Victoria’s training budget was underspent by hundreds of millions of dollars in 2016-17 but no one seems to know where the money has gone.
Asked today how much money was returned to consolidated revenue, department officials appeared to be struck by a case of amnesia.
Department officials are not just confused about where the money’s gone, they are also unable to get their story straight on the extent of Labor’s cuts.
The figures provided at Public Accounts and Estimates Committee today don’t match up to the figures provided at hearings in May.
The Productivity Commission’s Report on Government services, released earlier this month, revealed that in 2016 Labor underspent the student training budget by a staggering $502 million.
Comments to be attributed to Shadow Training, Skills & Apprenticeships Minister Steph Ryan
Higher skills and training officials have got a serious case of the ‘umm’s.
It just isn’t believable that hundreds of millions of dollars could vanish from the department and no one knows what it’s been spent on.
Daniel Andrews cannot continue to claim he is providing record funding for training when the $1.2 billion student training budget has been cut by half a billion in just one year.
Labor’s cuts are of unprecedented magnitude and are a betrayal of his promise to ‘rescue’ TAFE.