the low year in 2017-18. They were to grow every year until, in the 2020-21 year, under the settings left by successive treasurers—if they had had their way—from the former Weatherill Labor government, the savings and cuts would have grown as high as $30.5 million per year. Even the best board in the world would have been up against it to deliver in those circumstances.

I am not going to dwell on the question of how well that board was performing—more than enough has been said over the years, I feel—other than to highlight the historical fact that the member for Port Adelaide publicly withdrew her confidence and, on cabinet's recommendation, the Governor fired the chair of the board late in 2017, the chief executive already having resigned. I stand to be corrected, but I cannot recall that happening in any other circumstance that comes to mind, certainly not in an organisation of this significance to the state.

I do not want to diminish in any way the value of the bill that we are considering today, which we are supporting and I think does have some value. I think it will improve the organisation. The point I make is that in 2017 and 2018, as did the dedicated and passionate staff at TAFE, their leaders, the board members—the one ongoing one and the new ones who came in—the public servants and other agencies who were supporting them, the incoming government from March 2018 onwards worked very hard to give TAFE SA a fresh start and to give our training sector a sustainable future in which it would thrive and provide the services to businesses, industries and students that we all need it to.

The imperfections of the TAFE SA Act would not have made it into the top 10 considerations that were keeping people up at night. I am not saying that the imperfections were not felt, and I am not saying that this is not worthy work. I am just highlighting that there are number of other pieces of work that had to be done first. It was an enormous body of work just to identify the true cost of any individual service delivery within the TAFE organisation and the basis on which it was actually operating.

It was an enormous body of work to work out how to remediate the challenges that were created and to build up the quality and the reputation at TAFE. There are many excellent public servants, TAFE staff and board members who worked countless hours that I doubt will ever be fully appreciated or understood by people in this state, other than those staff members and their long-suffering families. I am very grateful to them all and I want to put on the record my thanks to them all. I will name a few, but there are countless others who I should name. This speech has already gone on for coming up on half an hour, so I do not have time for them all, but I will identify a few.

First is the board chairs during that time, and Rick Persse was there for the first six months. I suspect, of his many achievements within the Public Service, being requested to be the interim chair of the TAFE board for a period of time had not been on his bucket list, but I am sure he is now grateful to have had that experience. Next was Jacqui McGill and then Jo Denley. I highlight that Jo Denley had in fact been installed by the member for Port Adelaide as the chair of the TAFE board after the firing of the previous chair by the Governor. Jo Denley was the acting chair coming in. She served on the interim TAFE board under Rick Persse, along with some senior public servants of great merit, who I am grateful to.

Jo Denley continued on the TAFE board under the appointment of Jacqui McGill, and when Jacqui McGill, having served two years, indicated that she wished to focus her energy on other things, Jo Denley stepped up again. Jo Denley was last year recognised at the South Australian Training Awards for her lifetime of service to the sector. I probably mentioned it then—I hope I sent her an SMS—but I mark for the record now my significant gratitude, as I know the minister and the former minister equally have incredibly high regard for the work she did.

Interim TAFE Chief Executive, Alex Reid, was thrust into the situation at an extraordinarily difficult time. I really valued her extraordinary professionalism as the incoming chief executive as I was the incoming minister. There was a lot of important work that happened during her term. Also, the Acting TAFE Chief Executive, Julieann Riedstra, was former deputy chief executive of the education department and is about to retire as Chair of Zoos SA. Her service to South Australia was extended through this body of work as well. In particular, David Coltman's service as the Chief Executive of TAFE has only just recently concluded. As the current minister has already done, we thank him for his service and for his significant body of work in this area.

As I said, there are dozens of others who I could and probably should name, but I will only single out one more, being Chris Bernardi. His body of work supporting TAFE CFOs in particular, in addition to his day job at the education department, which was not insignificant, was instrumental in developing the case that convinced cabinet, including Treasurer Rob Lucas, of the need to correct the fantasy budget figures that had had such a negative impact on the TAFE organisation and our training sector for so long.

Ultimately, over four years, without cannibalising the rest of the training budget—indeed, while investing hundreds of millions of dollars of new money into expanded programs for apprenticeships, traineeships, vocational education in schools and non-government providers, both not-for-profits and private providers of quality—the former Liberal government injected more than $350 million over the course of its four budgets into the TAFE SA organisation.

That was a combination of new money, reductions in the previous Labor government's identified cuts and more favourable—actually, not more favourable, just realistic assumptions related to revenue: the abolition of the previous Weatherill Labor government's fantasy land revenue projections, which made the TAFE board and the TAFE organisation's job pretty much impossible.

I am really not given to hyperbole, but the rescue of the TAFE SA organisation from the brink of disaster that it was on from 2018 to 2022 will stand as one of the significant achievements of the Marshall Liberal government. It was left in a sustainable position by the time of the 2022 election, with realistic budget figures. The fact that the TAFE SA organisation's budget overspends since the 2022 election have been rounding errors, effectively, compared to regularly being tens of millions of dollars every single year prior, is testament to the budget fixes that were put in place prior to that 2022 election.

There has been new money as well, but that new money has paid for different things. The underlying assumptions that TAFE SA's budget is now based on are now realistic. We have actually copped some criticism since the election for having a disproportionate amount of new money during the term of the Marshall Liberal government go into the TAFE SA organisation rather than non-government and private providers, which is ironic because we have also had criticism from the AEU at the same time that we were providing too much money to the non-government providers.

The truth is that the Marshall Liberal government significantly increased funding to both. In terms of the market, we provided a curated market where higher levels of opportunity were there for areas to be supported by private providers where there was quality and depth in the market. We also provided massive injections of funding to enable TAFE SA to be the quality organisation that all South Australians deserve and all of its staff aspire to be.

It is really important to note: when we look at the Nous review into quality and the Moran-Bannikoff review into TAFE strategic capabilities and all of the other advice I got, none of those documents criticised the vast majority of TAFE staff, who work their guts out to support training in their sectors. There are problems about the structure of the training sector—the extraordinary difficulties that structure provides for non-government providers. There are criticisms of governance, of oversight, of Treasury decisions and of strategic intent—and we will go through some of them a bit later—but the TAFE staff, many of whom have worked very hard for a very long time, are to be commended and particularly those who worked so hard to set TAFE on their trajectory towards being able to thrive in the years ahead from what were very difficult times in 2017 for many of them.

Anyway, we left TAFE in a sustainable position. The new government was elected in 2022. They came in with their own policy agenda, including some new programs they prefer to some of those that were in place. They have adjustments in the settings to prioritise investment in TAFE SA specifically rather than allowing non-government market providers to offer certain courses in some circumstances. That is their prerogative; they have been elected by the people of South Australia. They get the opportunity to implement their agenda. The minister gets the opportunity to put in place his programs.

But while the minister might potentially not go so far as to admit that he is grateful to have come into the stewardship of TAFE SA after four Rob Lucas budgets rather than four previous Labor Treasurer budgets, I will nevertheless say on behalf of Rob Lucas to the minister, 'You are welcome.'

Back to the act: we worked within its imperfections, and we were able to make significant strides supporting TAFE SA alongside a recovering and then increasingly strongly growing non-government sector to serve the interests of South Australians students, jobseekers, people who wanted to upskill and the businesses and industries who so needed those skills in their workforces.

But we were not and we are not operating it in a contestable market. It was never set to be one, when TAFE often gets three times the funding that a non-government provider offering the same course gets. All the good intentions, all the best endeavours and all the clear instructions to work collaboratively with the non-government sector in the world are still going to run into difficulties from time to time, and absent specific instructions from the minister the board's legal duties are, of course, to the organisation under the Corporations Act, ahead of what might be more broadly understood to be the state's interest.

So reform is a worthy objective. I commend the minister for undertaking the reform, as do the Liberal Party, and now is as good a time as any to implement legislation such as this. Let's consider for a moment what form those reforms might take. Different suggestions get put forward from time to time. Some have been pretty significant. Suggestions put to me over the years have included splitting TAFE into a number of separate regional providers. I think the—how do we refer to him—recently relieved member for Mount Gambier had a motion to the house of this sort of nature not so long ago, and that attracted some support from the Labor Party at the time, as I recall.

That was one suggestion. There was a suggestion highlighted I think by a bill that was proposed by the Greens before the last election to regularise TAFE SA back within the Public Service, which would in fact achieve a number of the goals of the proposal being put forward today. It would regularise forever the fact that the staff are public servants and not employed by a separate entity, but of course that has happened anyway, so it would not have made much difference there. That had certain attractions and may one day in the future be considered again if this model does not work out, although we all hope it will.

It has also been suggested from time to time that TAFE SA's training provision should be separated from its assessment provision, or separated from its infrastructure provision. Various iterations of those have all been suggested and they reflect different models of reform that have been tried around the country and around the world.

Compared with some of those ideas the actual reform in front of us today, to transfer it from a statutory corporation or a government business to a statutory authority, is fairly modest. In fact, I note that the Rea report never actually refers to TAFE as a statutory corporation. I did a word search to see exactly where the reference to this bill was highlighting that it should be changed from a public corporation to a statutory authority, and the only two times the words 'statutory authority' are mentioned in the Rea report are when Associate Professor Rea refers to TAFE as a statutory authority. It was potentially the view of the authors of the report that TAFE SA already is a statutory authority, although they then clarify in the next chapter that it is a government corporation and they quote from Tom Kenyon's speech, in similar quotes to those that I highlighted earlier.

The point I make is, the difference between a statutory corporation and statutory authority is not massive, but it is real and it is beneficial. The proposal in front of us today may be relatively modest in the scheme of things, but it is entirely logical. It is a good proposal and we take the view that it is a clear and unambiguous improvement on the current act.

So how did the government come to this proposal? The minister's announcement in 2023 was contemporary with the release of the long-awaited report from Associate Professor Jeannie Rea with her committee, which included some people from TAFE and from unions. There were some industry representatives there. Peter Nolan, of great experience in running non-government training organisations—PEER, amongst others—was on the committee from memory. There were some very good people on that committee and they no doubt worked very hard.

The minister's second reading speech identified the bill's response to the recommendation of Associate Professor Rea that the act be reformed. I think in the second reading speech the language that he uses makes it clear that he has tried to identify what he considers, and the government potentially considers, and what I probably would agree are some of the best aspects of that report. He may have used that to inspire the legislation and that is fine and we consider it on its merits. There are some things in the report that were not included in the bill and that is fine too.

Prior to preparing these comments and discussing this bill, it had been a couple of years since I had read it, so I refreshed my memory. It begins with the section called 'The Context,' and Rea, or the authors of the report, write:

TAFE SA in 2023 carries a legacy in terms of aspirations and ambitions, not just in public assets and community support. Considering aspects of the history of TAFE helps explain some of the contemporary ambiguities, which inform this Roadmap.

The subsequent pages set out a history, from the 1830s to the present, of vocational training. In rereading the report I had hoped it would present some useful reflection and consideration of the proposals in this bill. I hoped it might reflect on some of the story that I have described, the journey from 2012 through to 2018 and then on to 2023.

I was interested in how it would consider the Skills for All debacle, the defunding of the non-government sector, the massive TAFE budget cuts of 2017 in Labor's last year, their last Mid-Year Budget Review and the reputational crisis caused by the ASQA quality accreditation scandal of the same year.

I hoped to glean some insight from Professor Rea's historical account of this tumultuous decade since corporatisation and I hoped that would provide the logical analysis that would lead to the bill we are at today. Unfortunately, with all respect, I was surprised that very little of this narrative, or very little reflection even on this period in time, made it into the text.

We were able to read about the early 19th century mechanics institutes operating in England prior to South Australia's proclamation. There is a very interesting paragraph on the evolution of the South Australia Institute to the South Australian Institute of Technology between 1856 and 1892. The development of the TAFE systems and national approaches to training over the second half of the 20th century are narrated over the course of about four pages. There is positive commentary on Whitlam. There is negative commentary on Fraser. There is positive commentary on Albanese. There is negative commentary about John Howard.

I have to say, after reading it I was starting to feel like it was a bit more of a political document than a dispassionate analysis of the context in which the TAFE SA organisation found itself. But thinking back to my time as shadow minister in 2018, I was getting towards the end and I was thinking about how this report would treat the budget cuts of the Weatherill years and the 2017 quality crisis which disrupted the lives of thousands of students and staff alike, which was not fully resolved until December 2018, let alone the ongoing impacts of the organisation that lasted a few years thereafter. At least I thought that is what happened.

The report instead only has a brief reference inside a paragraph about decommissioned shonky providers. It offers two brief sentences in brackets:

(TAFE SA itself faced reputational damage when ASQA withheld re-licensing in 2016—

I note that it was 2017, not 2016—

due to several instances of assessment quality issues—

I note for the record it was 16 instances of failed audits, two of which were remedied, four of which were not attempted to be continued by TAFE, and 10 of which failed a subsequent audit. Professor Rea goes on to write—

which TAFE SA corrected within a few months and passed the audit. Since then TAFE SA has had its license rolled over without issue.)

I highlight for the record a different timeline that the primary sources that I will go through in a minute bear out differently. In short, it was December 2018 until all of the students had had their subjects remediated and TAFE SA was able to confirm it and continue offering those courses. It was 2019 before TAFE SA was able to gain reaccreditation again. We were able to do so for a seven-year reaccreditation, which had never been achieved before—it is the maximum allowed by ASQA.

So the fact that TAFE SA since 2019 has managed to make it to the next year before it needs to be reaccredited again is a credit to an enormous body of work by all of those public servants, as I said before, including about half of the 2,000 staff at TAFE SA who had a direct involvement in correcting course materials, correcting assessments, remediating students or supporting students.

There were hundreds of students who were studying at TAFE who had to redo aspects of their course. There were hundreds of students who had completed their studies but who were unable to get their parchments until they were able to resit assessments or have coursework redone to correct the errors in the previous training package. This is hard to believe, but there were hundreds of students who had received their parchments, only to find that those parchments were retrospectively not recognised as a result of the quality audit, and then had to come back and do more assessments. I read again from the report:

…several instances of assessment quality issues, which TAFE SA corrected within a few months and passed the audit. Since then, TAFE SA has had its license rolled over without issue.)

I hope that in 10 or 15 years' time the parliament does not need to be looking back at TAFE SA legislation with disappointment, as we all are now, the dreams of the hoped-for improvements that we had in 2012 having been dashed. We are disappointed. I hope that in 10 or 15 years' time members of parliament and people interested in the training sector do not have reason to come back and look at these debates and wonder what happened that led to these circumstances. I have some confidence that they will not. I have some confidence and hopes that this bill will see us through and we will not need those further reforms.

However, if people do have cause to look back at these 2025 debates and wonder what was the cause of all those problems, what was the situation prior to the need for this bill to come into place, what happened in 2017, I hope that they will look further than the Rea report when it comes to identifying that historical analysis. I offer instead an alternative timeline, which is checked against primary sources readily available to anybody who cares to so much as google them or look in the parliamentary library.

Coincidentally, given that I will be leaving this place soon, I hope this reflection that will follow potentially this afternoon will also provide some sufficient context for the support given to TAFE SA during the term of the previous government when I had ministerial responsibility for the organisation. It was a privilege then, and I seek leave, potentially, to continue my remarks after the lunchbreak.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER: You still have another minute.

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER: Another minute, okay, excellent. In that case, rather than commencing on the dot point analysis, I will foreshadow that dot point analysis, starting with the Skills for All debacle, taking us through the CASA report that saw TAFE's qualifications to deliver air safety programs and mechanical airline engineering programs disqualified, that Parafield Airport was effectively shut by CASA, not by any decision of government. We had the ASQA quality scandal, the $97 million worth of cuts imposed by Weatherill Labor treasurers imposed on the organisation, and the $350 million of restored sustainable funding provided by the former Liberal government to enable this organisation to be on its feet.

Now we are in a position to support the reforms to the bill that will set up TAFE SA to be more in line with government priorities in the years ahead and, hopefully, will also enable it to be better in line with the needs of the training sector as a whole, rather than just the industrial needs of the organisation I seek leave to continue those remarks after lunch.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.

Sitting suspended from 13:00 to 14:00.

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