Unions to stage rally over Victorian TAFE funding cuts

04/05/2012 - Victorian unions will stage a public rally next week in protest at savage cuts to TAFE funding handed down in the state budget.

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Australian Education Union (AEU) state president Mary Bluett, joined by representatives of the Australian Manufacturing Workers Union (AMWU) and the National Tertiary Education Union (NTEU), told reporters in Melbourne the unions would fight back.

"The unions are absolutely determined to fight these cuts and we will give a public voice to that," she said.

Bluett said a public rally would be staged next Thursday outside government offices in Treasury Place to take their message directly to the premier, Ted Baillieu.

"What we have is growing community outrage," she said.

"This is going to lead to further unemployment in a state that is already struggling and we hope that the premier is capable of leaving ideology behind and actually go for jobs."

NTEU Victorian state secretary Colin Long said he believed up to 1000 jobs would be lost directly in TAFEs over the next year.

AMWU assistant state secretary Leigh Diehm said there had been thousands of redundancies in the manufacturing area in recent months and its members relied on TAFE training to get back into the work force.

"We want to see kids, people in Victoria, trained up so they can get into other employment, not import skilled labour from overseas," he said.

Source: AAP

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Have your say...

Hedley James | 4/05/2012 16:31 1

Let's face it. This has been coming since the demise of the old technical schools. The boffins at the universities believed then that tomorrow's work force will all need to have a degree. Well, they said that twenty years ago as they justified growing their universities back then and now the future has arrived. Ask them. They can't be wrong. Their university jobs and plans depend on their belief that we must get a degree or be a failure in this society. My business received a job this week that came off a late model expensive diesel engine. My business is one of those old failing business models that the university thinking said wont exist today. Twenty page down load came with this job and guess what? I doubt if a degree would prepare someone for this type of work. What I now have to do is add more detail to these twenty pages to enable the repair to leave my shop so that an every-day fuel-efficient "shopping car" gets back on the road. And in case you didn't know, a Fitter & Turner (the trade in my shop) no longer gets metalurgy in their course. Unbelievable. Actually I think it will be good because as the skilled staff become scarce I'll be able to lift my pricing structure. Just ask the university: supply & demand isn't it? And a message for the TAFE: you lost contact with the trades.

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