Dick Adams (Lyons, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

They are paper figures, Parliamentary Secretary. Evan Thornley recently told us on the ABC radio:

If you add up the total of unemployment, disability and sole-parent benefits together, there are more people now than when the official unemployment rate was much higher. This, despite a decade of boom. It works like this: We used to have about a million unemployed and about 100,000 disability pensions. Now we’ve got half a million unemployed and 600,000 disability pensions. We’ve just rearranged the deckchairs, and declared victory. That’s why we still have one in six children growing up in a jobless household. … The truth is we have about two million people who have less work than they want.

Everyone who is on a benefit is quite aware of this. They wonder how they have been written off. Many of them would like to access much more retraining and have more opportunities but cannot afford to even try. He goes on to say that, although we have a skills shortage, there are employers everywhere who say they cannot fill their job vacancies, and therefore it is possible to have real unemployment and skill shortages running together:

Because the skill levels and geographic locations of the unemployed don’t match the jobs available. We have unemployed timber workers, but a shortage of mining engineers. We have unemployed textile workers, but a shortage of bricklayers. We have large pools of unemployed people living in our urban fringes, and shortages of fruit pickers in the Riverina.

That particular gentleman explained that, while demand for labour and skills can change quite quickly, the supply of people and the skills they have to meet new demands can only change with long lead periods. To skill people up takes time. He continued:

That’s why you try to equip your workforce with a large range of transferable skills, and think about how you’ll develop your regions.

That is what we should be doing. That is why I believe that we have to put training in the areas where the skills are likely to be needed. By using the regional high schools and having TAFE annexes, it will be possible to keep our young people up to date with future jobs of the region and also have the flexibility to upskill older workers whose jobs are changing or when new ones are becoming available that require a whole new training component.

Evan believes that we are not investing highly enough in the skilled workforce, nor are we competitive in helping what innovative local industries we do have to build up for export. There are few incentives and few avenues to find help to develop products. Just look at what happened with the removal of the renewable energy targets. Look at what is happening there, and that is going to impact on my state of Tasmania, where we might lose a factory in the future. Most of our research in the private sector is going offshore, and what we do ourselves is squeezed into our universities and places like CSIRO and maybe some CRCs, which manage to do a bit around their so called ‘core’ activities.

Evan is right: we cannot compete with the likes of the US. Our scale is all wrong. We have to be more clever and niche orientated with the things we do well now or could do well given the skills and incentives. This is what Labor wants to assist in and what we think we have the answers for. We have three commentators here who believe that we must change direction as far as training and innovation goes. To see that is really not rocket science, yet the minister has very little idea about how to deal with educating and skilling up our young people, let alone reskilling those who have been pushed out of the system by technology and are languishing in one of our unimpressive unemployment benefit schemes for the lack of any other form of subsistence. I am not impressed with these so called new colleges, as they do not offer anything different. Nor do they seem to allow any school links or provide any specialist training that does not cost the student an arm or a couple of legs.

You only have to look at the disasters in the rural sector. A recent article in the Australian Financial Review bemoaned the fact that it was ‘the end of the road for the family farm’, as they were ‘too small, too inefficient and not viable’, and it was happening across Australia. Farm workers are being laid off and, because they have had little access to training in the past and the wages have been low, no new ideas have been filtering in to boost changes to farming. Farmers are growing older and there is no-one coming to replace them. Our farming sector is likely to give up, and our farm produce will come from offshore. It needs a whole new mindset to change this and a whole new approach to training so that there is publicly available training to deal with shortages, not just today but planned for the future, 10 and 20 years down the track. We need training that means something, which can be developed on an ongoing basis, not just a static qualification which you get at the end of your schooling. This cannot be fixed with single, highly specific courses as, by the time the student has finished, some of it might be out of date.

I am not happy with this bill. I feel that the funds taken to set up a whole new sector would be far better employed in using the infrastructure that is there now and by boosting the ability to continue to add to courses, to research the needs of industry and the private sector generally and to come up with courses in conjunction with enterprises, to ensure we are in front with training and that employers value their employees because they are the key to the growth of their enterprise or industry. There is a danger here that, if we do not provide training that is relevant and inclusive to allow all our population to enter the workforce in the areas where they have the greatest chance of succeeding, we will be allowing in more and more migrants. I saw last weekend in an article in the Daily Telegraph that this government is planning to bring in 97,000 skilled migrants to work in businesses where it is claimed there are not enough local skilled workers to fill the vacancies—yet we are turning our own youngsters away from training institutions. Three hundred thousand have been turned away from TAFE since 1997, over 14,979 qualified students were refused a university place in 2006 because of the lack of funding and 4,000 fewer new apprentices were in training at the end of last year. More than 33,000 of those who start one of the new apprenticeships quit before— (Time expired)

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