He meant, of course, that wannabe politicians must know what happened before their time so as to avoid the mistakes of the past, including making ill-informed public comments.

What a pity Bendigo’s Greens candidates didn’t follow Cicero’s advice before signing up a union stunt and demonstrating their ignorance of vocational training’s recent history in Victoria by writing their letter ‘Our TAFEs are fighting for survival’, published in the Bendigo Advertiser on August 29.

For if they had done so, they would have discovered TAFE’s problems were not created by the Coalition in 2012 as they falsely claim, but by Labor in 2008 to 2009 when the then Minister for Skills, Jacinta Allan, introduced ‘contestability’, hiked course fees from $1500 to $7600 and cancelled concessions.

Contestability forced Victoria’s 18 TAFE institutes to compete with more than 550 new private training organisations for the vocational training funding TAFEs were previously guaranteed. 

Within a year, TAFE’s share of VET funding dropped from more than 75 per cent to less than 42 per cent as Labor’s newly uncapped VET budget was blown by half a billion dollars and rorted to a standstill.

TAFE institutes were not given any assistance by Labor to adapt to Allan’s ‘brave new VET world’ so courses and teachers’ jobs collapsed across the state as private providers gobbled up VET money leaving TAFEs cashless. 

But the future of TAFE is brighter in Bendigo today because the Napthine government has brokered and funded a visionary $100 million merger to create our new Bendigo Kangan Institute, despite Bendigo Labor’s belligerent opposition.