Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Indeed, the shadow minister is quite right—which he is still denying.

In the proposal that the Prime Minister put forward, obviously the most significantly funded item is the provision of vouchers to people over the age of 25 who have not completed a HSC to go and get themselves literacy and numeracy training. I have to say—and on this comment I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I am—if somebody is out there in a job and is over 25, I very much doubt that they are going to be rushing to the government for a voucher to go and do some literacy and numeracy training at TAFE. I think that that is a bit pie in the sky. I think if they were going to provide a voucher they would have been better off providing a voucher that could be utilised for skills which were actually job related.

I was an English teacher and so I think it is really important and a useful thing to do to upskill people in their literacy and numeracy. This is a pragmatic response. I think the take-up on this system is going to be very slow. And we saw bungling with the literacy voucher that this government implemented for school age children—a captive audience; it was not hard to identify who they were or how you had to access them—which dragged out to the point where there were kids who had failed the exam, were entitled to the voucher and did not get it until two years later when they were sitting the next exam.

So I think my cynicism about this particular program can be forgiven because of the track record the government has on these sorts of programs. Nonetheless, I will acknowledge that it is a worth while thing to do. I just think it is an awful lot of money for a not very well thought out process, and I suspect a lot of that money will still be sitting there at the end of the year.

The other thing that the government has done is to look at providing traineeships for mature age workers. That is a good idea. There are people in industries who do a lot of work that gives them skills and, if they had the opportunity to get the actual qualifications to become a full apprentice and then a tradesperson, they would certainly take it up.

The problem I have with this program is that, in an area like mine, the vast bulk of the apprenticeship opportunities actually sit in small businesses. If you are a small business—I am talking five to 10 people—it is highly unlikely that you are going to have the capacity to allow somebody who is working as a full worker for you now to become an apprentice. So who will be able to access these opportunities? Medium to large sized businesses. That is where the apprenticeship opportunities will happen. In my area, many small businesses utilise some programs whereby the group training companies employ the apprentices and they are then placed in small businesses to create those opportunities. The problem with this program is that it does not enable small businesses to effectively access it. I encourage the government to have a look at that, because it is worth while giving mature age people with practical skills they have got on the job the opportunity to upskill.

The biggest gap in the whole thing, in terms of $800 million, is addressing that issue that I raised about an area like mine, where you have 40 per cent youth unemployment. When my son, who is now 23, finished school, for two years there were five boys sitting at my house every day. Four of those boys would have killed for an apprenticeship opportunity. They were desperate for an apprenticeship opportunity. All four of them eventually got one when they turned old enough to have a car and be able to travel to Sydney. That was the reality for them. So they all now do that terrible commute from Wollongong to Sydney, like 20,000 people do.

Since the package was going to be this significant, I would have liked to have seen part of it target those young people, creating opportunities for them and supporting initiatives by people like the Illawarra Business Chamber, who have been targeting our chronic youth unemployment by providing expanded opportunities for young people in apprenticeships. It is a massive hole in this proposal.

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