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Continued...Derek

The reason I was happy to come out of my retirement to MC this meeting is because, as I say, I worked for TAFE for 26 years and I had a wonderful time working for TAFE. And more importantly I met lots of students who had a wonderful time.

And a couple of the things I thought TAFE offered that no one else could was the history and tradition. When people came the students would say, they usually called it “the Tech” back in those days even though it had been TAFE for a long time, and they all had family and friends who had been at TAFE, and they trusted it. It wasn’t one of these fly by night, pay-as-you-go rivals that have set up around the place and often disappear quickly. Some of them are excellent, but their quality is hard to work out, and most students don’t have time to do that.

So that’s why I think TAFE is really important. And the people of NSW deserve to have a really good, quality, adult provider of technical, second-chance education.

We have, on the agenda today, we have five guest speakers, who are supporters of TAFE from different angles.

Derrick Waddell

Derrick Waddell's Introduction

TAFE Community Alliance Launch – 22nd February, 2013

First of all I’d like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of this land we’re gathered on today and their elders past and present.

My name’s Derek Waddell, I’ve been asked to MC this meeting because I’ve worked for TAFE for 206 years but I’ve been retired for some time. So I’m coming in as an outsider, someone who saw TAFE from all sorts of angles and appreciated the wonderful stuff it did.

The purpose of this meeting is to launch this campaign to try and preserve TAFE as the leading provider of adult technical and second-chance education in NSW.

I’m to invite as many people as possible to be involved in our campaign to convince the Government how wrong their actions are.

I trust you’ve all signed, coming in, the registration because that means we’ve got all the names of the people here.

A couple of other things here. Before you leave if you take one of these cards it gives you contact details [and] how you can read all about the campaign over the website, and also on the back suggests some actions you may want to be involved in to help what we’re doing.

Secondly, there are petitions to sign if you’d like to sign one of them on the way out. Also if you would like to take some and talk with your friends and community and get them to sign it also.