campusreview. com. au policy & reform
SA finds a new rock bottom
Just when you thought the South Australian Government had buried the VET sector through the ultimate blithering incompetence, there’ s a knock from below.
By Malcolm King
The SA Government poured $ 568 million into Skills for All course subsidies over the past two years – funding an extraordinary boost in the natural therapy and fitness industries – only to be scrapped and replaced recently by WorkReady.
According to the SA Government website,“ WorkReady will support direct connections between training and jobs at the local level and connect people to the training and employment activity best suited to them over a working lifetime.”
How will WorkReady work? No one knows. But it’ s being rolled out in July.
Many South Australians are work ready – but there isn’ t any work. In fact, across Australia, 850,000 people are hunting for work but there are only 150,000 jobs. South Australia is the worst place in mainland Australia to find a job, with real unemployment( non-ABS methodology) above 12 per cent.
There are almost 60,000 people unemployed In SA, with another 20,000 underemployed. Youth unemployment is hitting 40 per cent in the northern suburbs. When Holden closes in 2017, more than 3000 people will join the dole queues. Within three years, another 10,000 adults, many of them males over 45, will join them.
Skills for All was a basket case from go to woe. It was killed off because it spent its entire three-year budget in the first 18 months. The state government failed to accurately track enrolment numbers, it failed to advertise courses that were important to the state and it failed to track employment outcomes, relying on voluntary student surveys. This is how your tax dollars are being spent.
The state government has also decided from June it will provide TAFE SA with 46,000 of the 51,000 new training places, in effect killing off the private providers.
I’ m no lover of private providers but this diktat tars the best trainers, such as Business SA, with the bottom of the market, dodgy providers that have been in the media of late.
Rick Cairney from Business SA told the ABC:“ There is an absolute groundswell from the business community that this is a bad decision, and just as importantly, it will cost jobs … That is not acceptable from any government.”
The state government is also slashing the number of subsidised courses at TAFE SA from 900 to 700. Funding will shift to courses that offer the best employment prospects. As the state is heading at breakneck speed towards mass unemployment, that’ s a big call. Why wasn’ t it a cornerstone of Skills for All?
One curio is that the new order offers unlimited subsidies to those wanting to study in the automotive and construction industries, which are crashing, whilst slashing funding to the creative arts and multimedia, which are monetising.
Premier Jay Weatherill said the reform“ doesn’ t tell people what they can seek to be trained in. It is just where the government is going to provide its support and subsidy.” But the real prize for dodging and weaving goes to the minister for higher education and employment, Gail Gago.
“ It was industry itself that determined what courses were redundant and obsolete and which courses were really priority areas,” Gago told the media.“ They told us they wanted the training list streamlined so those courses that were no longer being used, or had a low public value, were removed.”
Gago has washed her hands of TAFE SA, claiming that it’ s run by an independent authority, yet much of this disgrace lies at her feet. The SA Government provides the funding and therefore is instrumental in how TAFE SA is run. Some course fees have risen almost 500 percent in the last year.
We heard from Gago last year when a leaked parliamentary briefing note prepared for her showed that SA TAFE plans to slash 814 jobs by 2017 – 18 as part of a cost-cutting drive. At the time, Gago was unable to provide details on the full four-year impact of the state government’ s savings drive when questioned in budget estimates. She is extremely adroit at not being responsible for anything. Combine this with the fact that none of the nine TAFE SA board members has any VET teaching or leadership experience and you have a recipe for disaster.
The SA Government’ s Skills for All fiasco has slashed 200 courses, killed off the private providers and provided the raison d’ etre for sacking one-third of the TAFE SA workforce. A good day’ s work for this hopeless government, surpassed only by a useless opposition.
The chickens have come home to roost in SA. For the last 30 years, the best and brightest prospects in political leadership have left the state, leaving only the dregs. Time after time,‘ leaders’ with third-class minds have floated to the top, where they consistently demonstrate incompetence and failure.
It’ s only a matter of time before the Commonwealth government must intervene, as the state government is in chaos. n
Malcolm King is an Adelaide writer working on generational change.
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