Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party, Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

The member for Throsby interjects. This underscores how a former president of the Australian Council of Trade Unions, now sitting as a member in this place, has herself sponsored the decline in the circumstances that they are complaining about. This government is actually doing something about it. The hard thing for those opposite to understand is that the state governments are starting to realise they must cooperate in this national agenda. The leadership from Queensland, Victoria, South Australia and Tasmania is appreciated. The lethargy from Western Australia is lamented and the complete rallying against the way the world is going by New South Wales is pathetic.

This is where the member for Jagajaga and, indeed, the member for Throsby could play a role. In fact, they could demand of the New South Wales government that they allow trade training to commence while kids are at school. There are no Australian school based apprenticeships at any of the certificate levels, first, second, third or fourth, in the trades in New South Wales schools—none, zero. In Queensland there are about 8,000; in Victoria there is a growing number that is currently around 2,000; but in Western Australia they will not let you in the construction trades. Despite today’s announcement of a 4.8 per cent unemployment rate in Western Australia and businesses screaming out for trade skills, they are instead legislating to tell kids to stay at school until the end of year 12 and denying them the full raft of possibilities to start the elements of learning a trade while they are at school.

Instead of trying to become the Leader of the Opposition at the expense of the training opportunities of young Australians, I would ask the member for Jagajaga to get a serious contribution in mind and join with me, the Prime Minister and all the members on this side of the chamber and demand a truly national training system response from all state governments. Even Michael Costa, the New South Wales Treasurer, said earlier this week that dollars were more important than training. Mr Costa said:

We failed to keep our apprenticeship numbers up, partly that was due, you know, to the focus on the balance sheet, the need to look at cost-cutting strategies and unfortunately it seems that apprenticeships was the easy one.

The government is putting in $2.5 billion; Labor put in $1 billion the last time they were in office. That is an 85 per cent increase. We have contributed an enormous amount of additional expenditure that Labor never put into place. The state governments tell me that, for every dollar I put in, they put in three or four. So, by the state governments’ own account, if we put in $2.5 billion they must put in somewhere between $7.5 billion and $10 billion.

I think they are exaggerating their involvement but I will take them at their word. If those numbers are right, where are the priorities? The priorities are building large, fat bureaucracies in the state government departments and giving jobs to union mates who can’t do anything around the workplaces anymore because people are turning their backs on trade unions. They have to give them something to do, and they give them a big, fat pay packet to go with that and, as long they have a job, ‘It’s okay, Jack.’

I am afraid that is not the way this government sees the world. We see training opportunities for young people to start at school as a critical element of the way forward. Again, the member for Jagajaga does not understand this. It has been 12 years since we started talking about competency based training, yet here again today the member for Jagajaga is talking about the amount of time it takes. The simple matter is, if we can get units of competency being the basis for the advancement of people’s ability to earn more money, the units of competency being the basis on which they are paid more because they are worth more in the workplace, we will see people leaving a trade apprenticeship in a faster way. In fact we will also see people who have experience in other places and who have done other things getting those credentials recognised, getting that prior experience recognised, and getting them working.

That is why the Queensland government said to me—and in fact gave me a document to prove their point—that they need something like a 32 per cent increase in the number of people who know how to drive earthmoving equipment. They want to build dams and they want to build roads. They want to build all these things but they know that, because we lost 30,000 people in one year when Kim Beazley, the member for Brand, was the minister responsible for training, the recession we had to have dumped all of those people out of the apprenticeship system, which was evidenced by the fact that we had only 30,900 graduating in 1996. People dropped out. The Queensland government are saying to me that, because we lost so many people who had partly completed their apprenticeships in the early 1990s, there are people floating around this country with some of the skills but not all of the skills who are frustrated because they cannot actually do what they know they can do. They have not got the piece of paper. So I am happy to work with Queensland on that.

I would also remind the member for Jagajaga, as she is a member of the same faction of the Labor Party in Victoria, that she was a senior adviser in the failed Cain-Kirner years when the Socialist Left faction presided over the closing down of the Victorian technical schools. It might have worked well as she was sipping cafe lattes in Brunswick Street and working for David White, a key member of that disastrous party. She was a member of the guilty party, as Victorians would know, but even Lynne Kosky, the Victorian education minister, has admitted today that the Australian Labor Party may have erred when it closed down the technical schools across Victoria during the former Cain government.

So we have the member for Jagajaga trying to cover her sins and cover for the failure of the Labor Party when they were in government, and failing to understand that no government has invested more and no government has achieved more, failing to understand that never has there been more people in training, never has there been more people in the traditional trades and never has there been more opportunities for jobs, because of the strong economic management of this government. This economy is moving strongly, and as it demands more and more we will give it. (Time expired)

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