You can’t have your cake and eat it too. I know. I’ve tried. Yet governments seem to think they can pull off this trick when it comes to education.
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Let me get this out of the way up front: education is far too important to our nation for it to be entrusted to people who place profits before students. Don’t believe me? One private college allegedly signed up disabled and illiterate students in remote Aboriginal communities to tens of thousands of dollars worth of debt and is now being pursued in court by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission for $57 million in taxpayer funding. Another private college offered students free laptops and cost taxpayers almost $1 million per graduate in 2014. Good money, if you can live with yourself.
Now, in the midst of scandals plaguing the federally-funded private training sector, the government looks like it will try to take control of TAFE too.
In rural and regional areas, there aren’t enough people to sustain some of the businesses you see in the big cities. It’s why we don’t have any Porsche dealerships in Griffith. If TAFE needs to compete in the same marketplace as everyone else, something will need to give. Either prices will go up or classes will go down. Petrol’s dearer, so are cars and bricks and timber. Same goes for education. And it will be our students, our futures, that will suffer.
-STEPHEN MUDD