Page 3545 - Week 13 - Thursday, 26 November 1992
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should be, because the old TAFE and tech colleges in their time and place served the community very well. We should not belittle either their efforts or their influence upon earlier generations of students. Fortuitously, the word "technology", while acknowledging its derivation, also points the way ahead and one would hope that the Canberra Institute of Technology will, in years to come, achieve the deserved reputation of other institutes of technology in Australia and the world.
The amendments accompanying this name change, as I said earlier, complement the change, or at least present an opportunity to do so. I qualify my remarks, Madam Speaker, because the increase in membership of the institute council from seven to 11 people should augur well for increasing the expertise available to a potentially dynamic body. Unfortunately, governments sometimes spoil such opportunities by interfering in the process of making appointments. While I hope that this will not happen to the Canberra Institute of Technology Council, I do serve notice that the Liberal Party will keep a very close eye out for political favouritism in appointments to the body.
I also note the increase from $100,000 to $250,000 in the financial limits the institute may make without ministerial approval. This is not really explained, save that it brings the institute into line with some unnamed comparable ACT agencies. The Minister might like to clarify that, if he can, when he is responding. I would like to think that the creation of CIT does, as the Minister claimed in his tabling speech, enhance the social, educational and employment prospects of the ACT region. Unfortunately, Madam Speaker, I cannot agree, for while the institute might be socially enhancing for some students, and undoubtedly will be educationally enhancing to most, for even the institute's best endeavours to enhance employment prospects is, I suggest, asking a great deal - in fact, too much.
After something like 4,000 potential students missed out on an ACT TAFE place this year and, Australia-wide, teenage enrolments in TAFE fell by 33,000 or 12 per cent in the past two years, and apprenticeship intakes fell by 35 per cent in the same period, I grant you that something had to be done. The result in the 1992-93 budget was a $4.4m increase in subventions to TAFE. This came in a variety of additional funding initiatives of both Commonwealth and ACT governments to provide 500 more places at the ACT TAFE campus.
Welcome as these additional places may be, they do not guarantee jobs any more than the number of places that are usually available in TAFE schools, and it is to be regretted that some Labor apologists, obviously desperate for even a fractional decrease in the estimated 7.2 per cent or 12,000 people currently unemployed in the ACT, are prepared to cynically translate these 500 training places into jobs. Clearly, they are not jobs and the best that could be said is that the TAFE - soon to be institute - training might offer a preferable career path to a university degree - a sad commentary, I might add, on the "lucky country"; nevertheless, one mentioned recently as an option by the Labor Minister for Employment, Education and Training, Mr Kim Beazley. This situation, admitted by a Labor Government Minister, stands as a further indictment of Labor's mismanagement of the economy and the consequent destruction of jobs, opportunities and the hopes of a generation.
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