Page 2813 - Week 08 - Thursday, 24 August 2006
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built on the idea that tuition costs should be kept to an absolute minimum and the course structures need to provide a scaffolding for skills development and work for young people of all capacities. Consequently, I share many of Mrs Dunne’s concerns about the increases in fees. I believe that the CIT is currently trying to find how it can make more cuts, as required by this budget, to areas which it feels it has already stripped to the bone.
In this context, I think that we also have to acknowledge that we are working here against the Howard federal government. TAFEs round Australia have been running on diminishing federal support for the past 10 years and now the federal government has set up its own technical colleges in competition, although our competition, the proposed college for Queanbeyan, is yet to materialise.
The shift towards outsourcing educational services to charities and private providers has also had a direct impact on the ACT, with the CIT’s very strong adult migrant English program severely curtailed and now at risk. That is because the DEST contract for English for employment and further study was awarded to Mission Australia rather than to the CIT. Whilst the federal government’s media release states that all the successful organisations have a proven track record in this specialist training area, Mission Australia has no training function, infrastructure, et cetera at the present time in the ACT, as until now it has only funded and referred clients on to other training providers, such as the CIT.
The CIT ESL for employment and study is staffed by a very experienced, professional and highly qualified team of teachers who have been successful in tendering for the past two DEST contracts in this field, and they have developed cutting edge technology. Today I talked with some of these students, who expressed their concern about this move, and it does seem really stupid. The level 4 that they require in order to be able to move on to study at the University of Canberra is simply not available at Mission Australia. These students are very worried. They do not even know where they will go for classes with Mission Australia. Also, the teacher who was with this group is being forced to accept employment with Mission Australia at a much lower rate of pay because she is a casual and she has to work. So this is a really retrograde step.
In addition, the CIT is, or was, looking at programs combining ESL expertise with its trades teaching staff to fast-track migrants with a trades background into industry, this in a place where we have skills shortages. This profoundly effective program looks like being shut down due to a federal government shift in funding policy. We are still waiting to find out why the CIT bid failed. I asked about that in estimates. It is quite likely that cost effectiveness will be expressed as a key factor.
One might ask: where is the federal government’s triple bottom line analysis of the long-term impacts of its funding decisions? We have the same questions about this government’s holus-bolus acceptance of the recommendations of the functional review, which are also impacting on CIT operations. The need for post-secondary options in the Tuggeranong Valley is well known. At the last election, the ACT Greens ran strongly on the need to establish a CIT campus as a way to address some of that need. More recently, I raised the possibility of basing some CIT programs at Kambah high school and was advised that that was not what the CIT wanted to do.
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