Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry, Infrastructure and Industrial Relations) Share this | Hansard source

I will start my remarks on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006 by saying that I support the bill. I support the bill out of frustration that this government cannot find it in its heart to do more. I support the bill because, in the absence of anything of greater significance, I have to support the little bit that I, my state or, for that matter, the Australian people and young people across this nation are offered. I do support the bill, but I remain concerned about its intent, its direction, its implementation and a number of issues within Australian technical colleges and what it will mean for developing skills.

Labor has supported this bill fully, without amendment. Without taking that away, while we give our support, we also have a second reading amendment as was proposed by the member for Jagajaga:

That all words after “That” be omitted with a view to substituting the following words: “whilst not declining to give the bill a second reading, the House condemns the Government for:

(1)

creating a skills crisis through during their ten long years in office;

(2)

its continued failure to provide the necessary opportunities for Australians to get the training they need to get a decent job and meet the skills needs of the economy;

(3)

reducing the overall percentage of the Federal Budget spent on vocational education and training, and allowing this percentage of spending to further decline over the forward estimate period;

(4)

its incompetent handling of the Australian Technical Colleges initiative as evidenced by only four out of twenty five colleges being open for business, enrolling fewer than 300 students;

(5)

failing to be open and accountable about the operations of the Australian Technical Colleges, including details of extra student enrolments, funding levels for the individual colleges, course structures and programs;

(6)

denying local communities their promised Australian Technical College because of their ideological industrial relations requirements; and

(7)

failing to provide enough extra skills training so that Australia can meet the expected shortfall of 100,000 skilled workers by 2010”.

These are significant concerns and significant failings of this government in the most important area of skills and training. Skills and training is an important area to the continued growth of the economy and, if we want to remain globally competitive, efficient and productive—if we want to continue the good economy that this government lauds so much—the government needs to actually do something about it to continue the 15 years of economic growth we have had that were delivered by a past Labor government.

This government has been the beneficiary of difficult but necessary reforms made by the Hawke and Keating governments. But now, while it enjoys the benefit of those reforms in a strong economy, we are just starting to see the cracks open in the economy—cracks in skills and training in this country—and a government that is not prepared to act. The government is prepared to receive the benefits of a great economy—without question, one that it inherited because of 15 years of year-on-year growth after the good work that Labor did—but I will be surprised if we have a further 15 years of strong economic growth based on the actions, programs and policies of this government. In fact, after 10 long years of ruining this economy—10 long years of tax-and-spend policies and politicised campaigns for its own re-election and survival, about being the government born to rule rather than a government born to do something for the Australian economy and the Australian people—we are now starting to see the opening up of the deficiencies of this government and what that will do to the economy. I will speak a bit more about that, how it relates to the Australian technical colleges and what that means for Australia more broadly.

I also want to note and comment on the lack of government speakers that have put their names on the list to speak on this most important bill. I think that as well is a reflection of this government’s lack of identity with the community—a lack of real understanding about the issues that impact on average Australians, on the so-called battlers. I have been thinking for many, many years: ‘Where are the Howard battlers?’ The Howard battlers are battling harder than they have ever had to battle because of this government’s policies. Young people today struggle. They struggle to gain the skills they need, they struggle to save money and they struggle—almost with impossibility today—to afford to buy a home because of the policies of this government. So, in the same sense that we have two economies in this country, we also have two training systems—two skills systems—and I will also talk about that a bit more.

This government’s approach to date on delivering something in the form of skills and training was a last-minute effort, a last-ditch attempt, in the heat of a campaign at the last election. It was an ill thought out and ill thought through program. We still support it, because we think we do have to do something. The government must do something. At least we can take the very little that it offers, but if only it had genuinely sat down and systematically thought through a plan for dealing with the skills crisis, I would be less critical of what the government is doing.

I am critical because, when you take a closer look and examine how this program was put together you will see it was with very little detail, almost on a wing and a prayer, with the government saying, ‘It’ll be okay, we’ll just throw buckets of money at it,’ and then after the election they could work out the detail. Of course, the problem with that type of approach in developing policy is that it is often bad policy. What we are seeing as a result is that, while the government said they would throw a bucket of money at it, so far the states and the Australian technical colleges have received nothing bar a trickle of money. That is also disappointing to see. The explanatory memorandum to the bill states a number of things. In particular, it states:

The purpose of the Bill is to amend the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Act 2005 (the Act), which provides for the establishment and operation of Australian Technical Colleges. The Act provides funding for the Colleges over the period 2005 to 2009.

Again, that is as a result of this government not sitting down and properly thinking this through and being more intent on political outcomes rather than training and skills outcomes. It further states:

The Bill will amend Column 2 of the table in subsection 18(4) of the Act. Funding from 2008 and 2009 will be brought forward into 2006 and 2007 to meet the expected expenditure for the Australian Technical Colleges initiative over those years. The … amount of funds appropriated under the Act will remain unchanged.

So while the government is playing at the edges with some of the funding, as I said earlier, we are yet to see much of that actually being delivered. If you look at the 20 million people and the number of regional and rural areas that we need to work on with the states, and the local authorities for that matter, you will see the government is proposing a solution—I would say barely a paragraph—in trying to meet some sort of need: only 25 technical colleges, but that is the government’s answer. It is a small number: 25. Twenty-two successful proposals have been announced, so there are still some outstanding. Of those, only 12 funding agreements have been signed to date.

What is more disturbing, though, is that the government in their slow approach to dealing with the crisis to date have only four technical colleges which are open, with a total enrolment, as many members on this side of the House have said, of only 300 students. You would have to question, without doubt, whether those 300 students are in addition to what would normally have transpired had those students not had access to the ATCs but instead decided to go to TAFE. Have the government delivered something new, something concrete, something above and beyond what would have taken place anyway? Maybe they have; maybe they have not. I will leave that for other people to judge. But my concern is that, with only 300 students and with colleges only in a certain number of areas—Port Macquarie, Gladstone, eastern Melbourne and the Gold Coast—it just leaves a glaring gap, such a large hole in showing how much more the government could have done had they been genuinely interested in the heat of an election period in dealing with the skills crisis. My view on this is that a skills crisis unacknowledged or denied is a skills crisis not fixed. That is where we are at: the government refuse to acknowledge that we even have a skills crisis. While everyone in business, everyone in the community, all the peak bodies—you do not have to go very far to find the evidence of it—screams out for help and assistance in terms of the skills crisis, the government barely scratch the surface and barely attempt to show they are actually interested.

Another thing that concerns me about the government’s approach to this is that we already have a system for delivering skills training in this country, a system that has delivered well over many years. But if the truth be told, it is under some pressure and struggling, and that is our state based TAFE system. In my view, the government would have been much better rewarded more generally and certainly would have delivered more instantaneous results and better outcomes for a whole range of young people across the country had they sat down in a demonstration of goodwill with the states and said: ‘We want to deliver some extra training, some skills. We understand there is a skills crisis and we think that the best way to do it would be to work hand-in-hand in partnership with the states,’ regardless of their politically elected bodies. The efficiencies of working with the states would have been enormous and they also would have delivered almost instantaneous results.

One only has to look at the requirements that were put forward in the original proposals for those who would be interested in setting up an Australian technical college. In fact, I think the first criterion was that there would be no need for building new infrastructure; they could use the existing TAFE infrastructure. For me, that was the punchline. This is not about the government trying to deliver something new, something extra, something on top of, something beneficial to the country; it is about rebadging and taking over part or all of the state system, if it could. It is a sort of roundabout way of saying: ‘We’ll just use your current system, we’ll use your buildings. We’ll actually pump some money into it for once. We’ll actually assist you in trying to deliver something positive for young people in terms of skills, but it has to have our badge on it. It has to have the Commonwealth logo, it has to have the stamp of John Howard and the government on it.’ That is the real point of this; that is the real purpose. So forget about timing and how many skilled people we are going to deliver out of this, because that is a side issue for the government. The real issue is about badging and the election promise. The real issue is about how the government can make this look good or appear as though they are actually paying some attention to this skills crisis. That really concerns me.

The setting up of a duopoly as it were—it is not quite a duopoly but it is a two-tiered system or dual system—will prove in the end to be highly inefficient and probably confusing for young people in terms of where they should go. They will wonder whether one system is better than the other or whether one system has more resources. They will ask themselves, ‘How come we’re at a particular TAFE college but it’s called an ATC?’. They will wonder about the value of actually going down that path. All of that really does concern me.

The money committed by this government for the Australian technical colleges as at 30 May was $185 million, but only $18 million has actually been spent out of a total budget of $343 million over the next five years. Again it seems to me that there is little drive or incentive from this government to actually deliver on its promises. This is almost identical to the continual rubbish we hear from the government about an issue in my electorate: the Ipswich Motorway. They keep saying that they have committed funds. Committing them is great, but what we need is the actual delivery. We need to have the money not on the table in Canberra locked behind Treasury doors but on the ground with infrastructure in place. That is where we need the money. We need outcomes from this. Young people in this country need to know that there is somebody out there backing them through skills and training but we are seeing very little from this government. We have heard a lot of promises made but seen very little in the outcome and delivery areas. In fact the Department of Education, Science and Training has refused to provide any individual funding information for the colleges. Why would it do that? Why would it refuse to provide that information? Obviously it has something to hide.

Staff to be employed by Australian technical colleges must be offered Australian workplace agreements. They must be offered choice. Too bad if they wanted to make a choice using their own initiative—they must be offered choice. It is a case of saying: ‘Here’s your choice. Take this or take nothing else.’ Again this whole concept of choice is more about an ideological agenda of this government than about delivering real outcomes and delivering something for young people—or for the economy for that matter. Had the government been more intent on and interested in delivering real outcomes for the economy, we would have seen that reflected in the model and its partnership for the states. We see none of that, because the government is not interested.

The government has proposed that just 24 colleges be in operation by 2008. By the time you actually deliver the qualified, skilled people from these colleges in 2010, the world may have been reshaped. There might be a different type of skill requirement. There could be a whole range of different issues. The lag in this government’s approach to a skills crisis today is frightening. The government intends that each one of these colleges will accommodate up to 300 year 11 and 12 students. If you do the math on this, this gives a total of 7,200 students when fully operational. But what have they delivered today? Very little. What this clearly demonstrates is that this government is more intent on the politics and on winning elections. There is a general incompetence and an inconsistency in the way it approaches things. The only consistent thing is its no holds barred approach to spending money where it sees an electoral outcome rather than an economic, national interest or skills outcome. This is gross inaction in the face of a real, serious skills crisis in Australia.

The government has refused for years to invest in skills and training. The figures speak for themselves. Look at the decrease in real spend and investment in our skills, our education and our means of productivity and efficiency—our ports and our infrastructure, the drivers of the economy. We have seen very little to nothing in most cases. The government has been happy to reap the rewards of a strong economy—and to reap the rewards of a mining boom in Western Australia and in my home state of Queensland—but very reluctant to reinvest in people, to reinvest in skills, and to reinvest in the next 15 years in the drivers of the economy that are so essential for a strong economy to enable us to continue the living standards that we are now so accustomed to. The Prime Minister cannot run and hide. He cannot hide behind so-called low interest rates when, compared to the rest of the world, they are actually quite high. There is a body of evidence now that actually says they are higher in terms of the financial pressure put on families than they were at the highest peak under Labor. They are actually putting more pressure on families. If people are so asset rich, then why are they so financially poor? These are the questions that this government just refuses to discuss or answer, and this is another failing. This is another failing in the critical area of skills and training, where this government refuses to do anything real. It is happy to engage in politics but not so happy to deliver the outcomes.

I have a particular example of how this government approaches things in my electorate. One of the greatest developments—and one of the greatest examples of master planning and vision—in all of Australia is happening in the Springfield development in my electorate. On completion it will be home to about 90,000 people. It is also home to a new university in Queensland, the University of Southern Queensland, and a number of other key educational providers. One of the best submissions put in to the government about the delivery of an ATC came from my electorate. It could have been done very quickly with existing infrastructure and with a commitment from not only government and developers but also local councils and a whole range of other skilled people. It was probably one of the best submissions in terms of needs. If you really look at a needs scale, where do we need to build Australian technical colleges, if that is the best model? Where do we need to provide the skills? You do not have to look much further than the electorate of Oxley. It is a high-needs area. It is somewhere where we need skills. Growth and development are through the roof. It is one of the fastest-growing electorates in the country. Yet there is silence from the government because it simply does not care. It is more interested in putting ATCs where it thinks it has some electoral advantage.

Labor on the other hand actually do have a plan. Labor have a plan to do something about this. We want to increase the number of young Australians completing apprenticeships. We have talked a lot about how that can be done through financial incentives and proper programs for investing in young people, investing in skills and investing in training. We want to do the right thing not only by the young people of this country but also by the economy in the national interest. It is not about political interest, the interest of saving the bacon of government ministers or saving the electoral hopes of this Prime Minister. It is about time that this government was taken to task on its real responsibility to Australians. (Time expired)

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