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

In this dislocated debate, with the few minutes I have left on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006, I would like to say three brief things. One is that these 24 Australian technical colleges will go a long way to upskilling the young people of Australia. They will provide them with real, traditional trade skills to go out and earn a good living in the industry and the community that they live in, rather than something fatuous. For example, the current TAFE system is so bureaucratised that teachers in the local TAFEs in my area tell me that there are more teachers and more administrators in the TAFEs than there are students. They tell me that the bureaucracy—that is, the administration—are unbelievable, in that not only do they get paid exorbitant wages and generally end up with a car to go with it but they are unproductive in turning out meaningful trades and skills through the TAFEs. That is why the Australian federal government have had to take over this area. That is why we have had to show leadership in this area.

What are the states doing? They are trying to stymie it by slowing it down. One of the ways they tried to slow it down in my state of Western Australia—and, I know, in other states like New South Wales and the Northern Territory as well—is that they fought against the Australian technical colleges providing AWAs as a means of providing job prospects. This held up the whole arrangement for some time. Trying to enforce that, plus the unions making it difficult for these young year 11 and year 12 students to do work experience on construction sites, has held it up. So, when the Labor Party say that there are only four rolled out so far, we are rolling them out in the face of opposition from the state and territory Labor governments, because they do not want to be shown up in this area of training.

I conclude, in the few seconds I have left, by saying that providing flexible funding to allow these colleges to be brought forward and paid for in a timely way would be not only good for the young people of Australia by providing training and apprenticeships but good for Australian industry as well. I endorse the bill.

Debate interrupted.

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