Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity to rise tonight to place on the record my comments regarding the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006. This bill, as we have heard previously in the debate, proposes to reallocate funding for Australian technical colleges from 2008-09 forward into 2006-07. I have no problem with bringing that money forward, but I am concerned when funds that could be much better spent on fixing our skills crisis are squandered for little real return. What we have seen so far of these Australian technical colleges does very little to inspire confidence that the government has real answers to the skills shortage that is confronting our country.

While my colleagues and I do support the passage of this bill, we are certainly not going to gloss over the skills shortage that we now have in this country and the reasons for that skills shortage. We supported the government on the technical colleges bill the first time it went through the parliament, but we used that opportunity to criticise the government for not doing enough in the area of skills. Sadly, this remains the case today. The government is yet to announce any significant measures to address the skills shortage.

The funding for Australian technical colleges that the government put forward as a centrepiece of its re-election campaign is a case of too little too late. Our nation needed national leadership on skills years ago, and these colleges—even if all 25 of them get off the ground—will not produce a qualified tradesperson until 2010 at best. The government failed to do anything about the impending shortage. Its own experts, industry groups and others were continuously saying that the shortage was coming, and still it failed to invest in training and education. The subsequent results of the skills shortage are abundant and potentially damaging to Australia’s economy. But what is the Howard government’s solution to the skills shortage? What has been its response so far? Bringing in temporary overseas workers in their thousands. The answer for the Howard government was not to increase funding to TAFEs and universities so that they could train Australia’s future skills requirements; instead it chose to utilise a short-term approach that was cheap and expedient. I guess this should come as no surprise to any of us, because we are all aware that short-term solutions are the hallmark of this out-of-touch government.

Last year in the House I discussed a matter regarding the Lakes Creek meatworks in Rockhampton and a plan by local businesspeople and organisations to utilise this facility as a training centre for young Australians wanting to get a start in the meat industry. That initiative is relevant to this debate, and there is a need to refresh members’ memories about it. As members may recall, I informed the House of a plan hatched in 1999 by Rockhampton business groups to create a trainee meat processing facility. This project was supported by the local meat processing industry, which knew back then, in 1999, that a shortage of skilled workers was on the horizon. The project had my full support and I wrote letters to the then Deputy Prime Minister seeking his support for the project as well. Successive ministers gave the proposal lip-service and, in the end, despite plenty of effort from the Rockhampton community, nothing came of the plan. The government simply ignored a plan that would have had an impact on the meatworker skills shortage currently being experienced not only by Rockhampton but also by Australia as a whole. We had an answer for it but the government just ignored it.

Surely there can be no better example of the real failure of the Howard government to listen to an industry and a local community and provide training for our young people than the one I have just given. Here we are now, in 2006, seven years down the track, and the meatworks currently employs several hundred imported meatworkers, predominantly from Brazil and Vietnam, due to this government’s inaction. Had Rockhampton received the support from this government that this project so richly deserved, we would not be in this situation. We would have young local people working in that meatworks as fully trained and qualified meatworkers.

With examples like that, members on this side can be excused for seeing the Australian technical colleges as just a drop in the ocean and as sidelining, in some ways, other real solutions to the skills shortage that could have been taken up by the government. The ATCs are a start but they are far from the investment in Australia that Labor would like to see. We need a strong education and training system that allows Australia’s young people every chance to learn a trade or further their education. We need to increase our investment in this sector, not reduce it as this government has done for the past 10 long years. This government is responsible for significantly cutting public investment in our higher education sector, which stands in huge contrast to the OECD average of a 38 per cent increase. As we have heard in the debate already, there can be no more shameful indictment of the legacy of this government for Australia’s future than the fact that our competitor nations have spent on average 38 per cent extra on education and training in the past 10 years while in Australia we have seen an eight per cent decline. That is an eight per cent decline in investment in our future.

Labor does not want to see young Australians left without opportunities because this government has failed to do anything about this problem. How can the government call themselves good economic managers when they cannot plan properly for Australia’s future? Anyone can tell you that you cannot live off the reforms of the Hawke-Keating years forever, yet this is exactly what the government is doing. The previous government put in the hard work. They undertook the necessary reforms to ensure that the economy was heading in the right direction. This government has spent the last 10 years coasting and happily accepting the credit for the work of its predecessor.

The cracks in this government’s economic credentials are beginning to show. We have just had the third rise in interest rates since John Howard’s 2004 election promise of record low rates. We now have the highest interest rates that we have seen in 5½ years. The results of the lack of action on skills, the lack of action on infrastructure and the lack of action on petrol—the triple whammy—are starting to bite. These issues have all contributed to last week’s interest rate hike and can all be sourced back to the Howard government’s complacency and arrogance.

For 10 long years, those on the other side of this chamber have ridden the coat-tails of Labor’s reforms. They have not continued the hard work of preparing Australia for the future. Instead they have chosen to run with a litany of ideological issues that have no real bearing on the needs of the nation. The best examples of this that we have seen recently are the voluntary student unionism policy and Work Choices. We are seeing that the government is using the Work Choices legislation to try to impede the establishment of these Australian technical colleges at the same time that we are trying to train young Australians in those colleges.

The embarrassingly low enrolments at the technical colleges that currently operate surely must show this government that it is not doing enough in this area. They simply highlight that this government lacks the initiative to tackle the real issues in the area of skills and training and highlight the lack of initiative to reverse the 40 per cent of people who commence a new apprenticeship but do not complete it, the lack of initiative to ensure that our youth understand the value of a trade—the lack of initiative in addressing the skills shortage in any meaningful way. These are indicative of a government that has no direction and either does not know or does not care about the needs of Australians.

This government should instead take notice of Labor’s skills blueprint, of which we on this side of the House are very proud. That blueprint outlines Labor’s comprehensive plan to tackle the skills shortage head on. It is about investment in training and building a skilled workforce, and those are classic Labor policies. It is about the future, it is about creating opportunities and it is about nation building. That blueprint outlines our plan to offer young people greater choices and flexibility in training, expand school based apprenticeships, establish specialist schools and provide greater education and promotion of trades. Our skills account and trade completion bonus schemes are aimed at assisting and providing incentives for Australians to complete their training. The trade completion bonus aims to increase the completion rate of traditional apprenticeships to 80 per cent. Labor has a plan to tackle the skills shortage, while the government’s only real concern is who its leader is going to be this time next year.

In contrast, a Labor government would work constructively with the states to ensure that our education and training systems operate at their peak. This stands in stark contrast to the coalition’s approach of blaming the states for its own deficiencies in policy making. The notion of injecting funds into training is a noble idea and a welcome one. However, surely this money would have been better spent in our existing TAFE system rather than in trying to duplicate their existing work. Our state based TAFE network is the obvious choice for any program to increase trade training. The simple fact is that this government is not interested in solving the skills shortage but more in designing policies aimed at receiving media attention.

So here we have the government trying to put out the public perception that they are doing something to address the skills shortage, but in reality they have done next to nothing, and the hollowness of the ATC policy is catching up with them. The Australian technical colleges are not being built on schedule, and students are not enrolling in anything like the numbers that the government predicted. This policy is missing the mark, and still the skills shortage goes on unaddressed. Various groups have shown that Australia will have a need for an extra 100,000 skilled workers by 2010. That is only three years away. As the government’s technical colleges will not even show their first graduates until 2010, this would appear to be a sure sign of the government’s indifferent attitude to the shortage.

In Capricornia the skills shortage is having a direct effect on the coalmining communities. These mines, one of the main reasons for the current economic climate, are facing the same lack of skilled workers as other areas. However, the huge boom in mining at the present time has led to an increased demand for workers to set up new mines and expand existing ones. Due to the superior wages that tradespeople can earn in the mining towns, many of them have flocked there, leaving their previous centres with an even greater shortage. Of course, no-one can blame the tradespeople for their actions; after all, they have to pay for their increased fuel bills and higher mortgage interest rates somehow. But, even with this influx of workers, more are still needed in the mining regions.

This government has known for years that people were dropping out of traditional apprenticeships or avoiding them in the first place, and it took no action. We must put in place measures that educate Australia’s youth to the value of a trade. Greater action needs to be taken to ensure that our youth place the same importance on trades as was once the case. While the technical colleges are a weak, first attempt at doing this, much more needs to be done.

In yet another sign that the government are not serious in approaching this issue, in the original bill they placed a condition that the technical colleges must utilise their extreme and unfair industrial relations changes. We have heard from other members about examples around Australia where this crazy ideological obsession that the government have is impeding this much-needed policy to address the skills shortage. The government just cannot let go of their ideological obsession in order to fix what is shaping up as a very real threat to Australia’s prosperity right now and into the future.

This government has presided over one of the biggest failures in the education and training sector that this nation has ever seen. The Howard government has consistently seen fit to deny funds to cash-strapped universities and TAFEs as well as cutting the number of available places at these institutions. It now has the gall to come out and say, ‘This is not our fault.’ It sounds just like last week’s interest rate rise. If the government could blame this on the bananas, it would.

I would also like to focus on another aspect of the skills shortage and what it means to the people trying to live and work in the Central Queensland mining towns which make up a large part of my electorate. The skills shortage is exacerbating the serious housing crisis in our mining towns. You only have to read the local papers like the Miners Midweek or the Central Queensland News to find stories of people unable to find accommodation. The jobs are there in these mining towns, but people cannot take up the jobs because they cannot find places to live.

The Central Queensland housing situation is at breaking point, with residents being forced to leave. And there appears to be no end in sight as the mining boom continues to escalate. With next to no rental properties available, it is a gloomy future as the mining business sector outruns the accommodation sector. The region is crying out for affordable accommodation for workers, both to rent and to buy. If you are just a normal worker around those towns and not on a mining industry wage then it is very difficult to find affordable accommodation. The Emerald shire’s youth development officer, for example, has said: ‘Due to the rapid growth and cost of housing, young people are having to leave town, even after getting a job. There’s plenty of work in these mining towns, but the rent is just too much for them.’

We have seen examples in my electorate recently where this is happening and really making it very difficult to attract workers into jobs that are not associated with the mining industry. There are jobs in essential services in towns and it is very difficult to fill those positions because people are deterred by the extremely high cost of housing or just the straight-out lack of housing. For example, the postal delivery contract in Blackwater took many, many months to fill. Australia Post was beside itself, trying to figure out how it was going to fill this position, because how can you offer someone a job in one of these towns on $50,000 a year when housing costs are anywhere up to $1,000 a week just to have a roof over your head?

The situation is even worse when it comes to people taking up apprenticeships on lower wages. The people we would hope to be young apprentices in our mining towns are being forced to leave by this housing shortage. They are really put off by the housing crisis. The work is there and the need for apprentices is obvious but, on those lower wages, they have to live somewhere more affordable. I was at a function in Moranbah just a couple of weeks ago, and I was speaking to two different sets of parents who have elected to stay in the town just so their children could take up apprenticeships. There was no way those children could take up apprenticeships and make a start for themselves in the mining sector unless their parents stayed in town to give them a roof over their heads.

But it is not just the mine workers and other workers having difficulties. I have this week received a letter from a Moranbah GP, Dr Scholtz. The doctor advises me that there are currently only two GPs in Moranbah, and those doctors also assist the nearby towns of Coppabella, Nebo and Glenden. With the population of this district predicted to double in the next five years, Moranbah urgently needs another GP immediately and more GPs in the future. But, as Dr Scholtz writes:

Due to the mining boom, finding appropriate housing has become a major problem. The rental prices for houses in Moranbah now range from $700 to $1,000 per week. Therefore, realistically, no GP will relocate to Moranbah if he or she is not provided with adequate room to work from and reasonable accommodation to rent.

In our Central Queensland mining towns, the skills shortage begets the housing crisis, which then feeds into the skills shortage—and around and around we go. The Howard government has failed to provide the necessary circuit-breaker for our mining communities to address this problem.

This is not the only merry-go-round the Howard government has put us on. The ANZ’s chief economist, Saul Eslake, made comment in last Friday’s Financial Review about a possible cycle of interest rate rises and tax cuts. Mr Eslake said:

The government is, to some extent, causing a bit of a bind for itself by establishing a policy of handing over to households the windfall from mining companies.

The Howard government is more interested in giving tax cuts to Toorak than in nation building. I ask: where are the skilled workers, the infrastructure and the housing needed to keep our great mining industry in Central Queensland going? It is obvious that the Prime Minister has no idea the effect that the skills shortage, the lack of infrastructure and a shortage of housing is having on the working men and women in our Central Queensland mining towns. Those men and women, through their hard work, have given Australia this mining boom and, as Saul Eslake pointed out, have really given other Australians their tax cuts.

In conclusion, I invite the Prime Minister to visit the mining towns of Central Queensland before Christmas this year so that he can better appreciate his government’s policy failures in those areas critical to the future of the mining industry and of the men and women who work in our mining communities.

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