Who’s to blame for Australia’s “skills crisis”?

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Reform of the vocational education and training sector will be high on the agenda at today’s Council of Australian Governments (COAG) meeting. Prime Minister Scott Morrison says the vocational education and training (VET) sector is about the people who want jobs and the people who want to employ them, not the providers, be they public or private. Shadow education minister Tanya Plibersek says the skills crisis that the government claims it is trying to fix through reforming the VET sector is a crisis of its own making. While TAFE Directors Australia states that only $70 million of the $525 million that was allocated for skills in the 2 April Budget was ‘new’ money. From The AFR:

Scott Morrison has proclaimed “TAFE is as good as uni” as he assured the business sector that vocational education and training would be reformed to meet the unfilled demand for skilled workers…

Key business and employer groups have been complaining for years about the skills crisis, and Mr Morrison accepted the system “is letting us down on that front”…

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About the author
Leith van Onselen is Chief Economist at the MB Fund and MB Super. He is also a co-founder of MacroBusiness. Leith has previously worked at the Australian Treasury, Victorian Treasury and Goldman Sachs.