Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006. I had long calls during the last election from employers in my area that with the labour shortages that we are currently experiencing—we have the lowest unemployment rate in Australia in 30 years—employers are finding it hard to get employees, let alone skilled employees. We really need to step up our efforts in this direction and to get our unemployed skilled up to meet the needs of the directions of future Australian industries.

In my area the rock eisteddfods are incredibly popular, and I know that at any school you go to they have so many talented youngsters, but somehow the sciences, the trades and the technical professions need to capture that same amount of interest and enthusiasm and we need to direct young Australians into those areas, where the jobs are, rather than into entertainment. It is not that entertainment is not a great career; we just do not need more singers but need more tradespeople.

The amendment moved by the opposition really underestimates the effect of this bill and goes on with a lot of political point scoring which adds no value to the face of the bill. At the end of the day, the opposition will be voting for this. They realise that it is a good bill and that it needs to be supported in the face of state Labor governments such as the New South Wales Labor government’s ideological opposition to school based New Apprenticeships. It refuses to enhance, direct or incentivise its educational trainers, who have some outstanding curriculums to offer, to be a part of the bids that came forward to this government.

The states just cannot get across the industrial relations aspects of the bids, where we required these technical colleges to get the very best of trainers from industry. If you have to pay people higher wages on an AWA to give them what they are worth, then that is what you must do. If you find that a teacher is not performing, that they are not bringing students up to speed in a reasonable amount of time, then you have to have the flexibility to dispense with that teacher’s services and take on someone who will get those students up to speed. That flies totally in the face of the awards and the lock-down of the TAFE industrial system, and there is significant opposition within the New South Wales government to TAFE’s involvement. Every time it came to the crunch in areas like Lismore-Ballina, Queanbeyan and Dubbo, and even in my local area of Penrith—certainly in the Campbelltown area, where TAFE was a part of the bid—it was just so hard to get them over the last line of contracting the teachers with those types of technical skills who would work in the technical colleges.

In the end, the Catholic Education Office in Parramatta—and I am delighted to see the member for Parramatta here—was successful in attaining the Sydney technical college, and they will roll out a number of places. I think it is about 150-odd places across Sydney, particularly in Western Sydney. They have chosen the Blacktown area to establish their campus. It is a fairly central location. I figure that you could have at least two or three other technical colleges in Western Sydney. We have a large trades area—a large family tradition of trades—and a lot of young people interested in trades but who are lacking the opportunity.

The New South Wales government have not grasped the school based apprenticeships by the horns. They have not done much with TAFE incentives for employers. They make it very difficult for employers to take on apprentices. They have not taken on policies such as weighting government contracts so that employers with high numbers of apprentices have an advantage over employers with no apprentices in successfully winning government tenders. That is a very basic policy the New South Wales government could adopt to really drive apprenticeship take-up amongst employers.

They could back it up with school based apprenticeships, where kids start after year 10 to gain recognisable certificate level III skills in their trade during their school time and they can use their holidays and spare time working in the industry to gain on-the-job training so that by the time they leave in year 12 they have one or two years of their apprenticeship under their belt. Then the second- or third-year wage of an apprenticeship is not such a disadvantage compared to the pay of some of their friends who are possibly on welfare or in jobs which seem to pay, after expenses, a bit more than the poor old first-year apprentice gets. So there are a number of things that the New South Wales state government could have done.

As it was, a lot of the New South Wales ATCs went the way of the private sector, such as to the Catholic Education Office. There were good bids from my area, and there is a particular one I am still pursuing because I really think Penrith is a fantastic area to have a technical college in. We have a very strong interest in the trades, we have a significant number of young people and this is really where a lot of our young people want to head. They can get great paying jobs and make a significant contribution to their future financial security and have a very prosperous old age. My bid was backed by the Hunter—

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