Judi Moylan (Pearce, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006, and I have listened to some of the debate in this place this morning. I particularly appreciated the contribution of the member for Riverina, and my comments follow along a similar line. If ever we needed flexibility in meeting Australia’s skills needs it is now, and I really welcome the government’s responsiveness to contributing to meeting those needs. A view in the community that I believe has prevailed for many years is that every student must reach university to succeed. This attitude has caused many young people to lose heart, as they have felt other abilities and skills are not valued, and they are defeated before they even start. This has been a real tragedy for Australia. It is beyond time that we acknowledge the technical skills that go hand in hand with the academic abilities to create valuable and crucial synergies in areas of science, engineering and medicine, to name a few. I think my colleague the member for Lyons mentioned innovation and the very important contribution that makes.

Yesterday I had the privilege of meeting Professor Ian Frazer, the recent winner of the Nobel prize for his work in finding a cure for ulcers. As I prepared this speech, I could not help but reflect on where Professor Frazer would be without his lab technicians and the people who design and manufacture the lab equipment. I think he would be the first to recognise and acknowledge that the team around him has allowed him to have such great success in this groundbreaking medical work which improves the quality of life for many people who suffer from stomach ulcers. Indeed, where would a heart surgeon or aeronautical engineer be without the designers and the welders? The engineers and the architects who design our buildings or our homes would be unlikely to see projects come to fruition without the window manufacturers, the concrete batchers, the bricklayers, the carpenters and the electricians, all of whose skills ensure an end product.

We sometimes do not give a lot of weight to this—or we have not in the past. I have been very pleased to see our ministers, particularly Brendan Nelson, raise the national debate on this to a very high level. We have some amazing young people who have such a lot to contribute but who feel so defeated by our country, which seems to place a disproportionate value on economic, legal, science and other academic qualifications. I do not for one moment want to suggest that we should not value and reward these disciplines, but it did get to a stage when there was too much emphasis on academic achievements and insufficient on creative and technical skills, and I am very pleased to see this being redressed.

I am a great supporter of university education. We have to encourage the full development of our people and their skills and abilities. In fact, for 10 years I worked with the Midland community, which is not technically in my electorate. It is now in the electorate of my very good colleague the member for Hasluck, but it services much of the hinterland, which is in my electorate. With the local community, we fought very hard to achieve university places in the eastern corridor. If you look at a map of Western Australia which shows where the institutes of higher learning are, you will see they are mostly located in the northern coastal or southern coastal strips and in the western suburbs. We have very little to offer in terms of a university-level education in the eastern region. I compliment the incredible work of people like Eric Lumsden, who headed a community committee to drive the establishment of that university. Brendan Nelson, again, was responsive and provided 25 places for Midland.

I went along to the opening day. Many of the students who actually came from the electorate of Pearce, the hinterland, expressed to me that they would never have had an opportunity, because of travel restrictions and family situations, to attend a university had it not been for these places, which were administered by Curtin University, being made available in the region. They were people doing early childhood development courses and suchlike—important work at that higher level. So I do not for one minute want to suggest that I am not supportive of university; I am.

It is an extraordinary achievement that this government has managed to highlight and have debated the value of technical education and been prepared to fund Australian technical colleges, giving those in our community an opportunity to reach their potential in other areas, thus making an important contribution to the skills base of our nation. As I said, I am grateful for the early work of Minister Nelson, who raised this issue nationally and worked so hard to draw attention to the inequities of funding between university and technical education. Minister Nelson visited the Swan View High School in my electorate and saw first-hand the value of recognising and developing the individual abilities of students, whether they be academic, creative or technical. The federal government, along with the state government, provided funding for a manual arts centre there. It was a joint effort. There was a jewellery design and manufacturing course and workshop available at that school. It also had a strong emphasis on engineering and strong collaboration between the academics from the universities and technical development so that young people could either stream into the serious academic side or stream into the design or manufacturing side of engineering skills.

I met two young people who had been students at the school and became jewellery designers. They worked in New York, I think, with one of the top jewellers and then later came back to Perth and took up positions with one of Perth’s leading jewellers. It was a great inspiration to see how thrilled these young people were to have found a niche where they excelled and where they knew their abilities were valued. I think it is enormously important that we do speak up more about how valuable these skills are, whether they are in engineering or other areas of design or technical skills. We need to acknowledge that.

I recently attended a graduation of some young people who were part of a pilot program to attract more young people into the trades and the automotive industry. Over the years in which we have seen the decline of technical education, there has been a view from parents that they do not want their kids to go into what used to be known as the ‘dirty trades’. The automotive industry has changed so much these days. It is a very highly sophisticated area and, again, there is a path for many different skills—from the design side to the actual mechanical side. The Motor Trade Association of Western Australia did a very good job in going around to schools, engaging with parents and students and helping them to see what opportunities were available in the modern automotive industry. I attended the graduation of these young people and, again, it was terrific to see the enthusiasm they had for the areas they had worked in. As a result of that pilot program, nearly all of them had been placed in apprenticeships in the domestic automotive industry, the heavy equipment industry or in shipping and boating, which is big in Western Australia. The opportunities are boundless in Western Australia, whether they are in domestic automotives, heavy equipment or the shipping and haulage industries, because it is going through a huge resource boom and it is having to import skilled people to take up jobs in the mining sector. What a great shame it is for our young people that they did not have an opportunity in the past to seriously develop these skills. The government’s 2004 election commitment to create 25 Australian technical colleges to train 7,500 years 11 and 12 students in the areas of need across the country was an important step in reducing that skills gap.

The purpose of this bill is to amend the original Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005. The new bill will amend the 2005 bill so that funding originally outlined for 2008-09 can be brought forward to 2006-07 and will insert a new provision in the bill to enable the minister to redistribute program funds between years by regulation instead of legislation. This allows much greater flexibility in responding to training needs as they arise and it will also allow the establishment of more facilities at an earlier date than first anticipated. I think this demonstrates the incredible enthusiasm around the country for this initiative by the federal government. The funding set aside for the colleges is $343 million over a five-year period. That is a very big injection of funds into technical training. I am informed, as I said, that this will benefit about 7,500 students around the country.

One of the reasons I really wanted to rise to talk on this is that there were a number of organisations in the Midland area—which crosses over between the Hasluck and Pearce electorates—that had made a bid for the first round of funding. I know it was very competitive and it is always difficult to choose who gets the opportunity and who does not in the first round, but they put together such an excellent proposal that I wanted to run through a couple of the issues raised in a letter to our minister from the group, which was headed by the Swan Chamber of Commerce, outlining some of the reasons an Australian technical college should be located in the Midland region, in the eastern region of the Perth metropolitan area. To quote from the letter:

Current education and training delivery models are simply not proving effective for the region and a new approach is required if the Eastern Metropolitan area is to be revitalised and re-energised using education and skills development as a catalyst. For a decade the Midland community, the regional centre, led by the local Government authority, the City of Swan and local business, has worked towards the establishment of an integrated learning environment (the Midland Community Learning Precinct).

This is the same group that I helped get the university places for. They have done incredible work. They go on to say:

Interest groups which had been working to enhance education and vocational training issues have come together to form both the Midland Local Area Planning group ... and the Swan Alliance both of which have representation from industry, business, educators, the community and local government.

…            …            …

The Perth Eastern Region has a long and honourable tradition of vocational training—

that is true—

and a culture of taking pride in trades achievement and has been in the past one of the major apprenticeship and trainee locations for the State.

It has this long tradition. In fact, both my father and my grandfather were apprenticed to the Midland railway workshops, where my father learned to be a fitter and turner and as a young man studied mass production. America was just beginning to mass-produce motor vehicles. When war broke out, my father was manpowered to Adelaide because they needed people like him to solve the problems of how to mass-produce munitions. It was his job to resolve those problems and set up the kinds of mass production techniques they were using in the motor industry, in which he studied, for the building of railway engines and to transfer that skill to the war effort. So for me it is a very personal issue as well because I know this area has a marvellous history, particularly in the engineering trades.

The writer of the letter, the President of the Swan Chamber of Commerce, who was Peter McDowell at the time, said that the Midland ATC ‘would focus primarily on engineering’. There is good reason for that. Midland is at the crossroads of the major highways that service the traffic going to and coming from the eastern seaboard of the country. It is also the major highway, the Great Northern Highway, which takes all the trucking and tourism to the north-west mining and pastoral regions of Western Australia and, of course, the Perth airport is very close by. The letter went on to say:

Employment of apprentices and trainees has decreased markedly in the region and recently industry has begun a concerted effort to rectify the decline. Some of Western Australia’s industry leaders are located in the region and have committed to a project to increase their involvement in enhancing educational outcomes. During the development of the ATC program industry partners will participate directly so pathways can be identified that optimise the relationship between the vocational environment and the workplace.

As I said, the electorate of Pearce lies within the outer metropolitan regions of Perth and it extends to country towns and communities. There are wheat and sheep farms, viticulture, horticulture and brickworks in the electorate as well as mining interests, aviation and heavy haulage—it covers such a broad area; there is a need for all sorts of skills in all of these different industries—building and construction, manufacturing and so it goes. With all of the transport coming through this hub, it is a very important part of the outer metropolitan area. It used to be called Midland Junction because it is indeed, as I said, the junction between the eastern seaboard and access to the northern reaches of the mining and pastoral areas of Western Australia.

The push for an Australian technical college really does not in any way suggest that we have not got strong educational precincts there now. The Swan Technical College and the northern technical colleges have done an amazingly wonderful job supporting the region. If you look at the figures from the 2001 census in the Swan catchment alone, which is only part of the proposed catchment for a technical college, almost 20 per cent of 15- to 19-year-olds in the area were unemployed. That is terrible in a state where we are just screaming out for unskilled and skilled labour. In 2000, just over 18,000 students were attending school in Swan, at 31 primary schools, 12 high schools and the Midland College of TAFE. The Midland catchment area relies more heavily on a certificate level qualification—13.8 per cent—than the Perth metropolitan area, which reflects a reliance on TAFE and access to trades and vocational studies. The Swan TAFE offers excellent initiatives. As I said before, that is where the eight young people who graduated in the automotive industry pilot course did their work. I commend the work that they have done.

In finishing, I want to quote again from Mr McDowell’s letter on behalf of the group seeking funding for an Australian technical college, because they set out very clearly the reasons that an establishment of an Australian technical college is justified. I wholeheartedly and enthusiastically support this group in their work to bring an Australian technical college to the eastern region. These are the reasons they set out:

a.

A decade of hard work has already been done to establish an innovative integrated education environment in Midland, the centre of our region utilising existing community assets.

b.

Plans for the Midland Community Learning Precinct could easily accommodate an ATC and add considerable value to the integrated learning model.

c.

Interim Board led by industry, and an Independent Governance model is being developed.

d.

Industry and community need and demand has been amply demonstrated.

e.

Federal Government has recognised the region as a key area of need.

f.

The proposed site of the ATC is in a major transport hub for metropolitan and inland areas and there is a diversity of modes of transport available.

g.

There is a catchment of more than 10,000 year 9 and 10 students.

h.

The region is home to some of WA’s biggest industry players in the engineering, transport and building and construction and mining services firms and many are directly committed to the ATC concept.

i.

The area can service skills shortages in the metropolitan, regional and mining areas.

I am pleased with and support this bill. (Time expired)

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