The Minister has spectacularly failed in his task to deliver meaningful TasTAFE reforms, instead cutting courses. What courses and campuses will be next in the Liberals’ stadium fire sale?
The TasTAFE Act Review identifies an ‘opportunity’ to close campuses as an ‘efficiency’ through divestment. The Minister needs to stop the spin and be transparent with Tasmanians. Which campuses will close? Will further courses be cut?
Tasmanians can have no confidence that the sale of public building assets and course subsidies will be reinvested into TAFE and not redirected to pay a stadium-sized debt.
When the TasTAFE reforms were underway, Tasmanians were promised that no student or teacher would be worse off. But since then, we’ve seen redundancies in the Automotive sector.
Now teachers will be forced to leave as price hikes in courses make them unattainable for students to enrol in. The Greens understand education managers have been asked to cut 20% from their already tight operating budgets.
The fact that not a single TasTAFE teacher was interviewed for the review is shameful and undermines the integrity of the report’s recommendations. How did the Review conclude teachers were satisfied with the changes despite not interviewing any teachers?
The Minister evidently has no grasp on the real-world outcomes of his decision to scrap funding subsidies for these courses. His statement about his new direction for TAFE focusing on health is more spin when over 50% of the students in the now unattainable Lab Tech course go on to be employed in the Tasmanian health system.
The Minister has failed to deliver genuine reform. If the Liberals do not step up to prevent further erosion of skills and training in the state now, the damage done will take years to repair. TasTAFE should be strengthened, not stripped.
The Greens call on the Liberals to reverse their cuts to the arts and design course. Minister Ellis must come clean and tell Tasmanians which campuses he plans to flog off, which courses will be cut and the extent of cuts to internal budgets.
