Tafe

Learning a trade is one of the surest paths to secure, well-paid work – and for a lot of working families, it's a pathway they'd like available to their kids. But starting out costs money before you've earned any: tools, fees, time. Anything that lowers that barrier gets more people into a trade; anything that raises it keeps them out.

So it's worth looking at how the votes have gone.

In 2023 and again in 2025, parliament voted to make TAFE fee-free – no course fees standing between someone and the training that leads to a trade. Both times, Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts voted no.

We were surprised too, so we looked at the wider record.

2025 – Fee-free TAFE, and wiping student debt

When parliament moved to make university and TAFE permanently fee-free, One Nation members Pauline Hanson, Malcolm Roberts and Tyron Whitten all voted no. The same year, Hanson spoke against the government's move to wipe 20 per cent of student debt – a change worth hundreds of millions of dollars to apprentices and vocational students already carrying training loans.

2023 – Fee-free TAFE, the first time

Two years earlier, the same fee-free TAFE proposal came before parliament. Pauline Hanson and Malcolm Roberts voted no then too.

The wider record on post-school education

It's not only TAFE fees. Looking across the full run of votes, the independent tracker They Vote For You rates Pauline Hanson as having voted generally against increasing funding for university education, and generally against ending the indexation that quietly grows student and trade-support debt year after year. Different votes, same direction: when the question was making study or training cheaper, the answer was usually no.

The pattern

Fee-free TAFE, university funding, the indexation that inflates training debt – across all of it, One Nation's senators have leaned the same way. The clearest examples are the two fee-free TAFE votes, where Hanson and Roberts both voted no outright.

What they say, and how they've voted

One Nation talks a good game on apprentices – the party has floated having the government cover a large share of an apprentice's wage in the early years. It's a real proposal, and it sounds good. But a stated policy isn't a vote, and it doesn't cost anyone anything until it's actually legislated. What One Nation's senators have actually done, when a real bill to make training cheaper was in front of them, is vote no. That's the difference this whole site is about: not what a party says it stands for, but how it's voted when it counted.

Don't take our word for any of it. Every vote here is a matter of public record – check it yourself at theyvoteforyou.org.au or on the Australian Parliament's website.