Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Hansard source

The skills crisis is an inconvenient truth for this Prime Minister. Australia’s skills crisis is hurting Australian families and Australian businesses, and now we know that it is hurting the Prime Minister. It is hurting the Prime Minister, and that is why he has been forced to act in the way that he has today. The Prime Minister created this skills crisis. He is responsible for the massive skills shortage which is hurting Australian families, driving up interest rates and making it impossible for Australian businesses to find the skilled labour that they need.

We know that since it was elected this government has turned 300,000 young Australians away from TAFE. That is 300,000 young people who could have had the opportunity to learn a trade, to learn a skill, being turned away because of this government’s budget cuts back in 1996-97, the freezing of TAFE spending up until 2000 and of course the slashing of university budgets.

What have we seen today from the Prime Minister? A desperate attempt to catch up and deal with an issue that Labor have been putting on the agenda since the last election. Labor have put forward costed policies to make sure that we get enough electricians, plumbers, carpenters, mechanics, and so the list goes on. We want to make sure that we have enough of those skilled tradespeople on the job, working in this country, so that we can prosper again. We know, the Reserve Bank knows, Australian families know and of course business knows that the skills crisis is the No. 1 economic issue facing this country. But what does the Prime Minister think? Does he think there is a skills crisis? I will read a couple of his quotes. Back in March 2005, in response to one of my questions, he said:

... I have absolutely no intention of embracing this absurd rhetoric—which is quite false, when you actually look at the increase that has occurred—that there is some kind of skills crisis.

In September this year he said:

All I ask is that you not mistake boiler-plate rhetoric about a skills crisis ... with anything approaching actual policy insight.

Today the Prime Minister provided $800 million to fix a crisis that does not exist. He has spent $800 million of taxpayers’ money to fix something that he does not even think exists. It is quite an extraordinary performance from this Prime Minister. We on this side of the parliament know, and we have been saying it over and over again since the last election, that the lack of skilled workers in this country is the No. 1 economic issue in Australia. It demonstrates the lack of economic management on the part of this government. We know that it is the skills crisis that is pulling down investment, slowing economic growth and, most importantly, as the shadow Treasurer continues to point out, dragging down productivity.

What is the government’s answer to the productivity challenge? We know what they want to do. The member for North Sydney, the Minister for Human Services, let the cat out of the bag yesterday. Their idea is basically to make everybody work harder, to drive wages down and, if we refuse to work for those lower wages, bring in more people from overseas. That is the government’s answer to the productivity challenge facing this country. Labor’s answer to the productivity challenge facing this country is to invest in the skills of our people. We know that that is the only way for our country to go forward.

Let us look at what the package that was announced today does. Some useful things are finally being done, but it is absolutely extraordinary that this government has ignored the fact that two-thirds of Australian apprentices are under the age of 25. There is absolutely nothing in the package that was announced today, called the Skills Future, that is going to address the issues that affect the people who are our future, the young people of this country—the future of Australia. There is nothing in this package to invest in their future. There is nothing to help them complete their training.

One of the shameful statistics that this government needs to take responsibility for is the 40 per cent dropout rate of apprentices in training. Forty per cent of them drop out of their training. Why? Because the wages are so abysmal. Do you think the government could have done something about that today? Of course they could have. First of all, they could have picked up the policy that we have had out there for some time, our trade completion bonus, or they could have thought of something else to do to help these people finish their training. But, no, there is absolutely nothing to help those young people who are desperately needed in our economy.

I want to touch on another issue that is so important in this area, and that is the need for us to focus on the standard of education that our apprentices are getting. We hear a lot about standards in areas that the federal government says it has no responsibility for. The Minister for Education, Science and Training wants to reintroduce the teaching of Latin. That should help to deal with the skills crisis! What Labor want is serious investment in the traditional trades. We want some decent standards attached to the training of tradespeople. We do not want any of the tick-and-flick training practices that go on in far too many workplaces in this country. What we want is decent, high-quality training to make sure that we address the skills crisis.

I want to take the opportunity to set out what we see as the real policy needs that the Prime Minister has refused to address today. It has taken a very long time for the Prime Minister to even get up here and make the announcement that he has. We have been setting out detailed policy. Last September, the Leader of the Opposition set out a major skills blueprint and really threw down the challenge to the government—a whole year ago—to say: ‘These are the things that really could be done to address Australia’s skills crisis. Let’s go to the root cause of the problem. We need to make sure that in our secondary schools right around Australia we get more young people interested in the trades. It is the case that far too few of our young people are going into the traditional trades.’

So what did Labor propose a whole year ago? We proposed serious investment in trade facilities in our secondary schools for those 12- and 13-year-old kids who are interested in the trades and who want to try them out. We want the best trades facilities in our schools for them. We recognise that for those kids who are in years 9 and 10 it is a difficult time. They are starting to think about what sort of job they might go into. We proposed—a whole year ago—a trade taster program so that those kids could try out different trades and see which one they were suited to. A second initiative put forward by Labor—another initiative raised in the same speech given by the Leader of the Opposition—is that Labor is going to have specialised trade schools in each school district, and we will make sure our young people in years 11 and 12 have the choice to go to those specialised trade schools. We are not going to just have 25 of these technical schools around the country. We know they have to be available in every single school district and, of course, we will do it in a cooperative way with the state and territory governments.

Since then we have announced a number of other policies. We have also announced that we would like to see an extra 4,000 school based apprenticeship positions and will pay a little bit extra to the schools associated with every school based apprenticeship position to make sure that they work well for the young person and for the business that is prepared to take them on. Those are all detailed policies that Labor has put forward. Have any of them been picked up today by the Prime Minister? Not one of them—and I have not finished yet. Labor has also proposed—and this is extremely important—that every single trade apprentice, and there are over 60,000 of them every year, will get a skills account. Over the life of their apprenticeship that means they will get $3,200 in their skills account for them to use to make sure that they do not face up-front TAFE fees. It is a very important initiative announced by Labor.

What do we get from the Prime Minister? All we get is complaints about TAFE fees. He said today in his ministerial statement, ‘Oh, those TAFE fees, they’re terrible; they’re affecting whether or not young people do a traditional trade.’ Did he do anything about them? Did he announce anything today to address TAFE fees?

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