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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-11-18 Daily Xml
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TAFE SA

The Hon. S.G. WADE (14:28): Can the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills confirm that, in addition to the 462 jobs that TAFE has slashed over the last three years through targeted separations, private RTOs have lost another 500 jobs as a result of WorkReady's preferential funding to TAFE? This means that almost 1,000 jobs have now been lost in the VET sector under her guardianship.

The Hon. G.E. GAGO (Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills, Minister for Science and Information Economy, Minister for the Status of Women, Minister for Business Services and Consumers) (14:28): No, I cannot confirm that. However, as I have indicated in this place before, we expect that the training sector will contract under the current budgetary configuration. I have spoken in this place at length before, so I will not go into a lot of detail again today, but I have outlined before that back in 2012, once-off additional funds were made available over a number of years to enable this government to achieve its target of 100,000 additional training positions.

Considerable additional money was put into the VET sector, and it's not surprising that at that time the industry expanded to take up the training opportunities made available from those additional funds. We know that the sector expanded around that. We know that training organisations were providing additional training. New businesses were arriving in the market, and we know that TAFE's activity also expanded for at least some of that time.

That money was fully expended. We achieved our 100,000 additional training positions and expended all of those funds, so we have now contracted back to pre Skills for All funding—and we are actually still slightly in front—and pre Skills for All subsidised training activity. Again, we are still ahead there. We are committed to I think it's 81,000 training positions whereas, pre Skills for All, I think it was sitting on about 65,000, so we are doing more training activity with less. Actually, it's on a slightly improved budget outcome which shows that, throughout that period, we have actually been able to derive some significant efficiencies, which reflects well on the system.

We know that, for the reasons I have already outlined, for this year, we have given 90 per cent of the subsidised training activity for new enrolments to TAFE. I have outlined here comprehensively why we needed to do that for this year, and I have outlined that that will continue to improve next year and throughout the forward estimates as the pipeline or currently enrolled students that are filling the system empty out or they finish their courses. I have already indicated that what I will do with those moneys is, as they become available, make them available to the competitive pool for new enrolments for subsidised training.

We knew that the private RTOs were particularly going to do it tough this year. We have worked with them wherever we could to ensure that they gained access to either the subsidised training funds or the funds under Jobs First STL—the subsidised training list—or Jobs First employment programs. We have worked that as hard as we could to make sure that we were able to ensure that it was as evenly and as fairly distributed as possible while still meeting our government priority training needs.

I do accept that the sector is doing it tough at the moment. I have indicated, I think it was just here yesterday, that we have put TAFE on notice—I think it was during the Auditor-General's Report. We have put TAFE on notice that, for the increased differential for funding that they have been receiving in the past, the tap will be turned off by 2018-19. Each year, they will be expected to improve their training outcomes and the costs associated with that. I have indicated that, for their commercial training activity, they will be receiving dollar for dollar parity with the private sector by 2018-19. We have a plan to ensure that, in the longer term, it does become a more open and fair and contestable VET marketplace but, in the meantime, we have had to make some very difficult decisions and take some difficult steps to enable us to get there within the forward estimates.

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