Page 3547 - Week 13 - Thursday, 26 November 1992
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The changes to the advisory council, as Mr Cornwell has mentioned, are a necessary reflection of the new status of the institute. The old TAFE Advisory Committee will be replaced by the new Canberra Institute of Technology Advisory Council. It will have more members, growing from seven to 11, and this will reflect very much the growth in the scope of training in the ACT. This can all augur well for the institute, for its students and staff and for Canberra itself, and I am very pleased to see this Bill go through. I join other members in this place in wishing the future Canberra Institute of Technology all the very best.
MR HUMPHRIES (4.19): Madam Speaker, I also believe, as my colleague Mr Cornwell has indicated, that this Bill will enhance the work of what is now the Canberra TAFE and will become the Canberra Institute of Technology. I think that, in achieving a status for this institution which reflects our ambitions for it, this Bill is a worthy piece of legislation. A very vigorous debate goes on in academic circles about the ranking of academic institutions and the way in which those institutions compete, one with another, for particular marketplaces of students. I have no doubt that the passage of this legislation will allow the Canberra TAFE, the new Canberra Institute of Technology, CIT, to better target some people in that student market to whom it believes it has services to offer - in other words, students who would be well placed to accept the services they have to offer but who might otherwise overlook the institute because of its name, its title and its perceived position within the marketplace.
The decision to change the name of the institution, I have to note, is a reflection of the ever present desire by educational institutions and other arms of government to adapt to new vogue nomenclature. The institute of technology label is one which is now shared by a number of institutions - RMIT in Melbourne, the Queensland Institute of Technology, and I think the New South Wales Institute of Technology might still exist. I think it might have gone on to another phase, the university of technology. There is the TIT as well, the Tasmanian Institute of Technology. Those sorts of developments are natural.
Madam Speaker, the fact of life is that the educational lexicon is replete with discarded institutional descriptions. We had the college of education at one time. We had the college of advanced education. We had institutes of mechanics. We have had all sorts of phrases which have come and gone. The question I ask myself, Madam Speaker, is this: Is this new description any better than the old one? The Institute of Technical and Further Education was a body providing education in a technical sense, like panel beating, electronics, carpentry - things which people understood to be technical in nature - and it provided further education for those who wished to upgrade their skills in particular areas such as typing and secretarial skills, word processing - things of that kind. It was a fairly clear description and people could understand what it was they were getting for that title.
The institute of technology is, I would suggest, a little less clear, a little less descriptive of what it actually is. Technology as such covers a vast array of activities and it would be quite understandable if a person either outside the Australian education scene or outside Australia altogether might imagine that an institute of technology might, for example, conduct research. I do not believe that research has ever been conducted at TAFE in any substantial sense, or ever will be, at least for the present; but that can be the impression it leaves.
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