Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased today to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006. In doing so, I would like to cite a number of examples and, in the time permitted to me before question time, raise some issues relating to the technical college in my area, Perth South. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Act 2005, which is the current act, to reallocate funding from 2008-09—from the out years, in other words—to 2006-07 and to insert a new provision in the current act to enable the minister to redistribute program funds between particular years by regulation instead of by legislative amendment. I emphasise this point, because that is the crux of this bill: it allows the minister to redistribute these funds by regulation rather than by legislative instrument. I will come to that a little later, because it has some implications.

We know that before the last federal election, in response to the call from industry and the community in general, the Prime Minister made a commitment to the Australian people to develop 24 new Australian technical colleges. The reason for him wanting the Commonwealth to produce 24 Australian technical colleges was that the states had failed in their duty of skilling the young workforce and the workforce in general. In fact, there was a huge cry about the fact that Australia’s skill needs were not being met. The opposition will tell you: ‘Shock, horror! This government hasn’t addressed it.’ When I was elected to this parliament as the member for Swan in 1996, apprenticeship numbers left by the previous Hawke-Keating government were approximately 105,000 apprenticeships per year. Currently it stands at close to 500,000. So that is the difference. The Australian Labor Party left the young of this country without a proper apprenticeship commitment. There were only approximately 105,000 apprenticeships being undertaken in those days and now we are looking at almost half a million. That is the difference between us and them in terms of real commitment.

What was the Labor Party’s alternative in the days that they were in government and being led by such people as the member for Hotham, Mr Simon Crean? It was to create this mickey mouse training initiative called Working Nation. We all remember Bill Hunter and Working Nation, don’t we? There he stood on the edge of oil rigs and other such things saying, ‘Here we are: we’ve produced job ready people.’ Those people who were job ready were doing training courses that lasted three months.

There are some brick houses around Perth that I tend to suggest people would want to have a close look at because they were built by these people who did three-month courses, and I would want to be a little bit careful about the future stability of these houses. This was not proper apprenticeship training and skills training; this was a mickey mouse scheme to get people off the unemployment statistics. They were creating jobs. We know that the statistics say that when the Labor Party created their Working Nation system it cost about $60,000 to produce a job. You may as well have paid them $60,000 rather than spend $60,000 trying to concoct jobs that were not really there. It was not proper training.

So the Australian government has committed itself to a proper skills training regime with these 24 Australian technical colleges. The 24 Australian technical colleges will concentrate on skills, not alternative type arrangements such as we cop in the TAFEs now—aromatherapy, flower arranging and transcendental meditation courses. That is the qualification you will end up with if you come out of one of these courses now, which you cannot use and you cannot transport. It is just a time-filling arrangement.

Currently the states have dropped the ball. If anybody is guilty in this whole argument, it is the states, who have dropped the ball. As a result of the states having dropped the ball on training in their TAFEs, the federal government has had to fill the vacuum. The 24 Australian technical colleges will fill this vacuum in training. But there is a big impediment to this—and the member for Jagajaga said recently it is going slow. Of course it is going slow. We know why it is going slow. It is because all around Australia the state Labor governments are doing their best to slow down these colleges. It is unbelievable.

One of these colleges—the Perth South technical college—has been assigned to my region, and the member for Hasluck and I were very pleased on 1 May this year to open it with Minister Hardgrave, the Minister for Vocational and Technical Education. One of the school principals came up to me and said, ‘Don, just by the way, the Perth district south office has said to us that we’ve got to find a way to slow these technical colleges down,’ because they do not support them. Then Ken Ticehurst, the member for Dobell, told me that the technical college in his region is suffering the same fate. The New South Wales government is trying to slow down the development and the roll-out of the technical college in his area. So no wonder there are only four currently up and running at the moment when you have the imposition of the state governments, for partisan political reasons, trying to slow down the roll-out of these colleges.

As I said, the Perth South region, which the member for Hasluck and I represent, has been lucky enough to have a technical college—there was a great submission from the Stirling Skills Centre. That technical college will concentrate on the automotive industries, with a campus to be located in the Maddington-Gosnells area, and on the construction industries, with a campus which will be located around Armadale, in my area. The mayors of the cities and the industries surrounding these regions are excited about the prospect of providing young year 11 and 12 students with real skills training in the automotive and the construction areas. We are also very pleased.

I am pleased to see the member for Brand here. The member for Brand, when the Kwinana-Rockingham consortium tried to put together their bid, did not support it at all. In fact, one of the reasons why they do not have one is his lack of support for that technical college in the Rockingham-Kwinana region. We know that this consortium took Minister Hardgrave down and flew him over the area, because the industrial strip in the Kwinana region is calling out for a technical college in that area and can satisfy the requirements for it. But did the member for Brand actively get in and support this? No. That is one of the reasons we won our very good application for the technical college in the Perth South region.

There is also a college that has been assigned to the Pilbara. As a result, the young people of the Pilbara region, in the north-west, where there is an enormous amount of industry such as oil and mining, deserve the opportunity in year 11 and 12 at school to be skilled in the traditional trades: not the alternative skills that might be learnt—tarot card reading and this sort of stuff—but metal skills, fitting and turning, automotive skills, electrical skills and other engineering skills. But no. Again the state authorities helped to slow this Pilbara bid down. At the Minerals Council dinner the other evening, the Prime Minister announced that the Pilbara bid is up and running due to the support of the industry, and some of the issues that the industry has outlined are being addressed.

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