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ASSOCIATION
The world has
changed.
Can someone
please tell the
educator sector?
Every now and then there are things that happen that some
how just don’t make sense from the perspective that you
have of the world. A case in point for anyone involved in
the creative industries and the entertainment sector are the
changes being undertaken in the TAFE system around the
country.
Its not that the TAFE sector is restructuring but the effect
that restructuring appears to be having on the creative
industries that seems counter intuitive.
For example, it was just a year ago that Simon Crean, Minister
for the Arts and Regional Development was launching
his Culture Policy discussion paper to quite some fanfare
and, with considerable acknowledgement of the value of the
creative industries here in this country. According to Crean,
the creative sector is worth around $31 billion in annual
revenues and employs something like 285,000 people.
you only have to do a little research to understand that
in addition to those two facts the creative industries sector
is growing at a rate faster than that of the economy more
generally and, in employment terms, the creative sector is
growing at around twice that of the national average employment
growth overall.
Further afield, the United Nations report that in most
developed countries the creative sector is driver of economic
growth. In Europe and the UK for example creative
industries output is said to equate to 4% of GDP making it a
more significant contributor than the hospitality industry,
utilities, forestry, or agriculture.
Here in Australia much the same patterns can be found.
At $31 billion in annual turnover the creative sector is
significant and is placed somewhere between mining and
agriculture in terms of its economic importance. Remember
that it was not that long ago that ‘Australia rode on the
sheep’s back’. How things have changed.
The only down side that can we can find is that it takes
creative sector graduates longer to secure a job than the
average but, even that is only a temporary negative, because
once employed creative industries workers earn around 6%
more than the average Australian wage earner.
Creans’s work and investment in the long overdue (and
still unfunded) cultural policy is not the only investment
in creativity that is taking place in Government. The much
criticized National Broadband Network (NBN) is funded to
the tune of $40 billion over the next few years. The NBN has
the potential to be a major stimulus to the creative sector
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and should provide significant new employment opportunities.
The NBN, if it is to fulfill its objectives, will require
new content and lots, and lots of it. That means new artists,
performers, multimedia creators, audio technicians, ICT
technicians, writers and much more.
And this is the contradiction. On one hand at least two
arms of Government are spending significant amounts of
money to create a competitive and culturally creative Australia
for the 21st century but on the other hand its education
authorities are withdrawing what are in real terms relatively
small amounts of funding from some of the key institutions
that will provide the skills to enable the use of the NBN and
the creativity to drive the cultural policy.
From what ACETA has learned to date, the impact of
the revised TAFE funding model will be significant for the
creative industries sector. It seems that the Departments
of Education have failed to grasp the value of the creative
industries and the need to train a 21st century workforce
rather than continuing to offer a 19th century industrial
revolution education and training model.
The result appears to be a number of pending course
closures around the country in areas of music, visual arts,
production and multimedia. At this stage institutions in
each of the east coast states and Western Australian are
going to be impacted. The effect in regional Australia will be
even greater.
Where course closures are not taking place the student
fees are rising markedly. Certificate level fees in some
institutions are reported to be rising from $2000, a level
where some students may have the capacity to pay as they
learn, to $8,000 which they mostly will not. If these costs
are indicative then Government’s are going to have to move
on their plans to include Certificate IV level courses into the
FEE-Help funding arrangement otherwise these courses will
see reduced demand through that lack of suitable funding
options.
What concerns ACETA and the sector more generally are
statements from authorities that reinforce the value of traditional
skills - welding, fitting and turning and the like over
new skills which are often categorized as ‘lifestyle’ courses.
The experience of the ACETA membership is that is already
hard to secure staff with the required skills it looks like
finding an ‘industry ready’ workforce in the future is going
to get harder not easier. And where our member businesses
are willing to train staff it looks like the cost of that training
is about to increase by a factor of 3, 4 or 5 in the short term.