Thornlie TAFE is all about opportunity, Prime Minister Anthony Albanese said on a visit there on Monday.
“It’s about an opportunity for people to earn more through good jobs. It’s about training Australians for the jobs of the future in skills that we need,” Mr Albanese said.
He said the Government created 300,000 fee-free TAFE places last year in areas such as electrical, engineering, computers and technology, but also in the care sector, in aged care, in child care, all of those skills that Australians need.
“What this is doing is preparing some young people straight out of school for their first job, but it’s doing something else as well,” he said.
“We met people today who are being re-trained, who found out about Fee-Free TAFE and said, ‘I know I’m going to have a crack at a job in the mining sector through electrical work’, and that is such a good thing.
“Good for them, but good for the economy as well.
“The other good news, of course, is that for those people, like a couple of the TAFE students we met today, they’ve already got jobs.
“So, they’re studying through TAFE with Fee-Free and they’re starting to work on a part-time basis as part of their entry into their new careers. Guess what? They’re going to get a tax cut as well.”
WA Minister for Training and Workforce Development Simone McGurk said there were some fantastic examples of training at the TAFE
“Reece, Chad, Carol, students who made the decision to go into technology, to go into the disciplines of automation, both operations and programming, as a result of our fee-free courses,” she said.
“We met students who had not made the decision before about what they would do.
“They heard about fee-free courses and they decided to give it a go. And now, as a result of the fee-free, for instance, in the Cert II and Cert IV, in automation, in operations and programming, we’ve got over 200 students in the metropolitan area alone doing this work.
“These are skills vital for our mining sector. We know that operations, remote operations, are now a critical part of our mining sector.
“They’re crucial for our energy sector. They’re crucial for a whole range of different industries across the state. We want our industries to be competitive.
“We want them to be able to find the employees that they need who have got the right skills.
“And we’re working at every level, through our local TAFE colleges, to work with industry, to understand what those skills are and then to offer the courses that are available.”
