Kim Beazley (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

I agree very strongly with the action of my colleague the member for Watson in moving to disallow these migration amendment regulations. I want to assure the government that we will campaign on this between now and the next election. I can assure them that after the next election we will remove this blot on the Australian training agenda.

We had a lecture from the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs on the fact that the Labor Party is supported by the trade union movement and receives funds from the trade union movement. I suppose if I want to be as cheap as him I could point out that he has been an official of the Liberal Party for many years and he has been scooping up loot from the business community. Therefore, I would suspect that his views are in some way or another formed by a desire to suppress trade unions not on behalf of the nation but on behalf of the business community—but I would not make that point because that would devalue this debate and bring me down to the very low level at which the parliamentary secretary operates. Nor would I make the point that, while he lectured the Labor Party for having received the odd contribution from the trade union movement, he and his colleagues on that side of the House connived recently, taking $55 million from the Australian taxpayer to advertise their industrial relations legislation, and that took the government to $1 billion being spent on advertising since it has been in office.

I do not think any other political party in this country has a record of having taken $1 billion from the Australian taxpayer to give to advertisers—but I would not make that point either. I simply mention these points because the whole tone of the debate was so grossly lowered by the parliamentary secretary.

Therefore, I will now get on to the more serious argument related to where this stands in the record of the Howard government, which has after 10 years in office presided over the development of a chronic skills crisis in this country. It is not a crisis that has arisen today or that arose yesterday; it is a crisis which has in fact been in place over this decade. We have seen every single area of traditional trade over that 10-year period report a shortage in at least eight of those 10 years, some of them in 10 out of those 10 years. This has been because it has covered with its novelties its so-called modern apprenticeship training system. Many of those novelties, as the studies of this modern apprenticeship training system show as the consumers of it are consulted, basically hide an absence of training behind a wage subsidy for a variety of businesses. The government has used the numbers in that—and the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs was doing the same thing again here today—to conceal the collapse of traditional trades beneath that facade.

It is like so much of what the Howard government do. Wherever you want to be, there is the spin out there—the magnificent spin, the bright, shining arguments—but, underneath it, the reality of a drossy administrative and policy outcome performance. In no area has this been more glaring than in the area of skills. So what do they do to cover it? They decide that what they will do is not to train young Australians, even though the areas where they are going to run these apprenticeships are chronic in their youth unemployment. They are not going to train young Australians—they do not want to pay them the money. They believe the apprentices are paid too much. They do not want to pay them the money, but they want the work out of them, so there is one way to get the work out of them, and that is to get workers in from somewhere else.

The opportunity arises now. This is why it is in here now. It was not here nine years ago, eight years ago, seven years ago, six years ago or five years ago. Why is it here now? There has been a trade shortage right through that period of time. It is here now because it dovetails with your industrial relations legislation. That is why. You are placing yourself in a position now where you can effectively deny ordinary Australian workers—in this case, young Australians—a capacity to effectively deal with you because you are at last able to bring in a counterpart who will work for nothing or who will work for what are very low apprenticeship wages but which, compared with what they would get in their country of origin, look quite generous. That is just cynicism—sheer, blatant, naked cynicism. You have the opportunity arising now.

There are biblical stories that deal with this. Young people who ask for bread and are given by their fathers a stone. That is what you represent. There are biblical stories especially for you. You have spent your entire life, Parliamentary Secretary, in politics, wandering around this country acting on behalf of a narrow elite to whom you have reported and for whom you have been a faithful servant. As far as we are concerned, we know you and we know how to deal with you.

In this period of time, 300,000 young Australians have been turned away from TAFE. The minister gets up here and says: ‘There’re out there and we’ve been advertising like blazes and there are just no Australians who want to take advantage—none of them. That’s why we’ve got to do something about it now.’ There were 300,000 young Australians turned away from TAFE. In the same time, they have imported 270,000 extra skilled migrants. So they do have form in this regard. They have turned away 300,000. I will tell you why they have turned them away, Mr Deputy Speaker. I negotiated, when I was Minister for Employment, Education and Training, with John Fahey, who was then the counterpart in the New South Wales state government, the creation of the Australian National Training Authority. I promised on behalf of the Commonwealth 10 years of a one per cent per annum real betterment—that is on top of the adjustments you normally make to deal with the rate of inflation—in return for which the states would maintain real effort, with a hardline set of measures to ensure that they did.

What this government did when it came to office was to collapse it, three years into operation. Of course, when you collapse it at the national level and no longer keep your promises, you liberate the states from keeping theirs. This was a scheme which, if it had been implemented fully—and by now it would have gone about three years past its 10 years—we would not be standing here talking about skills shortages in this country.

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