Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

It would be true to say that there is an air of the surreal about some of the things we debate in this House. Over my time here I can remember things such as the Work Choices bill, which was all about taking choices away from workers and the fair dismissal bill—it was a beauty—making it easier to sack people. Now we are having a debate about the government’s skills package, which is a package of measures designed to address a skills crisis that, until very recently, the Prime Minister and the government were denying even existed. The skills package was released last week by the Prime Minister in the context of a skills crisis that the Prime Minister denies has been a problem for the country.

The Prime Minister is alone in that opinion, because everyone else has known for quite some time that we are in the midst of a skills shortage or a skills crisis—whatever you want to call it. Labor has known about it. Over a year ago we put out a substantial and comprehensive policy putting forward our solutions to the skills shortage to make sure that Australia has skilled and qualified people in its workforce to take our economy forward, to secure us for the future and to give people the opportunities to get the skills they require to meet their potential and to reach their goals in life, whether that be their career goals or their personal goals. So Labor has been talking about a skills crisis.

The Reserve Bank has been warning that the skills crisis will have impacts on the economy. The OECD has raised it as being a problem. Just recently, on 25 June, BIS Shrapnel put out their economic outlook, which also warned that a chronic shortage of skilled labour is set to act as a permanent constraint on Australia’s growth. And the list goes on. So there have been plenty of warnings to the government about the shortage of skills and how it is threatening our economy, how it is putting pressure on inflation and, correspondingly, how it is putting upward pressure on interest rates. We have seen three interest rate rises since the last election, when the government promised us just the opposite.

Labor has been warning about the skills crisis and we know very well where the skills crisis has come from. It has come from this government’s failure to invest in training and education. OECD figures have shown that Australia is the only developed country in the world that has actually cut spending and public investment in training and education. While the rest of our competitors—the rest of the developed world—have been upping investment in their people, upping investment in training and education to make sure they have highly qualified workers in their economy, Australia has been completely dropping the ball on that and dropping funding as well. Last week the government announced an $837 million package, but when you look at figures for VET funding for the last 10 years you see that it is really just putting back money that the government has denied the VET sector in their 10-year term in office.

You really see the government’s true colours when it comes to skills and training. First of all, they denied that a skills shortage exists. Now they are putting just over $800 million back into fixing a problem that they themselves created by the cuts to VET funding under their watch since 1996. So this is really about fixing a political problem that the government created rather than any serious commitment to the training that Australia needs.

The government of course has had some policies on skills in this period of time. We had, at the last election, the Australian technical colleges. They seem to have completely dropped off the radar. As I was preparing for this speech, I had to ask myself whether any have even been opened yet. Has anyone actually enrolled in one? I think the technical college in Gladstone, not far from my electorate, has one student enrolled. Of course, even if that policy had worked to its full extent, we were not going to see any qualified tradespeople coming out of those colleges until about 2010, so it was hardly ever a serious response to the skills crisis. The other beauty was Minister Hardgrave’s proposal to build TAFEs in Africa as a way of providing skilled workers in Australia. So, really, the government is not serious about this.

The government’s real policy on the skills shortage in Australia has been to open the doors for thousands and thousands of overseas workers on 457 visas, and of course we have seen that used extensively in the meat industry, including in my own electorate. Some 270,000 foreign workers have been introduced into Australia on 457 visas at the same time as we have seen 300,000 Australians turned away from TAFE, thanks to the cuts to VET funding that I spoke about earlier.

In the time that I have left, I actually want to turn to a local matter. There is some very good news in this local story and some not so good news. The good news is that Moranbah State High School was last week named a winner in the Queensland government’s Showcase Awards for Excellence In Schools for this year. These are the state government’s highest accolades for state schools. Moranbah State High School, which is led by Principal James Sloman, won for their program called Different Pathways for Different Futures. It is just a fantastic program that the school has put in place. It is focused on years 11 and 12 and it is all about enabling young people to get to where they want to go. They identify in year 10 where they might want to go career-wise at the end of their schooling and the school then tailors an education program to meet their needs and aspirations. The school’s goal is for every student to leave with a certificate II or an OP of 1 to 15. Last year 82 per cent of students reached that goal.

There are three main parts to the program. There is a pathway for kids with academic goals in mind; there is a pathway with a focus on vocational education outcomes; and there is a pathway for those kids who are at risk of not having their needs met through the traditional schooling system. The academic program offers an alliance with the University of Queensland. There are seven students currently undertaking undergraduate courses, while they are still at school, through the University of Queensland—and teachers at the school volunteer their time to coach and tutor students doing those university courses. The second arm of the program is vocational education, and James Sloman, the principal, tells me that this is where the school has really kicked some goals for kids. The school works very hard to align what they are doing at the school with what industry wants. Of course, when we talk about industry in Moranbah, it is largely the mining sector and associated industries that support the mining sector—heavy engineering and manufacturing businesses that are also set up in Moranbah.

The school works with industry to find out what specific skills industry wants. So it is not about very nebulous general work skills; the school really drills down to find out: what can we give you that you need in your business? A classic example that the principal mentioned to me was that the mining industry often wants people with competency in both metric and imperial measurements. That is something that you are not going to get in the traditional school program, but by working with industry they can really provide industry with students who have the specific skills they want. There is a real focus on school based apprenticeships and traineeships, which of course is a big part of Labor’s policy under our skills blueprint, and one in three senior students now do a school based apprenticeship or traineeship.

The school assigns study coaches to help students through the self-paced modules that are required under their apprenticeships and traineeships, and it also gives backup help with literacy and numeracy. The principal tells me he believes, on the information that he has been given, that the school based apprentices and trainees at Moranbah High School have one of the best completion rates of modules in Queensland because they have that support as they are working through the self-paced learning.

At the end of that, when they graduate from high school, these students are entering the workforce as second- and third-year apprentices. The school is working very closely with companies like Macarthur Coal, Anglo Coal, Rio Tinto and other smaller firms around Moranbah to give these students a real chance at getting a start in their apprenticeships and traineeships. It is the small manufacturers that have been taking it up, and the mining companies are now starting to realise that, if they want the best people, they have to start looking for these students when they are in grade 10 so they can get them started and on their way.

The other group is at-risk students. These are the students who have had high truancy rates or have been excluded from school. The school is offering a certificate I in work readiness for these students and working closely with a local registered training organisation to develop programs. It is also working with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, which has a very strong presence in Moranbah, to get these kids started in truck-driving courses or other work experience programs to make sure these kids see a pathway for themselves through training and education.

Congratulations to the school. I am looking forward to attending their speech night on Tuesday night. That will be my chance—but I also do it here in the Australian parliament—to congratulate the school on winning that very prestigious state-wide award for what they are doing for the students in Moranbah. The school now has a very low dropout rate. The school is very proud of the program that it is delivering and also of the outcomes that these students are achieving. I want to congratulate the staff at the school for their commitment to making that happen.

I now come to the not-so-good part of this story: the fact that the school has been trying for some years now to build a skills centre. It is a partnership between industry, state government and the Commonwealth government. This skills centre has been approved by DEST, but the school has had to go back to the Commonwealth government with an additional application for a greater amount of funding because of the rise in construction costs since their original application. Construction costs right across Australia have been blowing out because of the skills shortage—we come back to that—and nowhere is that more the case than in Central Queensland, where the resources boom is at its strongest.

The school has applied to DEST for additional funding to get this skills centre off the ground—a skills centre that, I might say, has already been approved by the Commonwealth government. I understand that there has been some delay in getting this final tick-off on the additional funding, and I am calling for the minister, Gary Hardgrave, to get onto this. Please, tick off this project: you have a school here that has just won a state-wide award for what it is doing in the area of vocational education pathways for students, with school based apprenticeships and traineeships. It has a program ready to go next year, working with students from right across the central highlands—places like Dysart, Clermont, Middlemount and Glenden, which are all in my electorate as well. It all rests on getting a skills centre built. The project manager is ready to go. The school has done what it needs to do. The state government has done what it needs to do. We are just waiting for the Commonwealth government to tick off on this money. I understand it is with the minister at the moment for that decision to be made, and there is some technical issue about where the delegation authority lies or some technical bureaucratic problem within DEST.

Minister, there is a skills shortage. There is a school that could be opening up fantastic opportunities for the young people of the central highlands and the mining towns. We need the skills centre. Let us get started on this: tick off the program and give the school the certainty it needs to start this project so it can be up and running in 2007. The minister talks about building TAFEs in Africa; all we want is a skills centre in Moranbah. It cannot be that hard.

But if we cannot get action from the minister he will certainly be hearing a lot more from me about it and a lot more from the people of Moranbah. They are very proud of what their school is achieving for their students and they do not want the Commonwealth government, which has presided over a skills shortage for the last 10 years, making the skills shortage in their part of Australia any worse than it already is. In closing, congratulations once again to James Sloman and his staff. I look forward to offering them my sentiments of congratulation when I see them at their speech night on Tuesday.

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