Hello Everyone,

With the collapse of freemarket financial structures across the planet, our government sees fit to guarantee the safety of banks but not the durability of infrastructure like TAFE to ensure that Australia is skilled for this century.

Well, apart from industrial action and other forms of reaction to both the State and federal Government’s myopic perspective on TAFE I believe that we can do something more.

The community expects TAFE staff to protest the changes and it expects us to go on strike. With our current wage struggle DET management is threatening to take away our conditions (even to take away 4 weeks leave) using the grounds of “community expectations”. Let’s face it, the non teacher will think it is reasonable to only have 6 weeks annual leave(compared to their 4 weeks leave) and for teachers to teach more hours because they do not know what it is like to be teachers and what is involved in our profession. The Government knows this and it will use “community expectations” to make out that we are “greedy”. Never mind that our DET boss was just given an automatic 4% increase without any demonstrated productivity gains. So, our battle is in the perceptual arena, it is a Public Relations exercise. We need to gain the support of the community for both the wage claim and the survival of TAFE.

I believe that TAFE has an amazing pool of talented and highly skilled people who teach and train the community but who can easily direct these talents and skills to produce a mega spectacular “Event”.

Not only do we have them now but we also have retired teachers and students who have graduated who will be more than pleased to be able to use their skills to save TAFE.

This “Event” can include performances by musicians, poets, artists…it can include “free” culinary delights, installation experiential pieces, demonstrations of stuff we do, Information Technology media presentations using the latest equipment. This Festival for TAFE can draw upon our expertise and skills in so many areas. Obviously we can ask our students to assist.

We can use TAFE equipment to do this…it will be our way of procuring the “means of production” for the community. After all we are Public Servants and our masters are the Public.

For the Event to have an effective impact it would have to be done not only in Newcastle but also in other centres like Sydney and preferably across the country…simultaneously. This way we can use the communications technology to connect live with the other centres in the country.

You can imagine the impact that this would have in the media. We can coordinate the web side of things as well and maybe make some connections with other educators across the world. Teachers and supporters from the community can tell Australia and the world about TAFE and why restructuring it out of existence is bad for all of us.

Anyway, everything I said above are just ideas floating about in my skull. I’m sure that if we want to do something we can come up with some amazing stuff.

Please don’t think “yeh, great, where’s the money coming from ?” because I know from experience with other projects I have been involved in, that the funds and stuff will come if we know what we want and have the passion to fire it up. Money and stuff follows energy passion and love for what we do and hope for.

So, how about it? Are we just going to roll over and let TAFE be destroyed or are we going to fight with all of our imaginative force and creativity to save TAFE for our community?

If you are interested in this idea let me know by private email still.seeking@gmail.com and if there is enough interest we may light the fuse….

Visit http://save-tafe-festivals.blogspot.com/ and leave a comment.

all the best,

steve g
TAFE TA Peace Officer
Hunter Institute, TAFE NSW

From Privatise TAFE (articles), 2008/12/18 at 2:38 PM