National Training Reform Agenda
A third wave of thinking, reflecting the need to change the whole system rather than sponsor equity bubbles within it, gathered force throughout the 1980s. But around 1988, the ground on which we were working began to shift beneath us, signaling the fourth wave of thinking. The National Training Reform Agenda emerged, shaped by an alliance between the federal government and the trade union movement in response to the economic challenges facing Australia and the need to develop a more open and globally competitive economy.³

The earlier systemic objective of unrestricted access and equity for all individuals had created fertile ground for feminists to promote access and equity for women and for other excluded groups. By the late 1980s, access and equity were criticized, principally by industry, as making TAFE "all things to all people." The new systemic objectives, under the Training Reform Agenda, were far less women friendly. They were initially driven from a relatively narrow industry perspective, particularly from apprenticeship and manufacturing. The extrinsic values of training, such as contribution to greater economic flexibility and technological innovation, were more strongly emphasized than the intrinsic value to women individually or as a group.

Up to 1989, most of the drive to advance the interests of women in vocational education and training had come from women in education in the public sector. These women were supported by women in labour bureaucracies and trade unions who were concerned with the gender segregation of the labour market and its consequential effects on women's wages and working conditions. TAFE had been the site of principal struggle.

But in 1989 this shifted. The focus was now on the whole of the vocational education and training system comprising not just TAFE but also, and equally importantly, in-industry training and private and community-based training. Women in the labour movement and in labour bureaucracies, anxious to seize the new industrial relations agenda and its training implications and turn it to serve the interests of women, began to take the initiative. But while the objectives of the training reforms were moderately clear from a national economic perspective, and quite clear from an industrial relations perspective, they were not and are still not clear from a feminist perspective.

Relations with the state
The National Training Reform Agenda has been constructed and is driven by a coalition of government and trade union interests. Increasingly, women are calling into question their historically close relations with the state. Australian feminism has long had a reliance on state intervention to achieve its objectives. As Lyndall Ryan has put it: "In Australia the state has not only been considered neutral, but as the initiator of change. While it is undoubtedly a patriarchal structure, its potential to liberate women from dependence on husbands and fathers is enormous. There is no doubt that the rise of the New Right in Australia has to a large degree been a response to the success femocrats have achieved in initiating major policy changes in the delivery of services to women. This pioneering decade (from 1973 to 1983) enabled femocrats to understand the possibilities as well as the limitations of change."⁴

As long as the state was committed to unrestricted access of women to vocational education through TAFE and equity for them within TAFE, it was possible to believe that it could be turned to feminist ends. In 1988 and 1989, the decision to adopt the National Training Reform Agenda and refocus effort away from the needs of individuals to the needs of the economy, industries, enterprises, and global competition, caught feminists in a difficult web.