Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I am, on behalf of the government, attempting to put a bit of clarity to the wild accusations made by the member for Ballarat. I do not mind the vigorous contributions from people opposite, but I will not be questioned on my commitment to families. The simple fact is that there was this enormous level of unemployment when those opposite were in power—one million people on the scrap heap—and that that million people represented, just as doctors bury their mistakes, the mistakes of the education and training system. You now have a set of circumstances in Australia where quite the opposite is occurring. We found some fundamental problems with the way our education and training system was geared.

Getting onto the MaxiTRANS matter: nobody who is a skilled worker, a tradesperson, has been sacked by this company, by their own admission. I have not seen a press release, but I have certainly seen the reports in the Age newspaper. I think there are some unfortunate points that the Age tries to make in this article, but it suits the purpose of the member for Ballarat in this argument today. MaxiTRANS have, however, laid off some non-skilled or semiskilled people only. The member for Ballarat in her contribution made the point that many of those were hired by labour hire firms—that they are in fact casuals. They are not the skilled people that are needed by this business to grow this business, to create even more than the 577 jobs which exist in the Ballarat region through MaxiTRANS’s effort. Is this right? Is a labour hire firm involved in this? If so, these people are employed by the labour hire firm, not by MaxiTRANS direct.

This sounds awfully like the example the member for Ballarat gave last year, and she mentioned it again today. The eight apprentices who were put to one side were not fully qualified tradespeople, who MaxiTRANS sought and who, by the member for Ballarat’s own endorsement in this place just moments ago, were needed to grow the business, to get MaxiTRANS working and working strong; they were in fact apprentices. According to the member for Ballarat at that time, these apprentices were sacked, but the truth was that they were employed by a group training company. They were placed in MaxiTRANS. And each one of those eight apprentices was in fact placed with other host employers.

So I am simply saying today that the member for Ballarat is on enormously thin ice of credibility when it comes down to the facts at the core of her argument. In summation, all of her assertions are plainly wrong. At the end of it, we are in this amazing circumstance of jobs looking for people, not people looking for jobs. We are also at a time when the government is spending record amounts of money when it comes to the training of young Australians, and our No. 1 priority is getting Australians trained. But we want to make sure that, for the business community of Australia, who are at the heart of every new person who is put in a position to be trained, it is not about building new buildings at TAFEs, even though we are spending more money on those sorts of things than ever before; it is about supporting the relationships in the training system that satisfy the needs and the expectations of employers, the people who trigger the process of training.

Because those opposite have not asked me a question on this for 266 days, until today, I cannot help but suspect that they really do not have too much interest in the facts when it comes to training. At the end of it, they do not want to understand what the state and territory ministers around this country are reluctantly coming around to, and that is the need to fundamentally reform a supply driven approach where the providers of training—and I am talking in particular about public training providers, and I will name them: TAFEs—dictate the terms and conditions on where, how and when training is delivered.

This sort of thing did not just happen overnight. In fact, some have suggested that, when the member for Brand’s father was the member for Fremantle and a minister in the Whitlam government, he had a lot to do with the way in which this sort of circumstance has evolved. It is worth noting that a generation ago TAFEs were demand driven, which is exactly what we want to see restored in Australia today. A generation ago, people worked for an employer as an apprentice and then, in their own time, sought and gained the technical training to back up the practical experience they got in the workplace. A generation ago, TAFEs were responding to the sort of training that was demanded of business. But since that dreadful period in Australia’s history, the Whitlam era—and, as I said, it was the member for Brand’s father who was the minister at the time and caused part of the change—the change was continued further on, when you think about the snobbish values brought in by the Australian Labor Party to the whole debate. There was a suggestion that if you do not have a university degree you are going to be a dud. You are a failure. And that is the sort of logic that has pervaded Australian society for decades and that this government is in the process of fixing.

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