“It’s quick, it’s effective. It can turn around people and it can retrain people,” he said. “I’ve seen some great examples where mums returning to work may have taken a package from their old jobs and they’re encouraged to take up nursing. “I see it happening with the retraining of plumbers so they can take up advantages in renewable energy.” Labor is promising to scrap up-front fees for 100,000 TAFE students and force companies to make sure one in every 10 workers is an apprentice on any Commonwealth project, in a policy costing $470 million over four years and $708 million over a decade. It is spending more on early education and preschool with a new $9.8 billion subsidy over a decade, while leaving its biggest commitment for public schools, which are being promised $14 billion more over a decade compared to the Coalition.

In a growing policy contest ahead of the election, the Coalition has outlined loan programs for vocational education students after years of work to end rorts in the VET-FEE-HELP scheme, blaming Labor for leaving taxpayers with bills of $325 million in 2012, $1.8 billion in 2014 and $2.9 billion in 2015 from “unscrupulous” course operators. The fee scandal has plagued the sector at a time when it has also suffered a steady erosion in funding, raising questions about where Australia will find the next generation of plumbers, carpenters, electricians, builders and other skilled workers. Mr Shorten has made technical education a central message in “town hall” meetings with voters this year, saying he would make sure two out of every three dollars in VET spending from Canberra would go to public TAFE rather than private colleges. Asked if he would be increasing hard money for public TAFE, he said "yes" and added: “This government has cut TAFE and we’re going to remedy that and start reinvesting in TAFE.” Mr Shorten has previously outlined a plan to apply higher visa charges on foreign workers to raise revenue for TAFE, but he told Fairfax Media there would be more to do.

“I think we’ve got about 1.6 million people in Australia at the moment who have a visa that gives them temporary work rights. That is addictive to the Australian economy and it means we’re not training up enough of our own young people – and some not-so-young people too,” he said. The number includes foreign students, young travellers on working holidays and temporary skilled workers. “I think the system is sprawling out of control – I think that there shouldn’t be a temporary labour worker from overseas a day longer than we can take to train one of our own,” Mr Shorten said. “We are always going to have some guest labour from overseas but I think the pendulum has swung too far.” Mr Shorten said the answer was to “train our own people” but would not set a target for a cut to the 1.6 million, highlighting the difficulty of developing a policy that would tackle the challenge without depriving employers of the workers they want.

Mr Shorten’s comments are an important signal of his intention ahead of the release of final policies closer to the federal election, to be held by May next year. Student enrolments in publicly-funded TAFE have fallen sharply in recent years, with Fairfax Media reporting in April that the numbers fell by more than 30,000 in NSW and almost 20,000 in Victoria in the first nine months of last year. Vocational education has also suffered years of shrinking funding, according to a report last December by the Mitchell Institute at Victoria University showing funding had fallen 4.7 per cent in real terms over 11 years. The shrinking budget for vocational education compared with a 30 per cent increase for schools and a 52 per cent boost for universities over the same period.