Daryl Melham (Banks, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The appropriation bills which are before the Main Committee today should be straightforward—dealing with annual operating costs of government. Yet when we consider just how the money is being divided up—with the government continuing to waste money on advertising itself when there are people who are struggling to survive—one must question exactly where and how money is appropriated.

Appropriation Bill (No. 3) 2005-2006 deals with funding for departments and agencies, such as $167.1 million for the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations. This is going toward industrial relations laws and Job Network—and what an awful job the government has done in these two areas. Appropriation Bill (No. 4) 2005-2006 deals with the tied grants to the states, in addition to storing antivirals, the Afghanistan task force, airport security and more industrial relations. While I hold some reservations about the efficacy of one or two of these allocations, there is a need for action, although belated, in the others.

What I wish to focus on today is where the money is not going and how the government is short-changing Australians for the future. Specifically, I refer to the second reading amendment, in the name of the member for Melbourne, which seeks that the government reverse the reduction in public education and training investment and notes that the government’s extreme industrial relations laws will lower wages and conditions for many workers and do nothing to enhance productivity or economic growth.

This government has lost the plot when it comes to skills investment in people in this country. At a time when unemployment has increased and employers are desperate for skilled workers this government refuses to act sensibly on the skills crisis. What the government has done is increase the numbers of professional and skilled immigrants by approximately the same number as the shortfall in successful applications to TAFE. While in some quarters this may be viewed as a solution simply because it brings the required skills into Australia, it is a quick fix. For every skilled worker brought into Australia, the government has turned one away from TAFE. Do not get me wrong—I understand and accept the need for skilled immigrants but this short-term solution ignores the real problem. Australia’s skills crisis has been caused by 10 long years of government incompetence and inadequate funding of education and training.

The mining industry has recorded a 35 per cent increase in job vacancies over the past year while for the construction industry there has been a 36 per cent increase. In the electricity, gas and water supply industries there has been a massive 150 per cent increase. What does this government do? It brings those people in from overseas while many Australians who would like to work full time, rather than work in two or three part-time jobs, are unable to gain entry into TAFE. The Productivity Commission’s Report on government services 2006 found that government recurrent expenditure on vocational education and training totalled $3.9 billion in 2004—a real decrease of 3.1 per cent from 2003. The same report found that real government recurrent spending in the VET sector, per person aged 15 to 64 years, in 2004 dollars was $284.90. In 2000, this figure was $292.20.

The investment in VET focuses on ensuring that industry has a highly skilled workforce to support strong performance in the global economy. It also should strengthen communities and regions economically and socially through learning and employment. Yet this government persists in underfunding the skilling of our population. Surely it takes no imagination to understand that the failure to invest in skills is hurting job seekers and hurting business. There can be no argument that there are insufficient people to fill job vacancies. On the other hand there are over 1.7 million Australians who are either officially unemployed or not reflected in the unemployment figures. There are another 600,000 who are in part-time work but want more work than they can get. The government refuses to invest in improving the skills of these people yet tens of thousands of people are turned away from TAFE each year.

In the Productivity Commission report I referred to earlier, education preface table B.5 shows that 2.6 million people aged 15 to 64 applied to enrol in an educational institution in 2004 and, of those, 91.8 per cent were actually studying in 2004, 5.4 per cent deferred study and 2.8 per cent were unable to gain placement. On my calculations that is in excess of 70,000 people who were unable to gain a place at TAFE or another higher educational institution. These are unacceptable figures—totally unacceptable. The problem is exacerbated by the crisis in the noncompletion of apprenticeships. Between 25 and 30 per cent of all people who start apprenticeships do not complete them. Those are wasted skills that this nation is missing out on.

Labor has announced its policy of providing completion bonuses to students undertaking those courses to encourage them to stay on and complete their studies. This is a genuine incentive so that those people who start out on this opportunity to create a career in a trade, and complete it, will get a financial reward from the government when they do. Last year, the government introduced the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005. This represented the government’s inadequate attempt to address the major skills shortages faced by our community today. It is about time the government understood that investment in Australia in a number of key sectors is currently being held back because of the major skills shortages that exist in the Australian economy. What is the government’s solution? The government’s solution was that bill.

I am of the view that the Commonwealth should cooperate with the state and territory governments on the all-important issue of apprenticeship training. Instead of that, the government is duplicating existing skilling structures. The government has effectively decided to avoid cooperation and coordination. It is putting taxpayers’ money into bricks and mortar rather than the training of young Australians. Perhaps it is about time some members of the government got out and talked to some of the companies about their immediate demands to overcome the skills shortages which are currently holding back investment in Australia, undermining job creation, reducing exports and reducing the size of a potential economic cake that all Australians should benefit from.

I want to remind the chamber of Labor’s commitments at the last election. The commitments were immediate. They were about creating some 36,000 new vocational education and training places each year and trying to assist young people to stay at school to commence apprenticeships. To address the skills shortage, Labor offered to pay TAFE fees for secondary students who wanted to get a vocational qualification—that is, those who would commence an apprenticeship at school and partly complete it. When they finished school they would be not only job ready but also attractive to employers, because part of their apprenticeship—the initial year—would have been completed at school. They would also have completed, appropriately, years 11 and 12.

Public investment in our universities and TAFEs has fallen eight per cent since 1995. The OECD average is a 38 per cent increase. Australia was the only developed country to reduce its investment. The OECD released its Education at a glance: OECD indicators 2005 report early in 2006. One of the performance indicators measured by the report is the amount of tertiary education funding coming from private sources. In Australia this has increased to more than 50 per cent. The report notes on page 4 of the executive summary that this increase can be indicative of a decline in the spending on public education as a percentage of GDP. The report also notes that in some countries tertiary institutions are now relying more heavily on private sources of funding, such as fees, than they did in the 1990s. With Mexico, Portugal, the Slovak Republic, Turkey and the United Kingdom, private contribution in Australia rose by more than five percentage points from 1995 to 2002.

There is a case for some private funding within the tertiary sector, but Australia is increasingly dependent on this form of education. The premise is unacceptable, both in terms of public policy and in terms of equity. Governments have a responsibility to ensure that citizens are able to access publicly funded education if they want to go beyond secondary study, yet this government has actually decreased its recurrent expenditure on training and education. Even if the equity argument falls on the deaf ears of the government, then surely an economic argument must make sense. Australia’s productivity and economic performance can surely only improve with skilled workers in trades and industry. This government, through its extreme industrial relations changes, will depress wages and conditions and will do nothing to increase productivity and participation.

The government’s approach is to make small changes at the margins and not to confront the real barriers to training in Australia. The truth is that industry wants these tradespeople now. All the government can say is, ‘We have the solution: we are going to increase skilled migration.’ That is unacceptable. We have to have trained Australians now to fill these skill vacancies. We have to focus on real skills development and get incentives in place to get people into meaningful, secure jobs. If we are to increase productivity in Australia and skill the Australian workforce, we need to invest in our own nation and our own people. We need to create opportunities. From creating opportunities from our citizens, we get growth, we get productivity increases and we lay a solid foundation for the future.

This government is about to celebrate 10 years in office. In my opinion, there is not a lot to celebrate. There are a lot of superficial arguments about the successes that have been achieved by this government but, when one goes to the substance and the detail, one sees that there are few successes, particularly in this area. You cannot turn around after 10 years and keep saying, ‘Blame the Hawke or the Keating Labor governments.’ After 10 years in office, we need to see the substance from this government. We are not getting substance; we are getting rhetoric. We are getting rhetoric that is ideologically driven but outcomes that are questionable. I think history, when it passes judgment on this government, will be very savage, because the truth is that they promise big but achieve little. That is the history in this area.

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