The Guardian 7 May, 2008
Skills shortage hysteria:
cue for attack on TAFE
Bob Briton
The skills shortage, vocational education and training (VET) and guest worker schemes are burning issues right now. State and federal governments and just about every employer group seem to have a scheme to turn around the current parlous state of training in Australia. It was a subject at the PM’s 2020 Summit. Unfortunately, most of the suggestions being put forward persist with the disastrous "training market" model rolled out in the 1990s and the situation appears set to worsen with a virtual voucher system in the pipeline.
TAFE, which has been starved of funding for over a decade, is facing another destructive privatising onslaught. While this farce is being played out, more and more guest workers are being brought into the country, cementing a two-tier labour market in place.
The Rudd government made much of its pre-election Skilling Australia for the Future policy last year. There was a promise of an additional 450,000 training places over the next four years and a non-specific commitment to the TAFE system:
"As the largest provider of training in Australia, TAFE remains an important part of Australia’s training system. The TAFE system will continue to receive funding for existing places, and it is expected that, as a major training provider, TAFE will receive a significant proportion of these new training places."
However, as 2008 unfolds and despite plans to fast-track the provision of 20,000 places only 40 people have been enrolled into new places. Instead of getting a long overdue financial shot in the arm and greater respect under the new federal government, it is becoming clear that TAFE will be treated in the same roughhouse way it was under Howard. The executive summary of a report by the Boston Consulting Group (BCG) commissioned by the Howard government in mid 2007 was leaked to the media in February. Among its recommendations:
TAFE to pay market rents for its own facilities
TAFE to compete with all private providers for government funding — no guarantee of any government funds for TAFE
Two tiered funding — public funding of low level qualifications, no public funding of qualifications above entry level. Higher qualifications will be financed by "industry and employer investment" and the students themselves through full fees for courses above entry level. HECS-style Fee HELP loans to be made available
Allocation of VET places by industry skills councils which will have a narrow employer "human capital" view of education
Howard’s Australian Technical Colleges to continue
The Rudd government chose to keep the Howard-era report secret because the guilty truth is that it is as committed to the Council of Australian Governments’ neo-liberal approach to VET as its predecessor. While Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Minister Julia Gillard says she is only considering the BCG report alongside a number of other papers, all the options are reported to involve an expansion of the proportion of training to be put out to competitive tender, the penalising of TAFE for having its own infrastructure and the examination of ways to distance governments from TAFE to get around an alleged conflict as a purchaser and provider of training.
This "conflict of interest" argument is a classic precursor to corporatisation and then full privatisation. State governments appear to be competing with each other to see who can travel fastest down the road of "devolution". SA has just released a Skills Statement which announces that 50 percent of government VET funds would be open for full competition by 2012.
More of the same policies will produce more of the same results. Many TAFE teachers are due to retire in the short term and it will become harder to attract new teachers to jobs with the sorts of pay and conditions that will follow free-for-all competition. TAFE courses would be competing to an even greater degree against private quickie course merchants. Higher level courses would be less accessible for students as full fees are demanded.
TAFE funding has been cut by 26 percent since 1997 which resulted in 300,000 Australians being denied a TAFE place since 1998. The attacks on TAFE made over the past decade have produced the skills shortage and left the institution reeling. But while genuine remedies for the ailing VET sector are slow in materialising, 6000 places have just been added to the "Skilled migration" (Visa 457’s) program for 2007-08. This is not a painless way out even if there are high-sounding commitments that the guest workers would receive the same pay and conditions as local workers.
In a recent column in The Sydney Morning Herald, CFMEU National Secretary John Sutton paraphrased the sort of real world conversation that derails the various guarantees made to and about guest workers:
"Worker: Boss, I’m not getting some rights and entitlements I should be getting under Australian law.
"Employer: I’m giving you $10 an hour. If you were at home you’d be getting $2 an hour.
"Worker: Boss, I’m working very long hours, I haven’t had a day off in months and I’m not getting overtime rates like Australians get.
"Employer: You ungrateful sod. Put your head down and keep working or you will be on a plane home.
"End of conversation."
The big-business-backed global trend to use guest workers has led to enclaves of second-class workers in many countries from the US to the Gulf States. These workers have the usual problems of permanent migrants and many more besides. Governments like Australia’s don’t want the responsibility for strong permanent migration programs. They want a quick fix to the "skills shortage". They are not going to make the sort of investment required in TAFE and elsewhere in public education to meet the needs of the estimated 23 percent of Australian young adults currently neither in work nor studying. At least, not without a fight.