Numbers Game
Labor’s shadow minister for Education is more interested in politics than helping young people find meaningful work, says James Mathias.
You have to hand it to Tanya Plibersek for the innovative ways she makes a mark on each shadow ministry she assumes. It was as shadow foreign affairs spokesperson in 2014 that she demonstrated her innate knowledge for the geopolitical landscape when she famously called Africa a country.
Now she is at it again with her new shadow portfolio, Education. This week Plibersek, eager to demonstrate her knowledge of the education sector, claimed the Government has short-changed TAFE, training and apprentices by $1 billion.
Her media release on Wednesday morning began included a table, based on what "a new report reveals", outlining $919 million of cuts to the portfolio. However, just as she forgot the difference between a country and a continent, Plibersek forgot the key difference between a report and, say, a spreadsheet created by her own office.
At 11am that morning her colleague Senator Louise Pratt in Senate Estimates that the "report" was a table compiled by the Labor party.
Senator Pratt: "Okay, so Labor compiled that table and that’s the source of it, but it tracks the underspend."
Senator Pratt then claimed the table was from a single report created by the Department of Employment. The department refutes this.
Senator Pratt: Okay, we got the table here; it is taken from your annual report. It says...
Minister Cash: Can we confirm it is not taken from the department’s annual report?
Dep Sec Kerri Hartland: It is certainly not from the Employment (department) annual report and we did have difficulty replicating. If you wanted to step through the individual items there, when we tried to look at this most are demand driven and some, I think, are cost recovered programs. I think we have a whole comparison of apples and oranges.
Analysis of the claimed cuts reveal Plibersek's desperation. Notwithstanding the fact that the table in her media release contains some significant mistakes in the dollar amounts, the claimed cuts are little more than program underspends over four years.
One program singled out by Plibersek is the Australian Apprenticeships Incentives Program, which pays businesses to hire apprentices in areas of high skill demand.
Analysis by the Menzies Research Centre has found that in the most recent 2018-19 Education Department Annual Report, the target of 51,000 businesses receiving the incentive was exceeded by 10,000.
Plibersek says the $33 million underspend represents a cut to the program.
Her disregard for the facts is unbecoming of an Opposition MP aspiring to the portfolio. It is particularly astonishing given the fact that she was a part of a Government that between 2011 and 2013 made nine successive cuts to this exact same program totalling $1.2 billion.
And her former leader, Bill Shorten, oversaw the largest ever annual decline in apprenticeships while he was employment minister from 2011 to 2013.
Our analysis of Plibersek’s figures reveal that almost 20 per cent of the alleged underspend relates to the Adult Migrant English Program (AMEP), not apprenticeships.
AMEP is a service provided by Government to eligible migrants to access up to 510 hours of free English language education in order to support their integration into Australia. In 2018-19 53,000 eligible migrants participated in this program which was around 9,000 less than the department estimated but by Plibersek’s contention this is to be viewed as a cut.
Underspending is common in departments administering demand-driven programs, especially those whose budgets include buffers for unexpected spikes. After all these years in Canberra, one would expect Plibersek to understand this.