Gippsland 'jeopardised' by cuts

COURSES, facilities and possibly entire campuses face the chop in Peter Hall's Gippsland electorate.

Leongatha

FACILITIES and possibly entire campuses face closure in Victorian Skills Minister Peter Hall's Gippsland electorate, in the wake of last week's state budget cuts.

GippsTAFE CEO Peter Whitley said his training restaurant at Morwell faced certain closure because the government had slashed funding rates for hospitality courses. 

And he said the Leongatha campus was at risk because the ‘hard’ skills now prioritised by state government funding policies were of little interest to the tree changers who had flocked to the rural hamlet.

“While the government may wish to push motor mechanics and electricians, the reality is that’s not what people want to do in Leongatha,” Dr Whitley said.

The government has increased funding rates for about 20 per cent of courses – mainly in technical skills – but cut rates for most others.

Funding for some hospitality courses were slashed from between $7 and $8 to less that $2 per student contact hour. Courses in business, retail, recreation, events and process manufacturing suffered a similar fate.

Dr Whitley said he wasn’t opposed to the government’s hard skills push, but that it wasn’t suitable everywhere. “What occurs in and around Melbourne isn’t necessarily what happens in the rest of Victoria,” he said.

“Being an apprentice is fine, but it’s not for everyone. Why should we discriminate against the others?”

Leongatha is a town of about 4500 people not far from Wilsons Promontory. Dr Whitley said dairy farming and small-scale tourism were the predominant local industries, often staffed by Melbourne refugees attracted by the town’s rural lifestyle.

He said the Leongatha campus had specialised in retail and hospitality for years, and estimated the budget cuts would claim about half its revenue, with many of its courses now set to attract government funding of between $2 and $4 an hour. “You can’t possibly run these things at that sort of price,” he said.

Dr Whitley said he wasn’t considering closing the campus at present, but that its longevity was “jeopardised”. He said GippsTAFE had recently erected a $7 million, five-star environmental building at the campus.

The campus at the larger industrial centre of Morwell is also under threat, given that it specialises in areas like retail, hospitality and fashion and teaches no trades.

Dr Whitley said Morwell’s “magnificent training restaurant” would have to go. “We can’t afford to run it,” he said.

He said while many hospitality jobs were short-lived, they often functioned as stepping stones to other jobs. “To discard it as a non-valued training outcome is sad,” he said.

Dr Whitley said last week’s cuts would cost GippsTAFE $7-$10m.

He said it was ironic that the cuts had hit Gippsland so heavily, given that the area was the focus of a recent regional tertiary education review – the first of its kind in Australia – and was in desperate need of economic alternatives to brown coal power generation.

Gippsland is also the minister’s seat. Mr Hall, who’s based in nearby Traralgon, is one of five legislative council members representing the Eastern Victoria Region.

But Dr Whitley said he suspected most regional institutes had been similarly affected.

Bendigo TAFE, which is considered among the hardest hit by the rolling skills reforms, is in the electorate of former Labor Skills Minister Jacinta Allan. Ms Allan introduced Victoria’s open market for training funds in 2008.