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SPEECH BY THE PRIME MINISTER, THE HON P. J. KEATING, MP
NEW EDUCATIONAL REALITIES CONFERENCE
MELBOURNE, 15 JUNE 1994
I am grateful for the opportunity to speak to you today very pleased to address so many
people whose concern is Australian education.
With an economy now performing as well or better than any in the world, with so much
now in our favour, we have a marvellous chance to lay the basis of an Australian society
which is fair and cohesive, rich in opportunity and reward.
A great responsibility falls on our generation to seize the opportunity. It falls particularly
on people like yourselves because education is where one of the great efforts must be
made. It will be fuindamental to our success.
I am particularly pleased because you come from all parts of the education sector, from
industry and from the wider community. Success depends on your involvement. Our
modern education system needs your participation your efforts, all your ideas.
If we are to be a sophisticated and cohesive society, a society through which run both the
threads of ambition and those of tolerance and care; if we are to be a modern, competitive,
successful society in which opportunity and the common good are both enlarged; if we
want to succeed in the world and in our own region where so many chances are our
education system will have to meet the challenges.
If we want our children and succeeding generations to have the chances we have had and
more, if we want them to trust in and maintain our democracy and our best traditions our
education system will have to pass on the knowledge and instil the faith.
If we want to put half a million Australians back in touch with the workforce; if we really
want to make the good society a reality for all Australians it is going to depend on our
education system and the people who run
We will need what is fashionably called a " vision" though I am not sure that " vision" is
precisely the right word. I have a suspicion that sometimes visions have a little in common
with hot air. I am not sure that the founders of compulsory primary education or our first
universities talked about " vision" very much at all. I don't think the real visionaries ever
do. I think the best of them have been like the best of parents they have simply taken every
care and responsibility for the future of succeeding generations. They have had not just
imagination but courage and persistence, and I daresay an absolute determination to see
that policies and programs work.
So what I offer you today I'm less inclined to call a vision than a schedule of necessity
the series of things we need to do, must do and can do.
The worst judgement that can be passed on a government or on a generation is not that
they lacked something as vague as vision but something as concrete as responsibility, the
responsibility to do what was necessary to secure the future.
In this there is no substitute for effort a great national effort. I have said this many times,
I know. I said it in One Nation more than two years ago and I repeated it in the White
Paper just a few weeks ago.
It is not just rhetoric it is the only way to succeed.
We are all aware of the criticisms which are made of us: bureaucracies for not following
through and delivering; business for standing back and not getting involved; government
for not having the imagination or courage.
Well, the Government, I believe has shown the imagination and courage in education.
And I believe business will get involved it is so obviously in their interests. And the
bureaucracy wijll deliver because government and business and every parent and every
child in the country depends on it and we are watching.
In the past decade the Government has massively expanded Australian higher education.
Seventeen universities have been created in the last eight years, many of them in areas
away from thi-main urban centres.
We now enrol thirty per cent of all seventeen to twenty-two year olds. Today we can say
that our higher education system is truly open and accessible.
Perhaps even greater than this achievement has been the dramatic increase in secondary
school retention rates. In the space of a decade we more than doubled the number of
youiing Australians completing Year 12.
But comparing the present with the past is much less useful than comparing it with where
we have to be in the future. In international terms the present figure is acceptable but the
base it came off was deplorable. Fourteen per cent of our young people still drop out of
school early and don't go on to further education or training.
The Youth Training Initiative announced in Working Nation will maintain the momentum
of reform. It is designed to reach these young people at this turning point in their lives,
and stop the cycle of disadvantage and alienation.
Through the Initiative, unemployed fifteen to seventeen year olds will be case managed
and assisted into worthwhile education, training or work opportunities.
Young people who are still unemployed after six months will be offered a variety of labour
market and vocational training programs which may lead to permanent employment.
The Youth Training Initiative goes some way toward completing the expansion of postcompulsory
schooling we began a decade ago.
Our record in vocational education and training is not similarly impressive. Only one in
five Australians aged-sixteen and seventeen are in vocational preparation. The OECD
average is one in two. We have to reach a comparable level and do so quickly.
This is the great education challenge for Australia in the nineties to bring vocational
education and training up to the level our economic and social ambitions demand. A level,
for example, which compares with Germany, which has four times the number of
apprentices relative to the size of the workforce and twice as many people with education
or training qualifications other than university degrees.
Our objective and all Australian governments have agreed to it is that by the year 2001
ninety-five per cent of nineteen year olds will have completed Year 12 or an initial postschool
qualification, or be participating in formally recognised education and training.
In a successful Australian economy of the future, the key competitive advantage will be
our general skills.
To quote one very instructive example. Comparative studies of the hotel industry in
Germany and Great Britain in the 1980s found that the productivity of German workers
was fifty to sixty per cent higher than their British counterparts. The productivity of
German hotel managers is also higher because they did not have to regularly monitor their
staff. The difference was that the German workers had had specific vocational training
and the British workers had not.
The same lesson can be drawn from the example of Australian car manufacturers who
have embraced training to lift quality and productivity.
In cooperation with TAFE they developed a Vehicle Production Certificate. They now
build world class cars. They export. The industry has a future. The car production
workers have a future.
The moral of the story could be applied to the nation as whole. Our long term prosperity
depends on nothing so much as the quality of our workforce both their vocational skills
and their general education.
Over the last five years we have taken measures to massively increase the quantum of
vocational education and training.
In cooperation with the States and Territories, we established the Australian National
Training Authority ANTA to drive the expansion.
It was a watershed in Commonwealth-State cooperation of the kind we need to succeed
with in our education system, and we laid the foundation for expansion with 1. 1 billion in
growth funding over the period 1993-1996.
In Working Nation we announced an ambitious plan for the expansion of entry level
training by 50,000 places over the next two years. This program will be supported by a
revised system of payments to employers who provide young people with training places.
The introduction of a training wage will also provide employers in new and emerging
industries with a single scheme of payments. Traineeships will be expanded across the
whole workforce and the supply of training places increased.
It is not enough to just expand the system. The system has to meet the goals we set it.
We need to find the means by which the different education sectors can be effectively
linked with each other and with the worlds of work and culture. We need to make the
system more responsive to economic and cultural change.
Post-compulsory education has been fundamentally changed by the increase in retention
rates. Yet the curriculum still reflects the days when most of those completing senior high
school were hoping to go on to university.
Now that a large proportion do not have this intention, schools need to provide studies
which are integrated with relevant vocational education. In future there should be no
segregation of general and vocational education.
That is why Working Nation announced the creation of a new Australian Student
Traineeship Foundation a scheme delivered through regional partnerships between
schools and industry which will enable Year-I 1 and 12 students to combine school studies
with work experience in local industry and off the job training.
The traineeships will allow young people to complete their training and apprenticeships in
a shorter time. More generally, they should serve as a model for the next century when
schools must link as easily with vocational education and training as they now link with
universities. Similarly we must link industry and tertiary education indeed, we need to escape from
the tradition of keeping work and education in different spheres.
The task is to create an environment in which educational institutions and government
authorities involve industry in mainstream planning and decision-making and one where
industry feels bound to be involved.
The delivery of tertiary education must be more flexible to meet the wider range of
industry needs.*
The introduction of the second stage of the Government's Open Learning Initiative, which
includes the development of an electronic support network, will mean that employees will
no longer have to spend time away from the workplace in order to galn qualification.
Employers and education providers should be able to develop programs which meet the
needs of individuals at their own pace, at their own place.
Employers also need to be involved in developing a more streamlined and responsible
vocational sector. At present, they understandably complaln about the maze of
authorities, boards and processes they need to negotiate before they can get appropriate
training programs.
The National Framework for the Recognition of Training, which was meant to solve this
problem, has so far failed to deliver either national recognition or portability. In
cooperation with State and Territory Governments, the Commonwealth is seeking the
means of overcoming the problem.
One possibility is to increase the powers of ANTA, in order to give employers and training
providers a " one stop shop" where training can be nationally accredited in a single
streamldined process. Working Nation contained measures which Will assist cooperation
between business and training authorities. Administrative arrangements will be
streamldined. Industry will be put in the driving seat to make training administration simple
and relevant to industry needs.
The National Employment and Training Taskforce will enable traineeships to be fasttracked.
The new Enterprise Stream for traineeships will allow enterprises to develop
their own training standards, develop their own nationally accredited programs and issue
their own national vocational qualifications.
Working Nation suspended the Training Guarantee for two years, and it will be abolished
altogether if business seriously comumits itself to creating new entry level training places.
That really is the bottom line. None of these reforms will be effective unless business
increases its own effort and cooperates with providers in setting directions for the future.
The presence of so many business people at this conference suggests that Australian
industry is in fact keen to establish a genuine partnership with government and the
education industry.
Industry wants more than specific vocational skills. They want employees with general
skills, general knowledge, judgement, self-discipline, literacy and numeracy.
That is one very practical reason why the emphasis we are now placing on vocational
education and training must not be seen as antithetical to traditional educational values. In
fact, we should be strengthening those values as we go.
Education is a foundation of the nation's culture and strength. It is where knowledge and
appreciation of our heritage and institutions is passed on; where our sensibilities are
broadened; where moral, ethical and aesthetic faculties are shaped.
I don't think that I am alone in suspecting that some of these things are not the priorities
they once were.
Yet our success as a nation and as a society, as much as the responsibility we have to our
children, demands that we do not let these values slip from our education system.
Perhaps most of all, our children should know what the privileges and responsibilities of
Australian democracy are. What their great inheritance is. What change is desirable and
possible. The creation of an Exert Group to provide the Government with a plan for a program of
public education and information on Australian government, citizenship and the
constitution may be seen in this context that is, as a means of strengthening our
democracy by enlivening our appreciation of it.
The composition and terms of reference of this group will be announced soon.
It is scarcely less important that we improve our understanding of the nations with whom
increasingly we deal.
It will profoundly assist our relationship with the countries of our region if we understand
the languages they speak. Z.-
Today less than four per cent of Year 12 students study an Asian language. Only twelve
per cent are studying a second language of any kind. Yet the study of a second language
has a substantial practical significance both for the student and for our national
development. In the Budget the Government announced funding for a joint Commonwealth/ State
National Asian Languages Strategy which will see all Australian school children in Years
3 to 10 learning a-seco6nd language by the year 2006.
Sixty per cent of them will study one of four priority Asian languages Japanese,
Indonesian, Modern Standard Chinese and Korean and forty per cent will study any
other second language of their choice.
Twenty-five per cent of all Year 12 students will be studying a second language and one
per cent of students will go on to do a " Year 13" in Asia under the Young Australians in
Asia Program..
The program will greatly enrich our education system and with it the life of the nation. In
one sense, it is one more practical step in the process of opening Australia up to the region
and the world. In another sense, it is symbolic: symbolic of our willingness to meet other
countries half-way in our relationships with them, and symbolic also of our will and
capacity to devise for our education system new building blocks for necessary social and
cultural growth.
If we are to enter the twenty-first century with an education and training system large
enough and good enough to meet the aspirations of individuals and the needs of Australia,
we will need a national effort.
We will need State and Territory Governments to cooperate with business, and business to
engage as it has never done before. The States must streamlJine their training
bureaucracies: business must increase its own training efforts and share the responsibility
for shaping and implementing the training agenda.
As in so much else, the Australian education system will have to become more flexible.
The borders between schools and vocational training, and between education and work,
will need to come down.
Education must be a prime mover of necessary change, a vehicle by which the nation can
grasp the unprecedented opportunities which are now presented and all Australians can
share in the rewards and the responsibilities.
8
I said in Paris a few days ago that to be an Australian in this decade is to be present at a
defining moment in our history. Your presence at this conference I take as encouraging
evidence that you not only share this belief: but are willing to share the responsibility that
flows from it.
Thank you