Doorstop interview - Parliament House, Canberra

TOM FRENCH, MEMBER FOR MOORE: I'm Tom, I'm the Federal Member for Moore and represent the northern suburbs of Perth, but I want to talk about TAFE on National TAFE Day. I did a pre-apprenticeship, which led me into becoming a sparky, which gave me all these opportunities.

FIONA PHILLIPS, MEMBER FOR GILMORE: Hi, I'm Fiona Phillips, the Federal Member for Gilmore on the New South Wales South Coast. Happy National TAFE Day. I was a TAFE teacher for over a decade before I came to Parliament, and I saw the real difference it made in changing lives. I helped particularly women that hadn't worked outside of the home before, come back to TAFE, and on a pathway typically into aged care, community services, disability care, early childhood education. I saw sparkies and chippies and lots of different people. But what I saw in New South Wales was the absolute desecration of TAFE, and to be honest, the car park was just completely empty. When we came to government with Free TAFE, we brought students back to TAFE. And now in New South Wales in my local Nowra TAFE campus, they’ve had to grow the facilities because we've got more and more chippies, more and more sparkies. It’s just been a wonderful success and TAFE is so important to my community.

CASSANDRA FERNANDO, MEMBER FOR HOLT: Happy National TAFE Day. I'm the Federal Member for Holt. Before I came to this place, I began my TAFE journey at William Angliss Institute. I did a Diploma in hospitality management specialising in patisserie and I was a pastry cook, and TAFE changed my life, gave me practical skills and those skills have lasted me a lifetime.

TRISH COOK, MEMBER FOR BULLWINKEL: Hi, good morning. My name is Trish Cook, I’m the Federal Member for Bullwinkel. I spent four decades working as a nurse midwife and the first half of my career I worked as a remote area nurse in Western Australia, and the second half of my career I spent handing those skills over to the next generation. I was a TAFE lecturer at two regional TAFEs in Kalgoorlie and in Northern, and I know that TAFE changes lives. It gave people the opportunity to study enrolled nursing, which is a career in itself, working in aged care, in hospitals, in clinics. But also, is the foundation for going on to do university studies as a registered nurse and so on. So that allows people, and it's still a highly feminised workforce, but it still allows those women in particular, to have an income while they study and go on to further their education in registered nursing. So, TAFE changes lives and it also saves lives when you train up regional nurses.

DAN REPACHOLI, MEMBER FOR HUNTER: G’day, guys. I'm Dan Repacholi, Federal Member for Hunter, and happy National TAFE Day. I left school at 15 to become a fitter. TAFE gave me that head start in life to go and create something special. Unlike leccos who are behind me – leccos are good tradies too, but they're no fitters. They are no fitters, and tradies are cool. And this is what is good about TAFE. TAFE teaches tradies how to become tradies, how to do what they need to do to make sure we're pushing Australia further forward and make sure we're pushing Australia in the right direction. And we need more manufacturing and this is what trades give. Trades give chippies, trades give leccos, trades give boilies, trades give fitters. We need to get more young people out there, men and women, out there becoming tradies and happy National TAFE Day everyone. We need to see more of this.

JOURNALIST: Thank you. Can I get a translation? Lecco? What is a –

FRENCH: Sparky.

REPACHOLI: You know what it is? Weirdo. Leccos are –

FRENCH: He’s just jealous.

JOURNALIST: I was going to say, are you going to take that?

JODIE BELYEA, MEMBER FOR DUNKLEY: Good morning and happy National TAFE Day. I was a TAFE student, I studied youth work and then I went on to become a TAFE teacher. Throughout my career I have had the absolute pleasure of supporting many women, young people and men to return to study and build a career because of TAFE. That was my journey. TAFE is an amazing investment in people and we are very, very fortunate in this government to be able to offer Free TAFE, and to be able to offer people a career pathway into something that they wish to do.

ANDREW GILES, MINISTER FOR SKILLS AND TRAINING: Well, happy National TAFE Day everyone, and an extra special shout out to our amazing TAFE teachers and trainers who every day open doors of opportunity, change lives and change our country for the better. I'm really proud to be standing here with my colleagues whose stories just give a hint about the impact that TAFE has, the opportunities that open up across a wide variety and diversity of pathways. Even when our metal trades and electricians don't always see eye to eye – thanks Dan, also for the translation as well.

What we’ve seen through TAFE and this Government is a commitment to rebuilding vocational education and public vocational education particularly. Under our National Skills Agreement we've put TAFE where it belongs, at the very heart of our education and training system. And Free TAFE has absolutely supercharged that. Free TAFE has now seen, I can announce today, 850,000 enrolments right around the country. And these are enrolments in courses that really make a difference. Good secure jobs that are really important, whether it's caring for our oldest Australians, educating our youngest Australians, ensuring that we can have a future that's not just made in Australia, but made by Australia. And of course making homes for Australians as well.

850,000 enrolments and now 275,000 courses have been completed. That's people at work making a contribution. Free TAFE has been absolutely transformative right around this country. What's extraordinary though is it is not universally supported in this Parliament. In recent weeks we've seen a rolling war between the parties that constitute the opposition, One Nation, the Nationals and the Liberal Party, fighting each other, stealing each other’s bad policy ideas, but in heated agreement about one thing that I just don’t understand. They all hate Free TAFE. They all voted against making it permanent.

What we see here, in my colleagues and their stories behind them, what we see in the hundreds of thousands of people of thousands of people for whom Free TAFE has given them an opportunity they would never have had otherwise to get a good job for themselves and to make a great contribution in their community and their country. All of these people in One Nation, in the Liberals and the Nationals want to slam the door shut. On this National TAFE Day it's only the Albanese Labor Governor that stands for TAFE and will stand up for Free TAFE remaining permanent.

JOURNALIST: Now, I do have a couple of questions, I promise some on TAFE. So obviously it's a good thing that people are studying at TAFE, that we’re training up people here in Australia, but given some of the shortages that we're seeing, particularly of construction workers and tradies used to build our houses in particular, do you think that we need to be letting more people in who have those kinds of trade skills when it comes to our migration intake?

GILES: There's two points to be made here. One of the things we've seen is we've brought down net overseas migration by 45 per cent. What we've also done is looked at the mix of that. And one of the things I'm really proud about is our Government has delivered record numbers of construction visas, and thanks to reforms in the Budget two years ago and this Budget, we're getting those skills assessed more quickly. So when someone arrives over here, they can get to work to make their contribution to start building homes more quickly.

JOURNALIST: And then just quickly, we are talking AI fakes this morning. There's been a study around how many politicians are being used to create fake messages, videos, images, that kind of thing. Do you think that something needs to be done to crack down on that sort of thing?

GILES: I think if you look at the announcement the Prime Minister and Minister Wells made yesterday, what you see is our Government's deep concern to keep people safe online and to recognise some of the harms that we see in social media. We've already taken world-leading steps when it comes to our youngest Australians. What we're talking about is going further to make sure that the internet is democratised, not weaponised.

JOURNALIST: Has that ever happened to you? Do you know of your image being used in any kind of fake imagery or any of your colleagues?

GILES: Well, probably like a lot of people, I spend less and less time looking at my presence online as part of my quest for wellbeing, and I know I've got the Special Envoy for Men's Health here and he would probably tell me amongst other things not to read the comments. What we have seen right around the world is deepfakes becoming an increasing part of our political environment. That's obviously terrible for our democracy. It's terrible for our ability to have the sort of conversations Australians should be able to have about real policy choices with real consequences. I’ve not been paying close attention to how I've been treated in that regard but I do see how the Prime Minister's been treated. I do see in particular how so many of my female colleagues have been absolutely traduced in this manner. It’s something I’m deeply concerned about.