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

The member for Blaxland says it is hideous. The member for Blaxland is right. The ordinary working men and women of Australia are far more represented by people on this side than by those on the other side, who pretend to be the backers of the workers of Australia but in fact have left them in a ditch. If they are not in organised labour—in other words, about 85 or 90 per cent of Australians—they are not interested in them. If they are not in an organised union structure, they are not interested in them, because that is how those opposite get here. People on this side are listening to the real job creators and understanding the ambition of parents and indeed the students, and we are now seeing record numbers of people taking up a training opportunity.

If those opposite were really serious, they would denounce those Whitlam era circumstances that began the change and that were continued on by the Dawkins reforms that made every corner TAFE a university and created a circumstance which delivered a great deal of reinforcement to the idea of ‘Get a degree or you are a dud’. And then of course the member for Brand himself, in 1993, when he was part of a government that crashed the economy, really did bring home and emphasise the point I continue to make: 30,000 people dropped out of the training system in one year as employers of Australia took their lead from the government of the day and saw the employment of apprentices as a cost their business could not justify, and we lost the benefit of 30,000 people taking on training.

That is the sort of circumstance that is a background to any of the legitimate claims that may have been the minor part of the short contribution from the member for Ballarat: the suggestion that in fact there might be unemployment issues that are alive—and I will take her word for it—in her electorate amongst the young people of Ballarat. This is at a time when you go and talk to people in business around Australia and they are saying: ‘Send me a person. Send me a hot body with two hands who wants to actually work hard at the business of learning a trade.’ That is what businesses in Australia in places like the Pilbara and in the mining regions of Queensland are saying. That is why companies like Thiess are paying 18-year-olds $85,000 a year to keep them in the mines as apprentices in certain trades—to keep those kids there so they are not sucked out to some other opportunity.

We are in an amazing employment market at the moment. Companies like Maxi-TRANS—which the member for Ballarat is now claiming, after I have drawn it to her attention, that she was not trying to attack—an employer of 577 people, has an enormous commitment to training and understands far more about it than the member for Ballarat does from her cursory once-a-year look at the subject.

We have to continue the reforms we are trying to effect. I ask members opposite from the state of New South Wales to put some pressure on their state government to deliver on the COAG reforms that the Premier, Mr Iemma—if there is a dilemma, think of Morris Iemma; it is a great catchcry—has signed up to to bring about school based apprenticeships and a change to licensing regimes—which are basically set in place because of a lack of trust in the training that TAFE delivers. Why don’t you demand of the New South Wales government that it gives training opportunities for school based apprenticeships to young people in New South Wales? What is it about the state of New South Wales and, indeed, the state of Western Australia that fears a set of circumstances relating to school based apprenticeships when states like Queensland and Victoria—

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