Vet & tAfe
campusreview.com.au
throughout the Victorian economy,” Hall wrote.
This column monitored how the Coalition government continued
– until its election defeat in November 2014 – to promote its
irresponsible policy, allowing rapacious training providers to damage
the lives of vulnerable students. For the record, from 2012 onwards,
the Labor government in South Australia aped the Victorian policies,
and ended up in a similar mess.
CLEANINg UP
Now the policy pendulum has well and truly swung back the
other way in Victoria. The Andrews Labor Government made the
rescue of TAFE and the associated repair of VET one of its key
promises before being elected in November 2014 and since then,
the minister for training and skills, Steve Herbert, has taken a raft of
concrete actions to keep that promise. In an email to CR, Herbert
described the mess he inherited:
“On coming to office, we inherited a training system that
was not only in decline but was devastated by funding
cuts and policy instability … We had tens of thousands
of people being trained in areas where they would never
get a job, and we had a system that was deteriorating
rapidly; students and industry were losing faith.”
Herbert also acknowledged that the task of fixing VET is a massive
one that will take time:
“Making t H