Laurie Ferguson (Reid, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Consumer Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

We are talking about the percentage of GDP. An amount of $182 million of training gestures in the context of $37 billion tax cuts really puts this in context. I want to cite Heather Ridout from the Australian Industry Group:

We’ve been seeking additional incentive arrangements that encourages existing workers to upskill and younger people to achieve higher skill levels outcomes.

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This would require payment of incentives in addition to those announced in the Budget.

We are 15th in OECD R&D, just for the information of some of the other parties. That position, of course, is accompanied by the severe situation with regard to the current account deficit. However, Anna Lavelle, in the Australian Financial Review of 16 May, whilst talking about the government’s decision to put some money into venture capital—a praiseworthy action by the government—further commented:

One of the biggest threats to the industry is the growing skills shortage in science and engineering.

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But the need for a long-term strategy to attract secondary and tertiary students … and to encourage retraining and upgrading of skills … is fundamental …

The article also referred to the need for business and management skills. Hundreds of thousands of people have been turned away from the TAFE sector over the last few years. They have been balanced by virtually an equal number of people coming in as skilled workers. The government tries to paint those people concerned about this pattern as xenophobic and racist et cetera. That comes from a party which used question time yesterday to essentially denigrate Indigenous Australians and tried to make into a massive national issue the fact that one or two people might have received lighter sentences because of custodial law and totally ignored their human condition with regard to housing, dislocation and family problems. 

As I have referred to previously, training in this country is a fundamental issue. Labor in its budget alternative talks about the disappearance of TAFE fees for people in traditional trades and, importantly, in child care—an area where, despite the promise of more places, article after article has talked about the fact that there is geographic imbalance, that there are large numbers of people who are not at work using these resources at the moment and that other people cannot get access so that they will be able to work. It is a question not only of access but also of people’s ability to afford those rights.

This budget, as I have stressed throughout, is a budget which again gives higher tax assistance to those on higher incomes. The picture in Australia is very complex; it is not a uniform country. When the national unemployment rate was 5.3 per cent, we had teenagers at 15.2 per cent, Indigenous Australians at 20.3 per cent, single parents at 12 per cent, North African and Middle Eastern people—who predominate in my electorate—at 12.1 per cent, Australians with Vietnamese backgrounds at 11 per cent and recently arrived people at 10.9 per cent. The central western region of Sydney, at a time when the national unemployment rate went down by 0.1 per cent, surged by 1.4 per cent to 5.8 per cent. Whilst it might be comforting that the big end of town has significant tax relief, that does not affect broad middle Australia.

In research note No. 53, you see the disparity between electorates. In the electorate of Reid, 14.3 per cent of people depend on government cash benefits compared to 2.8 per cent of people in the electorate of Wentworth, where the alternative Treasurer resides. Similarly, 24 per cent of Wentworth residents rely on investments, contrasting with three per cent in my electorate. That is reflected in Deakin University’s Australian Unity Study, which talks about the level of contentment and happiness of electorates around this country. It was no surprise that Reid, with a poverty rate of 11 per cent and ranked 109th with regard to incomes, was amongst those with the highest level of discontent about their circumstances. It was a situation where 13,850 people were regarded as being impoverished.

Labor’s alternative to this budget stresses national skills acquisition. It talks about making sure that people gain access to TAFE colleges. It makes sure that there is more availability of child care, that child-care places are in suburbs where there is a need and that it is not just a slogan about how many places are released or how big ABC is becoming as a corporation. It looks at child-care availability in schools, where parents can drop a number of children at the same site so that people are not going around to a variety of sites to drop off children and the children can have the support of their elder brothers and sisters. If that is not available, it looks at community centres.

Labor’s alternative also talks about broadband access for education. It stresses that Australia must now decide to do something about the future. It must build the infrastructure; it must build the training; it must not rely on the short-term option of importing about 100,000 skilled migrants a year. I remember the period of the Keating government when Australia was importing 25,000 skilled migrants a year. The same people who now say it is xenophobic to oppose this are the people who then decried the level of 25,000: it was too high; there were too many coming; we were relying too much on this. Which employers are going to train people if they have the easy way out of being able to bring people in from overseas at the drop of a hat?

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