Victoria 'not well advised' over ITABs

CRITICS say the Victorian Government's new industry engagement arrangements will secure it the advice it's already decided it wants.

Advice

THE Victorian Government says yesterday's decision to defund its 16 industry training advisory bodies and abolish their umbrella body, the Victorian Skills Commission, was a natural consequence of the uncapping of the training market.

But critics say it was about avoiding advice the government didn’t want to hear.

Skills Minister Peter Hall said the state’s 2008 skills reforms had made it impossible for the ITABs and the VSC to continue in their current form.

Mr Hall said the VSC’s primary legislative function, as the body that contracted providers to deliver training places, was no longer relevant. “Under a market driven system, those contracts do not exist,” he said.

And ITABs’ key role – providing advice about how many training places were needed – was similarly defunct. “The nature of that advice has completely changed – we need to know whether the market is delivering the needs of industry.

“In that regard, direct contact with industry will provide us with good informed advice. The driver of this has been the change of market operation in Victoria from purchaser-driven to demand-driven.”

Mr Hall said the government would engage industry through an “industry skills consultative committee” drawn from employers and peak industry associations.

“It gives us an opportunity for a greater reach into industry, utilising the collective networks of government departments in particular,” he said.

“The Department of Business and Industry [for example] had over 12,000 contacts with industry in the last 12 months, compared with probably a tenth of that reported contact activity through the ITABs.”

But the CEO of Service Skills Victoria, Ian Nicholson, said it was a “sad day for industry” that would see Victoria join Tasmania as the only states without formal structures for independent industry skills advice.

Mr Nicholson said the Victorian training system was not “pure supply and demand”. Rather, it was driven by self-interested providers and students’ proclivities “not necessarily based on employment outcomes that industry wants”.

“We’ve seen an explosion in some forms of training, and [they] haven’t necessarily translated into greater productivity for the Victorian workforce,” he said.

“We’re losing a mechanism that could have provided advice back to government on how to do this more efficiently.”

Mr Nicholson said the government had been “not well advised” by consultancies with vested interests.

The Australian Manufacturing Workers Union said industry bodies wouldn’t be capable of providing sufficiently nuanced advice.

“Subtle differences that are incredibly important to the economy are missed when high-level peak bodies attempt to get down to the lowest common denominator in predicting skill shortages,” said the AMWU’s national skills, training and apprenticeship policy coordinator, Ian Curry.

“[For example] if you define manufacturing the way it’s currently defined, you miss out on a lot of the engineering stuff going on in high demand sectors like defence and resource infrastructure engineering.”

Mr Curry said South Australia’s food industry had an urgent need for cheese makers. “They don’t need 1000 cheese makers, they need less than 10. But they need them desperately,” he said.

“That’s critically important to that sector of the industry. But that’s not going to show up in some omnibus prediction of where your skill needs are going to be in the next three to five years.”

Mr Curry said killing the ITABs would enable the government to avoid receiving advice it didn’t want to hear.

“They’ve decide on a policy direction, and they’re now going to try and find advisory arrangements that support that direction. Leaving it to the market will reap the rewards that it often does.”

He added that the new arrangements in Victoria raised conflict of interest concerns.

“You would be hard-pressed to find [a peak industry body] that didn’t operate a group training company, a registered training organisation, an apprenticeship centre or all of the above,” he said.

“When you start adding those sorts of conflicts of interest with the amounts of money involved in public funding of vocational training, it’s a dangerous cocktail.”

But Mr Hall said these sorts of conflicts could be minimised by “spreading the network as wide as possible”.

“With government departments that have their own network liaison across their particular areas of expertise, you’re going to get that sort of collective view which I would expect is largely free from bias,” he said.