VET & TAFE
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secretary in August last year following stints
with Prime Minister and Cabinet, Treasury
and Education – a career path that fits with
a pattern Laura Tingle identified, which is
discussed below – then offered a range
of suggestions about how TAFE might
be involved in innovation. For example,
he suggested TAFE should partner with
innovation incubators to develop regional
offerings, as well as linking directly with
industry and university partners. “We’re
open to the discussion as to how we
might involve the TAFE sector,” he said.
Regrettably, following his somewhat
uncomfortable presentation, he couldn’t
stay at the round table to hear about a wide
range of existing TAFE-industry partnerships
in innovation and applied research.
For instance, in one session of the round
table, presentations were made about
TAFE and industry collaborating in three
major industries. The case studies covered:
collaboration between the Australian
Federal Policy and the Canberra Institute of
Technology in Australia’s forensic science
industry; between SkillsTech in TAFE
Queensland and George Fischer in the
gas industry; and between Healthscope
Hospitals and Melbourne’s Holmesglen
Institute in the health and allied industries.
In each of these case study presentations,
an industry representative addressed the
audience arm in arm with their TAFE partner.
I was invited to attend the round table
for the launch of a new quarterly magazine
developed by TAFE Directors Australia, TAFE
Futures, for which I was the guest editor of
the inaugural issue. In contrast with NISA’s
lack of awareness of TAFE in innovation,
the new magazine provided extensive and
concrete examples of such innovation. These
included an article on how the Kimberly
Training Institute of TAFE in northern Western
Australia is working with Buru Energy – an
ASX-listed oil and gas exploration and
production company – as well as with the
Yungngora Aboriginal community, to build
skills for diverse jobs in the region.
Another article in the magazine profiled
the work of TAFE NSW Northern Sydney
Institute in leading the development of
green skills internationally, as part of an
Asian-Pacific Economic (APEC) project.
The same article acknowledged the
work of the neighbouring TAFE, Western
Sydney Institute, in a “green construction
partnership” with Lend Lease, the developer
of the $6 billion Barangaroo project in
Sydney’s CBD. Western Sydney Institute
is a key partner in the Barangaroo Skills
Exchange, which is providing more than
10,000 accredited qualifications and
500 apprenticeships.
TAFE Futures cited a number of other
longstanding and effective examples
of applied research in the TAFE sector.
These included the Textile and Fashion
Hub, a collaboration between the Textile
Fashion Industries of Australia and Bendigo
Kangan Institute that provides high-end
training for enterprises in Melbourne.
Also, the Mechanical Engineering Centre
of Excellence at TAFE NSW and TAFE SA’s
Mining and Petroleum Services Centre
of Excellence are examples of publicprivate co-operation that supports skills
development and innovation. In addition,
Melbourne Polytechnic is engaged in
collaborative applied research projects with
the wine industry.
PUBLIC SERVICE AMNESIA
All of these innovations and partnerships
are well documented in the public
domain and one wonders how the federal
Department of Industry and Science could
not have known about them. However,
journalist Laura Tingle provides an insightful
explanation in the latest Quarterly Essay.
In an essay titled “Political Amnesia: How
we forgot how to govern”, Tingle describes
how, over the last 20 years in particular, the
federal public service has become more
politicised, with what former Treasury head
Ken Henry calls “the blurring of boundaries
between the public servant and the
political adviser, and the relentless focus on
message over substance”.
In addition to the public service
becoming more politicised, Tingle
describes a set of factors that have left
the public service without “an institutional
memory of its own”. For example, she notes
that “ambitious public servants will tell you
that the best path for promotion is to switch
regularly between departments, rather
than stay in the one place, meaning no one
develops expertise in anything”.
So perhaps we can explain or excuse
the Department of Industry and Science’s
omission of VET and TAFE as an example
of that department’s loss of institutional
memory. Based on Tingle’s analysis,
it’s possible the NISA document was
influenced by political advisers not career
bureaucrats; these political advisers may
be part of a new era in which “politics
and policy have spun down into a series
of reactions and counter-reactions that
play out in vacuous daily news grabs and
zingers”, Tingle writes. Certainly there are
some vacuous lines in the NISA document,
such as: “We need to leave behind the fear
of failure, and challenge each other to be
more ambitious.”
Is Tingle right about shoddy policy
documentation being the result of a lack of
institutional memory coupled with political
interference, or is the federal policymaking
around innovation and VET simply naïve? On
the same day that roundtable was convened
in Canberra, in an article in The Mandarin
written by Paul Roberts-Thomson, a former
chairman of TAFE Tasmania and of the
regulator, Skills Tasmania, he argued that
Australia’s VET sector is in chaos and may
require “unthinkable radical solutions”. In his
article Roberts-Thomson focused on the VET
FEE-HELP policy debacle and the naivety of
policymakers who have forgotten about the
Pink Batts program, which clearly showed the
private sector can behave unethically.
“The once high reputation of VET has
now been trashed by the behaviour of
unscrupulous VET operators and the arguable
naivety of senior government bureaucrats,”
Roberts-Thomson wrote. “While the quantum
of the abuse of VET FEE-HELP was predicted
by very few, the fact that abuse was certain
was noted by many industry spectators
who questioned how such a massive new
source of funding for VET diplomas could
be provided to an industry with