Federal Election 2025: What’s at stake for schools, TAFE, and industrial relations?
Queensland Teachers' Journal, Vol 130 No 2, 11 April 2025, page no 8 & 9.
As the 2025 Federal Election rolls around, QTU members and their families deciding who to cast their important vote for might be thinking about what issues will impact on them.
The QTU’s engagement in the federal election campaign continues our work with our federal campaigns For Every Child – Fully Fund State Schools and Rebuild with TAFE. This work also aligns with our Strategic Objectives:
- Strategic objective 2: Protect and enhance member working conditions and salaries
- Strategic objective 4: Promote and protect public education and the teaching profession
… and the 2025 Priorities:
- Enhancing and potentiating salaries and conditions
- Safe, healthy, and properly resourced workplaces.
Schools: 100 per cent SRS is finally in reach
A Heads of Agreement and Bilateral Agreement were signed between the Commonwealth and the Queensland Government prior to the calling of the federal election. This is a historic agreement and one that was made possible by the hard work of QTU members, campaigning side-by-side with parents and other community members. The agreement will see the Queensland and Commonwealth Governments lift their share of funding over the coming decade to ensure all state schools have a pathway to 100 per cent schooling resource standard funding.
Over the years, many members have participated in the Gonski, Fair Funding Now!, Every School Every Child and, most recently For Every Child – Fully Fund State Schools campaigns. It has been a long journey, and it often it felt that the more we campaigned, the more a federal Coalition government would find a way to bake in more advantage for the non-government sector.
Over the years, many members have participated in the Gonski, Fair Funding Now!, Every School Every Child and, most recently For Every Child – Fully Fund State Schools campaigns. It has been a long journey, and it often it felt that the more we campaigned, the more a federal Coalition government would find a way to bake in more advantage for the non-government sector.
The recent bilateral agreement is a demonstration of pragmatic bipartisanship across the two levels of government to resolve a complex area of policy. It sets up a genuine opportunity to end the game of “political football” that has characterised how schools are funded and the responsibility for that funding. This could be undone if there is a change of government after the federal election.
Find out more here (https://www.foreverychild.au/).
TAFE – Free TAFE is at risk
The Free TAFE Bill 2024 was introduced to the federal parliament in November last year and passed both Houses on 26 March. The bill establishes an ongoing commitment by the federal government to grant financial assistance to states and territories to deliver Free TAFE places in areas of local and national priority.
This outcome has also followed more than a decade of campaigning by TAFE educators, who have witnessed how successive cuts to TAFE have increased the pressure to deliver more for less, and the impact of the marketisation of vocational education and training.
The policy difference in this area could not be starker, with the Coalition at a federal level committing to abolishing Free TAFE, claiming that the private sector could be more efficient in delivering training. Past experience demonstrated that many for-profit providers were making super profits by focusing on high profit courses with low human and physical resource requirements, leaving the public provider to fill in the gaps and, in some cases, take over training part-way through delivery when private providers failed.
Free TAFE is life changing, allowing many Australians an opportunity to undertake skilling and reskilling to start or change careers.
Find out more here (https://www.rebuildwithtafe.org.au/).
Industrial relations – significant reforms at risk
IR reform has been another hotly contested policy space at the federal level. The introduction of the Secure Jobs Better Pay Act 2022 has resulted in significant improvements being made in the areas of:
- the right to disconnect
- same job, same pay for labour hire workers
- stronger protections against sexual harassment and discrimination
- stronger job security laws
- the criminalisation of wage theft
- stronger rights for casuals
- better bargaining rights
- world-first rights for gig workers
- new rights for union delegates
- stronger work health and safety laws
- better rights for parents and carers
- ten days paid family and domestic violence leave for all workers.
Many of these issues do not directly impact upon the work of QTU members in schools and TAFE (with the exception of QTU members working in vocational education and training at Central Queensland University). However, they impact upon the working lives of our family members and many of the families of the students we teach. The national industrial relations system also has an indirect impact upon state-based jurisdictions like Queensland, as governments often like to harmonise laws.
The majority of the reforms listed above were not supported by the federal Coalition and could be repealed in the event of a change of government.
Future reforms - extending reproductive leave to the NES
Ten days of reproductive leave was introduced for Queensland public sector employees in September 2024. As part of the federal election campaign, QTU members, along with other unions and the Queensland Council of Unions, are lobbying for this leave to be included in the National Employment Standard (NES), which would extend this important leave across all sectors of the economy.