VET & TAFE campusreview. com. au
Duelling narratives
Recent published reports have praised the new education minister for taking on some of the sector’ s problems or showed that system rorts are still very much alive.
By John Mitchell
Around the time of the election of Malcolm Turnbull as the new prime minister of Australia by his Liberal Party colleagues, two narratives that were running in the national media about the VET sector stood in opposition to each other. The first narrative was that the new Education Minister, Simon Birmingham, deserved his promotion from assistant minister for education and training because after less than a year in charge of the VET sector, he was well on the way to fixing its problems, particularly the exploitation of the VET FEE-HELP scheme by rogue training providers. He also deserved a promotion because he wanted to drive through a federal takeover of VET.
The second thread was that a mess around VET FEE-HELP still existed in VET, demonstrated by a front-page article in The Age in September, titled“ Vocational education, the biggest get-rich quick scheme in Australia”.
Which story is more compelling? The story about Birmingham’ s successes in VET was highlighted by Tim Dodd in the online version of The Australian Financial Review, in a flattering article titled“ Simon Birmingham makes progress in reforming vocational education”. The article opened with this ringing endorsement:
“ Amid the Abbott government’ s political turmoil, a seed is sprouting which may lead to a solution to one of the most vexing issues in education – how to end, or at least reduce, the dysfunction in Australia’ s vocational education system.
“ Last December, Tony Abbott took responsibility for vocational education and training( known as VET) away from Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane and gave it to rookie minister Simon Birmingham, a South Australian senator who was appointed assistant minister of education and training, working under Christopher Pyne.
“ In less than a year, Birmingham has made huge strides, moving closer to solving the mess of conflicting Commonwealth and state responsibilities [ that hampers ] vocational education, driving employers crazy and delivering a sub-standard service to students.”
The article quoted from a speech the then-assistant minister Birmingham gave the previous Friday at the annual TAFE Directors Australia conference in Hobart, in which he argued the case for the federal takeover of VET. On the surface, Birmingham’ s arguments seemed sound. For example, Dodd reported:
“ A national system for vocational education and training‘ would create benefits for businesses, training providers and students’, [ Birmingham ] said.‘ At the moment, it is riddled with inefficiency and confusing duplication. Accessing subsidised training markets in multiple jurisdictions is
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