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Research

Dimensions of innovation: Some historical perspectives on vocational education and training and innovation in Australia — A discussion paper

This paper considers the development of a uniquely Australian system of innovation and its relation to the vocational education and training (VET) system from a different and more long-term historical perspective than that by which innovation has usually been discussed in contemporary Australian and international policy debates. It is argued that the basis for a unique Australian innovation system was laid down between the late nineteenth century and the period of post-Second World War reconstruction. Arrangements prior to the formation of the technical and further education (TAFE) system in the mid-1970s are therefore considered.

In practice, innovation comes from ‘complex interactions between many individuals, organisations and environmental factors’ rather than being a ‘linear trajectory from new knowledge to new product’ (European Commission 2001, 1.5). The Business Council of Australia recognised this in 1992 when it rejected as too ‘narrow and misleading’ the:

… conventional wisdom … that innovation equals invention plus commercialisation … Innovation is not science. Nor is it technology or the ownership of invention.
(Carnegie et al. 1993, p.3)

As the European Commission further notes: ‘From this perspective the development of “human resources” is critical, first for the creation of new knowledge (primarily basic science) and second, for the diffusion of knowledge throughout society’ (European Commission 2000, p.29). A skilled workforce is a key pathway by which diffusion occurs and the development of this skilled workforce is, in general, the domain of VET institutions.

The European settlement of Australia and the development of Australian society occurred as part of the eighteenth century period known as ‘The Enlightenment’, and with Australian society absorbing key political and social lessons from the American and French Revolutions. Early Australian society participated in the general European and North American practice of the nineteenth century of applying science to technology. Moreover, early Australian governors were often amateur scientists, and a network of philosophical and learned societies became part of the colonial social fabric from the 1830s onwards.

Imported steam engines were used as early as 1813. By 1836 they were not only being modified by resident craftsmen for new marine and industrial uses, but local manufacturing had also commenced. The small-scale but thriving local industrial activities, which developed to supply the small but dispersed local population and agricultural export industries, expanded with the demands of the gold rushes of the 1850s.

The expansion of capital-intensive agriculture and the growth of extractive industries in all colonies after the gold rushes increased the need for technically innovative solutions. Rather than a derivative colonial science and technology, it is more accurate to see Australian developments in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries as part of a dynamic process occurring within mainstream western science and technology. In other words, innovation and technological development were absorbed, and lessons adapted within the constraints of a limited population and markets in colonial and federated Australia; they did not have to be adopted from ‘outside’.

The development of Australian technical education from the 1880s (although constrained by a small population, and fragmented labour, product and capital markets) reflected the fact that the colonies, and later the Commonwealth, were part of a common process in western societies. The libraries of the various colonial learned societies (in particular, their technical journals), the schools of arts and the mechanics institutes reflect knowledge and engagement with the latest scientific and technological developments in Britain and North America. Of particular interest is colonial knowledge of developments on the continent, where science and technology were being applied to the new chemical and biology-based industries. Australian colonies were active in participating in the various international exhibitions in the latter part of the nineteenth century, as well as promoting them in Sydney and Melbourne.

A key characteristic of Australian developments in technical education and the development of industrial and agricultural infrastructure that distinguishes Australia from Britain was the formative role of the state. The state invested heavily in essential capital infrastructure, and in the training of the skilled operatives who built it. In addition, industrial law, through apprenticeships and industry-based awards, provided a de facto national system of occupation-based definitions of formal skill. As a result, Australian practice in technical education tended to resemble processes on the continent (as a result of state intervention or encouragement, such as that in Bismarckian Germany), rather more than it did the locally based education system of the British metropolis. Britain in fact only began to approach a national system of technical training in the 1970s with the passage of the Manpower Services Act. In Australia, although the states delivered the technical training (compulsory in the case of most apprenticeships), the broad standards were set in legally binding federal industrial awards which were mirrored at the state level, with specific skills determined by the need for skill recognition within regionally dispersed occupational labour markets.

From the early years of Federation the technical education system in all states reflected this legally supported occupational structure. In a sense, the formal adoption of a national training system in the late 1990s was an outcome of over a hundred years of informal practice. The associated shift from state to federal influence and control in VET reflects similar changes to federal–state relations in other areas, which followed as a direct result of state transfer to the Commonwealth of a range of taxation measures during the Second World War.

Australia’s colonial heritage, its reliance on resource development, and its dependence on and integration with the world economy make it an interesting case study of emerging globalisation. To respond to challenges of geography and climate, Australia depended on innovative local solutions to local problems and relied on the development and diffusion of skills provided by the technical education system at semi-skilled, trade, certificate and diploma levels, complemented by a program of planned skilled migration.

The Australian system of innovation fits the pattern of incremental innovation and diffusion of technical knowledge. Historically, from colonial times to the advent of the present national system, the technical education and training institutions, for all their historically specific characteristics, industry critics and state differences, have functioned to support this process.