Page 1092 - Week 04 - Wednesday, 25 March 2015
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DR BOURKE (Ginninderra) (11.11): The Canberra Institute of Technology—the CIT—is essential to the Canberra economy providing our industries with the skills they need. For the Canberra community, it gives new and old students skills and training in quality, purpose-built facilities. CIT has over 30,000 student enrolments, and it is the heavy lifter in post-school education in the ACT. I am very familiar with the CIT facilities in my electorate of Bruce. It is one of CIT’s largest campuses, centrally located in east Belconnen and part of the Bruce learning hub.
This a major centre of the knowledge capital, tying together a great, diverse hub of learning, training, health and high-tech institutions. At one end of this zone is the University of Canberra with the new sports commons and, at the other, the Australian Institute of Sport. In between are the high-tech CIT Bruce campus and the Calvary hospital. New work is going on to build the Calvary car park and the new University of Canberra public hospital, complementing the major investment in CIT Bruce over the years. The campus is in a very pretty semi-bush environment, cascading down a slope.
What I would like to show today are the diversity of the campus and the diversity of courses offered. We associate TAFE with the traditional trades, which are well covered by CIT. The Bruce campus in particular covers several building trades, such as bricklaying, plastering, landscaping, horticulture and others. I had the pleasure some years ago—under very close supervision—of operating CIT’s KATO MR130 mobile slewing crane, then a new addition to the heavy lifting crane arsenal. The crane supports not only crane driver training but also elements of assessment for other areas, such as scaffolding, dogging and rigging.
It was part of the new purpose-built high risk construction training facility at CIT Bruce especially targeting work at heights, and it includes a training tower. The facility was constructed in response to the national assessment instruments for high risk licensing legislation, which the ACT was the first to implement and provide specialised training using the new facility at Bruce. As a result, interstate RTOs were keen to tour CIT’s facility prior to the legislation coming into play in their own states.
As I noted, CIT Bruce provides for many of the more traditional fluoro collar trades and industries. However, it now goes way beyond that to areas we are probably less aware of. Bruce campus provides training in specialist program areas that involve innovative and high technology applications across several industry sectors; for example, building information modelling using the latest software that is used for architectural design, building construction and development and environmental site modelling.
The surveying and spatial information science programs deliver training in a range of qualifications that focus on the surveying and spatial information sciences applications from the basic spatial locational data capture to more complex integration of spatial data sets for mapping and analysing data to seeking solutions. Students in these programs gain experience in the use of global navigation satellite system technology, laser measuring devices, satellite imagery and spatial mapping software to compile digital maps, analyse problems and model scenarios. The spatial
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