Letter to Director General DET on National TAFE Day

The letter below was sent to Michael Coutts-Trotter, Director General of Department of Education and Training on 29 October, 2009, soon after the Industrial Relations Commission (IRC) decision. I think it summarises the way we TAFE Teachers feel about the general direction management is taking TAFE.

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Dear Mr MCT

Yesterday was National TAFE Day, a day when we should have been celebrating all the great things that TAFE does. Australia's TAFE system is one of the world's greatest mechanisms in bringing equal opportunity through education and training to every one.

You sir, and all of your Senior Executive Service (SES) Officers are in the process of dismantling and destroying this great mechanism of equal opportunityby gradually commercialising TAFE and devolving the professionalism of TAFE Teachers to the lowest common denominator of Private Provider Trainers. All this in the name of "Competition".

You are trading in a system of giving a "fair go" ( a uniquely Australian institution) for a private system of dog eat dog, mercantile jungle where "Greed is Good" is chanted like a mantra and where the "huddled masses" are pissed on (with apologies to Lou Reed). You are treating your Teachers as potential cogs in a failed factory production line of trainers. Ask the overseas students how they feel about paying their hard earned money to the rip off private colleges.

A while ago I wrote you a letter entitled " A Connection in Spirit" . I felt that I had established a real dialogue with you at the Quality Awards Day in 2007 while watching Hunter Institute African refugee students dancing. I was alluding to the great thinker and writer Martin Buber's "I - and - Thou". His idea was that a certain synergy occurred when two individuals were in real dialogue - I use the word "connected" and that this synergy was enveloped by a higher force - Spirit.

Anyway, I thought that you would click onto what I was referring to and that this would then prompt a "reply in Spirit".

I got no reply but I noticed you did reply to some of my fellow teachers. I am behoved to use the word "lied" when you replied to these people that there was no plan to make TAFE teachers be present at the workplace for 35 hours. We all know that this is not the case because the IRC has stated that this is now one of the new award conditions. How do you explain this?

You and the Corporate Kids, use the camouflage of Mission and Vision Statements and so called "transparency" to immerse Teachers, like the living frog that gets boiled gradually after being placed in a pot of cold water, into cold bureaucratic managerialese (we've become FCPS'd, KPI'ed, CLAMed, TIPPAd, QualityVisualised and A.C.R.O.N.Y.M.E.D to the max).

You hoped that we would be boiled dead, indeed brain dead. Why would you dare do what you have done if you didn't think we would just go,"Oh well...boil on!" The fact is that no frog would have put up with it as long as we have and now that you have, apparently, taken our conditions and our sense of professionalism away, this frog is transmuting into a force you cannot fathom. Yes, a force awakened by an IRC kiss.

I have heard that you and your SES officers get bonuses for achieving KeyPerformance Indicators (KPI's). One of them would be a Budget indicator. I have heard that you get a bonus payment for achieving cost cuts. If this is true how many pieces of silver would you and the others get for achieving the despicable, two faced result presented by the IRC? Do we have to make a Freedom of Information request to find out? Oh, and by the way - how many work conditions did you sacrifice to get your 4% increase, or is this private information as well?

So, thanks Mr MCT for rekindling the spirit of comradeship and solidarity by thebetrayal of your teachers.

Celebrating National TAFE Day, I hope you and your political masters rethink what you have done and read and understand Dr John Kaye's motion that was passed last night in Parliament.

It's not too late to support PUBLIC EDUCATION and your Teachers.

It is never too late to start all over again.

steve g

Hunter Institute TAFE TA Peace Officer