Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

No. What the government did was roll the traditional apprenticeships into our traineeship system. I introduced the trainee system in 1995. In 1995, there were only 12,000 in the trainee system. Within two years, that had quadrupled to 48,000. The government benefited from the system that I put in place. It was a good system. They retained it, even though they scrapped Netforce, and the numbers that they now claim credit for are the direct result of the boom in traineeships, not traditional trades. The same figures from the library show that, in the latest year recorded, traditional trades accounted for only 148,000 out of a total of close to 400,000, but 60 per cent of what they call new apprenticeships in fact are our traineeships. So let us have none of this nonsense about their set of figures.

I will just make this point in terms of comparisons, because it is also pretty revealing from these statistics. In 1990, under the Labor government, when Kim Beazley, I think, may have been employment minister, traditional trades were at their peak: 161,000, a figure that this government has never been able to achieve in its term despite a resources boom. So there you have it: a Labor government that had a commitment to skills development and employment growth, showing what can happen when you start to invest in the skill development of a nation.

We hear of this government in terms of the need to address skills shortages. Nowhere is it a greater problem or issue than in the regions. You would know it, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, from your electorate—the inability of regions to go forward because this government has failed to invest in the skills development of its people. I again remind people of what Labor did when it was in office. When the skills shortage problem faced us back in the Working Nation days, I set up the area consultative committees under the Working Nation program to ensure that local training programs matched local industry needs, taking the supply with the demand. The area consultative committees were resourced to undertake skills audits to identify the skills and deficiencies within particular regions. We involved the local chambers of commerce and industry in identifying their skills needs. We encouraged local bodies to establish what the demand for their labour was. I remember coming up to your own electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker, and working with the area consultative committee to address its needs. That network of area consultative committees, which still exists today but is not resourced in the same way as we did it, was responsible for placing 300,000 jobs in six months—and then we lost office.

The point I am making is that local empowerment works when you use government as a facilitator and to resource the capacity to address the skills needs of a particular region. We want to go back to developing and tapping that sort of mechanism because we have shown that it works. But it will not work unless a government is prepared to make the investment in the drivers of economic growth, the investment in the skills and the innovation of the nation. That is what Labor has shown a preparedness to do. It is what we keep putting forward the policies to do, and it is what this government eventually is forced, kicking and screaming, to embrace.

We say: yes, we welcome this money, but more needs to be done in terms of not just giving people the opportunity but empowering regions to identify their needs to develop the training programs that suit their particular needs, to get back to doing what we demonstrated they were capable of delivering on—a government prepared to work with communities, not dud them and disinvest in the means by which people obtain their skills and the nation its productivity growth. (Time expired)

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