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

I am sure the member for Richmond is relieved her time has expired. Somebody must have told her it was a five-minute speech, because she used the same one at least twice. I am pleased to rise today to make some simple and straightforward comparisons between what the people on the opposite benches have done and what this government is doing, and continues to do, when it comes to creating new opportunities for more Australians. It is interesting to note that those opposite have only actually talked about skills as an issue since the government’s agenda on skills was announced in the 2004 federal election. As part of the proposition that this government put forward in September 2004 and during that election period two years ago, we said we would create the Australian technical colleges, that we would invest in tools for the trades—in other words, an $800 tool kit for people in areas of skills shortage, particularly those in small and medium enterprises—and that we would provide a Commonwealth trade learning scholarship to give people in the first couple of years of their trade apprenticeship an opportunity to gain a $500 tax-free grant from the government to help them lift their overall income circumstances. That is when the Labor Party started to talk about it.

For the entire term of government prior to those announcements, the only utterances we heard from those opposite was about universities. Is it any wonder so many people in Australia are enormously despondent as they embark upon the pathway to trade training—the nation building skills that have underpinned all that we have achieved in this country to date? Those people who invested in themselves by investing in the trades are enormously despondent because the Labor Party have not learnt anything over the last 20 or 30 years and because of the academic, highbrow discussion that if you have not got a degree you are a dud. Even today, the member for Richmond’s contribution was an automatic return to the comfort zone. In the Leader of the Opposition’s reply to the Prime Minister’s comments at midday today he automatically returned to the comfort zone of talking about universities and university degrees.

This government has said, ‘Hang on, the people who have the skills, who have the dignity of doing with their hands what they know is in their heads, need to be celebrated and we need to acknowledge what they are: national heroes and nation builders.’ I have to say to the member for Richmond, who sadly mouths the nonsense that is put in front of her by the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the gaggle who hang on around her, that if she wants to talk about lost opportunities let us look at some basic statistics here. Ten years after the previous Labor government were elected, and it is about 10 years since we were elected—in other words, in 1993—we saw 1.1 million people unemployed. What sort of denial existed about opportunity for those 1.1 million people? They were unemployed. Labor saw training programs purely as a means of hiding the unemployment figures. They put money in through their Working Nation program to hide people, to take them off the unemployment list, and mandated that they had to go off and train. We had a lot of people who became expert in weaving baskets and cutting carrots!

In fact, just 122,000 people were actually involved in the apprenticeship system in this country in 1993, when the member for Brand was the minister responsible for employment—really, the minister for unemployment—and the minister responsible for training. Factor into that that 10 years after this government was elected we have 403,600 people in training in apprenticeships in Australia today. That is 403,600 people who understand that the investment they are placing in themselves and that their employers are placing in them is going to make a difference for them because they are going to get skills that will stand them in enormously good stead in the years to come. Contrast the figure of 1.1 million people unemployed with the 4.8 per cent unemployment rate.

In the state of New South Wales, where the poor old member for Richmond comes from, 5.5 per cent is the unemployment rate. Simply put, it is the worst performing economy and the biggest economy in Australia. Her electorate office is about 100 kilometres away from mine—and it is not far from yours, I know, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley. The member for Richmond used to be a police officer on the Gold Coast. Her faction got her to move south of the border to give her a chance to get a seat in this place, and she was elected.

What the member for Richmond needs to understand is that what happens at Tweed Heads, on the New South Wales side of the border, is completely different from what happens at Coolangatta, on the Queensland side of the border. On the Queensland side, kids attending local schools can in fact start full-blown apprenticeships in the trades while they are at school. They can actually go and get a job part-time, working for an employer, earning a wage, and commence their trade training while they are at school. In Queensland there are thousands of kids involved in school based apprenticeships in the trades—learning to lay bricks, learning to fix cars, learning to build houses, learning to be electricians, learning to do all sorts of amazing things—because they can in that state. An initiative of this government to create school based apprenticeships was grabbed hold of by the short-lived coalition government in Queensland and, to the credit of the current government, was kept going. Out of the 16,100 people in school based apprenticeships around Australia, 8,000 are in Queensland.

In the state of New South Wales, not one person is allowed to do a school based apprenticeship in the trades—not one person. I would reckon, at a conservative estimate, that 10,000 or more young people in New South Wales are denied the opportunity to start a trade while they are at school. Why? It is due to the social engineering of the Left of the Labor Party. The Premier of New South Wales, Morris Iemma, says that he is all in favour of school based apprenticeships but he has done all he can to avoid them occurring because of—

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