David Penberthy: TAFE SA crisis is a massive black eye for the Weatherill Labor Government

THE TAFE SA crisis is a massive black eye for the Weatherill Labor Government, writes David Penberthy.

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IN a political sense the worst aspect of the Weatherill Government’s handling of the TAFE shambles is that it constitutes a rolled-gold betrayal of Labor principles. This is because its victims are people who are trying to make an honest living with their hands. Few of them will ever be rich.

Some of them, like the young woman we interviewed on radio who is studying aged care, are people getting themselves off welfare and into what Julia Gillard described evocatively as “the dignity of work”. What has happened to these people? The party that rightly counts one of its greats as Paul Keating, the most famous TAFE graduate Australia has produced, now stands accused of showing ineptitude and indifference as the vocational training system in South Australia sank into the abyss.

This is a multifaceted shambles. It raises serious questions about the employability of the mainly young people who are studying the 14 now-cancelled TAFE courses.

It raises cost issues for them, not just in terms of the fees they paid (which the government says it will cover) but the financial impact of putting kids into childcare or suspending work to study those discredited courses. It also raises issues about the future earning potential of all TAFE graduates, regardless of whether their course has been exposed - yet - as flawed.

This is because of the collateral damage to the TAFE brand, which has gone from being a byword for reliability in the training space, to something that arouses suspicion and doubt on the part of prospective employers.

Premier Jay Weatherill and Higher Education and Skills Minister Susan Close are under immense pressure over TAFE SA.

At a time when our state is still struggling to find job opportunities for young people, the Government through its mismanagement of TAFE has made it even harder for at least 1300 of them to enter the workforce.

This scandal also raises real issues of public safety. Aged care graduates who don’t understand the demands of dementia.

Motorcycle mechanics who don’t really know how the brakes work on bikes.

Cooks who haven’t been educated about hygiene and food storage, and from a culinary perspective might not actually know how to cook properly anyway, given some of them in regional SA have never entered a test kitchen.

If you ran a restaurant you wouldn’t be hiring a cook who had scored an A in the theory of lasagne.

Then there is the impact on business, with the costs of having to find replacement staff for those whose qualifications have been shown to be deficient.

There is also the direct and, in hindsight, abysmal impact that the Government’s championing of TAFE as a peerless provider of world’s best practice training has had on the private vocational training sector.

Three years ago the Government decided that TAFE should provide 90 per cent of the state’s training needs. The private training sector was up in arms, but at the time Premier Jay Weatherill stated that he was not in the business of running “make-work schemes” for the private sector when a corporatised TAFE could do a better job. Well, some job TAFE has done. The only people who got good jobs out of TAFE in the past few years were the two people who were running it - both of whom, in my opinion, now appear incompetent.

The first is chief executive Robin Murt, who pocketed a bonus of $448,000 in 2015-2016, before resigning this week. The second is sacked chairman Peter Vaughan, a man disliked in Adelaide business circles for his complicity in helping the Weatherill Government introduce two part-public holidays over the Christmas season. Vaughan was earning around $100,000 for attending a dozen TAFE board meetings a year. As chairman he showed the opposite of vigilance as the crisis within the organisation grew.

Then there is Minister for Higher Education and Skills Susan Close. If ministers were sacked every time an Opposition called for their head, there would barely be a government left in Australia. Setting aside the philosophical question of whether that would necessarily be a bad thing, it is worth teasing out whether Dr Close deserves to keep her job.

I believe she has displayed a damning lack of vigilance in handling this portfolio. The media and Opposition have been nibbling away at negative stories about TAFE for a good 18 months now.

I was one of several Adelaide journos who was on the end of what now seems a fairly desperate approach from Robin Murt to meet up for a friendly coffee last year, where he said he was sick of all the knockers and negativity and wanted to start getting some good stories about TAFE out there. It is hard to see now where those good stories were, nor to regard Mr Murt’s coffee invitation as a transparent arse-covering exercise.

Higher Education Minister Susan Close has displayed a damning lack of vigilance in handling this portfoliom, writes David Penberthy.

Dr Close has been Minister for Higher Education and Skills since January 2016. That period overlaps with the emergence of serious doubts about the manner in which TAFE was operating. Damningly for her, it wasn’t even the State Government that looked into the problems within TAFE, but the Australian Skills Quality Authority.

The Government argues that this was always the appropriate body to conduct such an investigation. The counterargument is that with mounting talk of a problem within TAFE the Government should have acted itself, and now looks like it has been woefully slow off the mark in doing so.

There is a gap between Jay Weatherill’s definition of ministerial responsibility versus that in the minds of the voters.

The Premier thinks it is the job of ministers to respond to policy failure. The voters think it is their job to stop the failures in the first place.

Labor likes to claim that Steven Marshall is Mr Negative. The problem with that claim is that there is a fair bit to be negative about. Child protection, Oakden, the chemo scandal, TAFE. Full-blown crises, and all being spun by the Government straight out of the Mike Rann playbook.

It is a massive black eye for the Government and it deserves nothing but condemnation.

DAVID PENBERTHY HOSTS BREAKFASTS ON FIVEAA WITH WILL GOODINGS