Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I have spoken on the question of skills and skilling Australia a number of times in the past 10 years. It has taken a good 10 years for the Prime Minister of Australia to finally make some comments and put a program together in the order of $830 million entitled Skills for the Future. What is not here? Skills for the past 10 years, skilling Australia through a full decade in which the demand for skilled labour and the necessity to train that skilled labour have been evident for at least the last decade.

Why has it been evident? All you have to do is look at two particular indicators. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, if you look at the average age of farmers in Australia you can tell that there is a significant problem not just with the age of the community as a whole but with the age of people who are managing and working on farms Australia-wide. Likewise, there is a significant problem in the trade skills area. The average age of skilled tradesmen in Australia is now 54 years of age.

People who work in the trades know in 2006 what they knew in 1996—that is, that the group of people coming behind them is narrow and thin. They know that, as they age, there is that band of people who trained in a period when there was still a very strong, full apprenticeship system—not a combined system where traineeships took the place of full apprenticeships and where concentration on the traditional trades was downgraded for quicker, cheaper traineeships that the government has lauded for the past 10 years. But they also understood then, as they understand now, that the great training institutions of the past—not just the technical and further education colleges of Australia but the institutions that train people internally—used our technical and further education system to bolster, improve and extend that training. We are dealing here with the modern Telstra in particular, and we are also dealing with entities such as State Rail. What we have seen for more than 10 years now—in fact in Telstra’s case and certainly in State Rail’s case I suppose it is more in the order of 15 to 20 years—is that there has been a complete walking away from their traditional place as the key trainers for Australia.

I know that whilst we were in government—and, indeed, prior to that—one of the key reasons for what effectively has been four, almost five, decades of declining apprenticeship numbers across Australia was that those who were the engine room of providing those trained people pulled out of the game. One of the reasons they did that was that they thought that they were expending a lot of money in training people and it was not really good that a lot of those people were pinched by outside companies. The private companies would come and take the fully trained Telstra employees—or Telecom employees as they were then, or PMG employees as they were previously—take advantage of all of the work and the skilling that had been put into those people, and offer them higher money to come and use those skills outside. Some took it; some did not. Some remained loyal to the institution that had helped train them.

If you look at the period of the late 1960s through to the early 1970s, you see that much of our training was in fact bonded training. There was bonded training at Telstra. That training occurred at the Telstra facility at Redfern. I know about it because my elder brother, Kerry, did his training there. He went to De La Salle Ashfield as part of the old system, did fourth year at De La Salle Ashfield and instead of going on to the leaving certificate went into a full apprenticeship with the original PMG, which transformed into Telecom. What was available to him was an extremely high-class, totally dedicated system of training that turned out a fully trained telecommunications technician, someone who could have later chosen to go on and take that through to an engineer level. He chose not to but he spent most of his working life productively in that organisation. Over a period of time he saw others take jobs outside and take their training elsewhere in the community.

If you look at it not from the point of view of the Post-master General, Telecom or Telstra but from the point of view of the community as a whole, these great engines of training and skilling for the future of Australia provided skilled people for the whole community at virtually no cost to the private employers. They grabbed those people who were trained here. Similarly, State Rail provided fundamental training across a broad range of skills for tens of thousands of people. They did that in my electorate at the Chullora railway yards for boilermakers—for Paul Keating’s father who worked as a boilermaker; he helped train other people as boilermakers—and for Jimmy Doherty, his mate who worked with him up there. Those people passed on their skills in significant trades to the next generation. They did that in Blaxland in the Chullora railway yards.

But with the change in philosophy, Telstra decided that it wanted to keep more money unto itself and State Rail decided to get with the action that was in not only the rail area but also a range of other state utilities such as the electricity commission and so on. Instead of maintaining their equipment in the way they used to, instead of reinvesting by training new people for the future, they effectively pulled out of the game. That means that those skilled people are not available in large numbers to those enterprises and they have to catch as catch can. They have done that now for a couple of decades by finding people who were trained by someone else, and that has largely fallen directly on the technical and further education system, which depends for its operation on the states. But that system fundamentally depends on support from the Commonwealth government—the money provided to the states—in order to run effectively.

Prior to us losing government in 1996, I think it would have been in 1994 or 1995, I went through the Bankstown Technical and Further Education premises with the then federal member for Blaxland, who had actually trained in the electrical section at Bankstown. In going through with him, what became apparent was something very strong and very real. Here was someone who had trained in a practical trade and then gone on to do the first part of his work in the electrical industry, as Laurie Brereton, the previous member for Kingsford Smith, who was a fully trained electrician, did. Kids who left school seven years before me did not go through to uni; they went out, sought trades and went into an area that was traditionally a working class area.

What Paul Keating understood and what he wanted to do in government was to rebuild the technical and further education sector. That job has still not been done, a good decade since then—and more. Why not, even though it is staring them absolutely in the face? We get to 10 years on, 12 October 2006, with the Prime Minister finally in panic and crisis mode because the problem is so evident that it is staring everyone in Australia in the face. What do we get? We get $837 million thrown at the problem. Who is it thrown to? Guess what? It is thrown to people 25 years and over who might need to retrain or it is thrown to people who come within a particular set of parameters—those people on disability support pensions, those people on income support in some other way or those people on carer pensions. It is those people who have been given training assistance in the past in order to get themselves into the workforce.

When we were in government we saw full well how much derision there was from the current government when it came to our training efforts to try to give people a chance to get through the period of recession that we had. That fantastic program, Working Nation, reignited this country and reignited its skills base. There was very little for people when Labor came into government in 1983, coming out of a recession. I have been waiting 10 long years for this Prime Minister to say:

The contrast with previous episodes of commodity boom-related labour market tightness is very stark. For example, in the mid-1970s demand pressures in some sectors led to a surge in wages and inflation across the whole economy.

His memory must be deficient—we know it has been deficient at other times—because that wage pressure was not just in the mid-1970s. Phil Lynch was Treasurer in the mid-1970s. When did the wage pressure really come on? It came on in the late-1970s—1979, 1980, 1981—under the Fraser government, with John Howard as Treasurer.

That wages pressure came out of a resources boom that never happened—a resources boom touted by that government. They said that there was going to be $29 billion worth of investment in that resources boom, and not one single person in the country saw that become evident. But what did happen? Because that resources boom was pushed and touted so heavily by that government, the strongest unions in the country, the metal workers, went out for 20 and 30 per cent increases.

What has conditioned this Prime Minister in his responses ever since then? Wage push inflation and cost push inflation—the two keys when he was Treasurer. What dominates him now—dominates him to this very day, dominates the whole structure of his approach in industrial relations and dominates his view of the Australian workforce—is that you have to have a Thailandisation of the work conditions for Australians and that the fundamental problem in Australia is the cost of labour. Get real! It is not 1979, 1980 or1981 and there are not the conditions under which he operated unsuccessfully as Treasurer. We have a situation where there is a deficit of skills Australia-wide because the reinvestment into Australia’s people has not been put there by the federal government of Australia. They have not pushed the agenda. They have not forced this, even though the evidence was there and stark.

Why have we gone into crisis mode? There must be a skills crisis, if the member for Bennelong is going to come out with a major package—scant as it is. The package is $837 million over five full years. What is in the package for young people under 25 needing training? Not a zack out of this package is directed towards them. What do we have in this package to completely reshape our education system in terms of driving skills? What we have got is 25 technical education colleges. How many are actually operating now? I am not sure. I think there might be one.

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