Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

You tell them. You are the government; you talk to them. You are failing. If you cannot handle it, get out and let someone else do it. It is your job to work with them. You tell them; do not ask me to do it. I am the opposition; you are the government. Take responsibility for your own actions and your own failures to work with the states. It is so boring and so tired, and everybody out there thinks it is. They are bored with the cost shifting and blame shifting that goes on between you and the state governments. Grow up and do your job. You would not survive a day in business if you took that attitude.

The second point I would like to make is how bizarre it is that I hear people talking about solving the skills crisis as though it is not a crisis—that the centrepiece of this government’s policy in solving a crisis which is current and has been around for 10 years is a program that will take 10 years to roll out. This program, six years after it was announced, will deliver at the very most 100 skilled people around the country. I am listening to speaker after speaker get up and praise themselves for doing something to solve one of the greatest problems Australia is facing at the moment, but it will take at least 10 years to roll out. What kind of centrepiece policy is that? How bizarre is it that you are all so relaxed about the fact that this country faces a chronic skills shortage but it will take you 10 years to produce any kind of result at all—100 skilled people will be delivered around the country in six years? It is estimated that in 2010 we will face a crisis of a shortage of at least 100,000 skilled people. This is the centrepiece policy? The relaxation on the government side of this House is astonishing. After all, it is not their fault; it is the state government’s fault! We have heard that day after day. There is nothing this government can do, because the state governments are standing in their way. It is just astonishing.

Nevertheless, we on this side of the House will be supporting the bill. It was part of the election platform. The government actually went to the people on this one. I cannot say the same for the industrial relations changes, obviously, but it did go to the people on this one. It was part of its campaign. In spite of the fact that we believe it is too little, far too late and that there has been extraordinary bungling of its administration, we will be supporting it.

The reason for our support of this legislation is that the issue of education and training is one of the biggest and most important issues facing this country and affecting our future growth and prosperity. Education, training, skills, knowledge, craft, competence and quality are all capacities that underpin growth not just for the nation and the economy but also for the people that the economy serves. Bills, such as this, that relate to our capacity to train people as they enter the workforce and as they retrain are all about how this country moves forward in the global environment. As new major economic powers emerge, as the massive labour forces of China and India take their place in the international market—massive numbers at relatively low pay rates and conditions and initially unskilled—we have to ask how this nation is to respond. As those massive labour forces change in nature, with their governments engaging in aggressive education programs—which they are already doing—and as the populations in those countries move up the food chain internationally, we have to ask how Australia is to respond.

Since the government has been in power for 10 years, we should probably be asking also how it has responded. We have been aware of the outside world for quite some time and we have been aware of the changes taking place in those huge developing countries for many years. I remember back in 1992, before I joined the Labor Party and at least 12 years before I entered politics, speaking at a forum about the growth of China and its impact on our workforce in the long term. I spoke of how, by 2020, people would need to reskill up to three times in their lives—many people are probably facing that need already—and said that creativity and skill would be the major drivers for growth in this country. That was back in 1992. So, if a person outside of politics who was not even a member of a political party was talking about it in 1992—and there were an awful lot of books, papers and magazine and newspaper articles about it back then—there is no excuse whatsoever for the Howard government to have ignored it and not responded.

How has the government responded? Has it tried to move us up the food chain, or has it tried to move us down? That seems a silly question, because this is Australia, the land of the fair go and the land of opportunity. It is really quite unimaginable that we would have any government trying to move any person down the food chain let alone large sectors of the population—certainly not pushing some people into a race to the bottom of the food chain, as seen with the new industrial relations system. I do acknowledge that the government is not trying to move the whole country down the food chain, just some of us—not all of us, but some of us.

When it comes to education, we really should look at this government’s record and we should look at it very hard. When it comes to education and training, our record is embarrassing at best and shocking at worst. Most notorious is the fact that we are the only country in the OECD, the only country in the developed world, that is reducing its expenditure on post-secondary education generally. Our expenditure has been falling. We are the only country in the OECD, the only country in the developed world, where that is the case. What is going on here, with this great country that is enjoying a most prosperous period? We hear every day in question time how wonderful things are, how everyone is doing so well and how prosperous we are; we have never seen such good times. What the hell is going on that, in the best of times, we are reducing our expenditure on education, against trends in the rest of the world and against massive trends in the developing world, particularly China and India, which will overtake us in terms of education in no time at all?

We should look also at our general level of skills and the measure of the number of people in the workforce that have a grade 12 equivalent qualification. Australia is really underperforming in that area. In countries like the United States and Canada and the major countries of Europe, 80 per cent or more of people between the ages of 25 and 64 have year 12 equivalent or better. In Australia, it is not 80 per cent; it is 67 per cent. This great prosperous nation that sees itself moving forward confidently into the future is leaving 33 per cent of our working population between the ages of 25 and 64 largely on the scrap heap. Maybe 10 to 20 years ago not finishing grade 12 was not such an issue, but it sure is an issue now. Unskilled jobs just are not there any more. They are moving offshore. They are heading off to those massive unskilled cheap labour forces overseas. In this day and age in Australia, if you do not have a good education or some training, you are out in the cold. Thirty-three per cent of our workforce between the ages of 25 and 64 do not have year 12 equivalent.

We have heard lately from the government lots of talk about the economy, particularly in relation to the new industrial relations laws. We heard a remarkable statement from the Prime Minister recently that ultimately the success or failure of the new Work Choices will be judged on what is good for the economy as a whole. That is one of the first times I have heard the Prime Minister suggest that perhaps it will not be good for people as individuals or even for people as a whole but that certainly it will be good for the economy.

But good for the economy must include good for all of us. Where possible, we should work unbelievably hard that it is also good for each of us—what is good in the long term for all of us and for each of us and what is needed in the short term for all of us and for each of us. That is government—not just good for the economy and good for the flow of money and the figures, but good for all of us and, if it is at all possible after incredible hard work, good for each of us. That is government. Politics, on the other hand, is about what is good for me in the short term and what is good for me in the long term. The worst side of politics is that it is also what is bad for the other side in the short term and in the long term. In the government’s approach to the skills crisis, we have very much a case of the latter.

One has to assume that the reason the government is choosing to set up a parallel system rather than work through the system that is already there—the TAFE system and the high school system—is that it really does not want to cooperate with the states because it gets too much political advantage by doing as much damage as it can to the states. By working with the states, it would no longer be able to play that political card and put politics first. Actually working with the states would be about government, not about politics—putting government first, putting people first, not its own political interests.

Playing with the nation for the government’s own political purposes and the lives of people in order to inflict damage on its opponents does, unfortunately, have collateral damage, and that is people—young Australians; young people seeking to enter the workforce; people who have found themselves sidelined because their skills are no longer relevant; people trying to retrain; and women who have been out of the workforce raising their children, women who did not have skills in the first place but who are desperately trying to find a way back into the workforce and are looking for the training opportunities to do so.

My electorate of Parramatta does not have a TAFE college, but it is surrounded by four struggling, underresourced institutions that are so overdue for real respect and renewal that I find it unimaginable that we are talking about setting up a parallel system when we have such a fabulously effective and well regarded system that is struggling and is well overdue for renewal. The TAFE institutions are incredibly important, because those unskilled jobs just do not exist anymore in the way they used to. They were originally incredibly important for the trades, but now they are also important for the services sector—for hairdressers and nurses. People from all sorts of professions now do their training at TAFE. There are also high schools in my electorate that want to provide flexibility for their students to mix high school with trade qualifications and even one that desperately wants to specialise in order to attract more students.

We often hear this government whingeing about duplication—usually whingeing about how badly the state does it and how they would love to be better if only they did not have those nasty states getting in their way and stopping them from doing a good job—yet now we see them setting up a parallel system at great taxpayers’ expense. They do not dislike duplication; they actually love duplication because it allows them to bag the states at every opportunity, to blame somebody else, to be the opposition if they possibly can and to deflect attention from their own failures and their own choices. Let us be very clear about it: the government is very good at claiming that this or that is a state responsibility—and I do know about the Constitution—but, in practice in this country, both state and federal governments are involved in education, health and social services, and it is their duty to work together to get the best result.

We will be supporting the bill because, in the long run, it will provide some quite important opportunities for a relatively small number of people. In my electorate, the Parramatta Catholic Education Office has been awarded one of the tenders. It will be training up to 200 people within a few years. This will provide extremely important opportunities for those couple of hundred people, and it will be extremely important for the Catholic Education Office, which does such an extraordinary job in my electorate. I wish the Parramatta Catholic Education Office well in developing its project and getting it up and running. It is an extraordinary organisation, and I know that it will do an incredible job in providing those opportunities for up to 200 skilled people. Of course we do need many more skilled people than that in Western Sydney, which that technical college will service, and we need many more than that in my electorate of Parramatta alone.

Let us look at this program in a little more detail. There will be 25 technical colleges which will not produce their first qualified tradesperson until 2010, at the earliest. The Australian Industry Group estimates that, by then, we will need at least 100,000 skilled workers, but by that stage the technical colleges that are up and running will only be able to provide 100. They will be 199,900 short in 2010 but 100 better off.

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