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Legislative Council - Fifty-Third Parliament, Second Session (53-2)
2015-12-09 Daily Xml
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Vocational Education and Training

The Hon. J.S. LEE (14:24): I seek leave to make a brief explanation before asking the Minister for Employment, Higher Education and Skills a question about the VET sector.

Leave granted.

The Hon. J.S. LEE: The National Centre for Vocational Education and Research has today released a publication detailing the financial information of the VET sector in South Australia in the 2014 calendar year. This publication shows that the amount of recurrent funding provided by the state government fell by more than $29 million last year. This decrease in funding preceded an increase in the state's unemployment rate from 6.7 per cent to over 7.7 per cent in trend terms. My questions to the minister are:

1. At a time when South Australia's traditional industries are declining and our workers are in desperate need of new skills, why has the state government cut almost $30 million in funding from the state's VET sector?

2. Can the minister explain how workers are supposed to gain employment in new industries if the state government is providing less funding for their retraining?

3. Does the minister acknowledge that this cut in funding has contributed to the rise in unemployment in South Australia since then?

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) (14:25): I thank the honourable member for her question. In answer to her last question about unemployment, no, indeed, in fact it is quite the opposite. Training very much supports employment efforts so I am very pleased to provide that answer.

In relation to the financial information, the honourable member is quite correct: the NCVER has released financial information for 2014 and it provides general information about government-funded VET systems throughout Australia and shows where money is being spent. The NCVER operating revenue figures, however, are not able to be reconciled with our South Australian state budget figures because the NCVER figures are reported for the calendar year and budget figures are reported for the financial year, as we know.

NCVER figures include revenue from other sources, other than just government, so there are some discrepancies there. However, South Australians are very much still receiving the training that they need. The total VET activity released by NCVER shows that there were 242,000 students receiving 46.4 million hours of training activity in South Australia during 2014 and this equates to approximately one in five South Australians aged 15 to 64 years being enrolled in VET in 2014; 30 per cent of this delivery was provided under fee for service, non-government funding arrangements.

WorkReady ensures that the public investment in training is aligned—and I have spoken in this place before on several occasions about this—to strategic industry sectors. Training courses and employment initiatives are linked to our state's emerging industry and priority growth areas, and WorkReady will connect training directly to jobs. I have spoken at length about the particular programs that do that in sectors that offer the greatest possibility for economic transformation in this state.

The figures are also distorted because some of the funds that this particular report includes are the tail end of that once-off additional funding that was made available under Skills for All. That was a large amount of additional money spent over a number of years to enable us to reach our target of 100,000 additional training places—which we did achieve. Of course, those moneys now have been fully expended. One of the additional effects that that additional money had was that it significantly increased the number of participants—people in the system.

It significantly increased the number of enrolments and the number of completions, so it is not surprising—given that those funds now have been fully expended and the tail end of that is still being reflected in some of these figures—that we see that South Australia has undergone some significant changes to our financing and some of our statistics, because they have been caught up in, as I said, the tail end of that once-off additional funding.

As I have advocated in this place on many occasions, WorkReady is a very powerful training vocational education instrument. It is very closely linked—and much better connected than Skills for All—with industry and with real jobs and assists in connecting local people with local jobs. It also has a much stronger focus on completion rates and co-investment responsibilities.

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