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

Four all up? So four out of 25 are operating. That is not a really good score—but, if you are going to start from the ground up, I suppose you can say that four out of 25 is a start. We know that a whole series of them has problems. Why? One of the reasons is the demand that Australian workplace agreements be the only agreements in place in those technical colleges. Even if you take the total number of people who go through a technical college, it is a drop in the bucket in terms of the need that Australia has for skilling its workforce.

Ten years ago we were in a position where, with determination, effort and a sensible approach to this, we could have built Australia’s trade and skill capacity and skilled our tradespeople, where we could have not only provided for our own needs in Australia—and filled the gap that is there and evident, where 54 or 55 is the average age of trained and professional tradespeople in Australia—but also exported those skills to Asia. The great opportunity that was lost then was the capacity to build Australian companies, based on skilled Australian tradesmen, and to export those skills into the Asian market.

Instead of that, what have we got? I was down at the Landmark in Barton—where group after group seemed to be involved in construction of that building—and the penny dropped for me in terms of what was happening and the fact that there was something rotten with 457 visas when, at quarter to five in the afternoon, a troop of Chinese plasterers, plastered head to foot with dust, came out of there. They had no work boots and no safety shirts or safety helmets—none of the sorts of things that other people had to have. Everybody else had knocked off at 3.30 pm or quarter to four, and I thought: ‘Here is an entire tranche of people brought in because what should have been done for young Australian people’—the people who needed to be trained as skilled work people—‘has not been done.’ All this government has done until now is substitute foreign workers for Australians. We should train Australians. (Time expired)

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