Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

While I rise to recognise and take note of Skills for the future, I would like to note that even in the Prime Minister’s own address to the House he said:

While it is clear that claims about a skills crisis are exaggerated, Australia does face real skills challenges arising from an ageing population, rapid technological change and an increasingly competitive global economy.

What the Prime Minister failed to recognise was that over the last 10 years of his government he neglected the area of skills. That is the greatest cause of the skills crisis that we are having at the moment. If we are having an ‘exaggerated’ skills crisis, it is interesting that he is throwing $837 million to boost vocational training. On the one hand we do not have a crisis but on the other hand we are going to have a large package to assist people who are obviously in areas of skill shortage.

Whilst the Prime Minister can probably take some heart from the fact that there is a healthy and dynamic labour market that has ensured that the need for workers is growing rapidly every day and that there is a need for workers in very skilled areas, he cannot take heart from the fact that for over 10 years he has done nothing about it. He has done nothing to address the shortfalls in chronic areas. They have known about them. The issue has been emphasised by leading business groups, the Reserve Bank and all of the senior modellers of the economy. They have all been saying that there are two great impediments to the economy continuing to grow as rapidly as it has: skills and infrastructure. For 10 years we have had this booming economy. They could have done something; instead they have not.

We have the only government in the OECD that is actually investing less in education and training. The OECD’s Education at a glance report showed that Australia is the only advanced economy that has reduced its public sector investment in education since 1995. It is the only one in the world. Whilst other nations have increased their spend by about 48 per cent, Australia has cut its spend by seven per cent. It does not matter how much the Prime Minister or the minister for education get up and down and quote numbers, the raw statistics show it all. The OECD report demonstrates quite dramatically that there has been a massive cut in spending on education and training, particularly in higher education and in TAFE training.

While the Prime Minister and his various ministers for education have moaned that Labor has no interest in TAFE training, they have not talked about the fact that 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE over the last 10 years. On the one hand we have this skills crisis while on the other we have had 300,000 people who have wanted to take a real live apprenticeship that takes three to four years to do and is not a traineeship—they are actually ‘rinky dinky didge’ going to get a TAFE certificate at the end of it and come out as a skilled tradesperson. Yet these people have been turned away from the TAFE system.

In my electorate we have some phenomenal educational institutions. We have the Box Hill Institute of TAFE, one of Australia’s leading TAFE institutions. Incidentally, I met with the CEO of the Box Hill TAFE at Sydney airport the other day and I asked where he was off to. He said: ‘I am off to China to sign a deal. We will be training people through various large hotel chains throughout China. We will be training them through the Box Hill TAFE in all areas of service delivery from child care, hospitality, service and maintenance to engineering.’ Here is my little TAFE in downtown Box Hill off to sign another international agreement. They currently have 12 or 15 such agreements with countries around the world.

Whilst we do have an Australian technical college set up, it is not in my electorate of Chisholm but in the electorate next door, Deakin. Money has gone into duplicating—and this is the absolute irony of this system—the wonderful system we have in the TAFE. The college is set up in a school environment at two schools in Ringwood. Instead of giving that money back to the TAFE sector—back to the educational sector—we try to duplicate and replicate it and try to retrofit a very bad model that is meant to be led by business. A lot of the businesses have said, ‘This is too complicated; we don’t want to do it,’ and a lot of the TAFEs have said, ‘We do not want to get involved in this because we are actually stealing from our own supply of students by getting involved in these things that are way too complicated.’

So the Prime Minister’s statement on skills misses the mark. Whilst we welcome the package—because it has ripped off a lot of Labor initiatives—it has missed the mark and it fails to recognise the government’s 10 years of neglect. Box Hill TAFE could have taken the money that has gone to set up the Ringwood ATC. It could have absorbed it and continued to run its phenomenal programs. For the last couple of years, it has had the Victorian Apprentice of the Year. Its output is phenomenal. It is a world-recognised educational institution.

Down the road from Box Hill TAFE is the Box Hill Senior Secondary College. It runs a Year 11 and 12 program. It runs a vast range of programs. I was there a couple of weeks back after a fire had come through and, sadly, gutted half the school, but it is managing to continue. It runs a phenomenal range of programs particularly catered to individuals who do not want to do mainstream academia and who want to do hands-on skilled work. Again, member for Hinkler, this school runs a program where the students come for a couple of days and also go into the workforce for a couple of days, so when they get to a job they can say, ‘Yes, I understand, when you say I have to be here at 7 o’clock in the morning, that I have to be here at 7 o’clock in the morning and that my mum should not still be yelling at me to get out of bed.’ They understand the notion of being at work for the whole day—that when they feel like a snack at about 11 o’clock they cannot just wander off. They have notions about what being work ready is.

The school runs that program. It has found it incredibly successful. Box Hill TAFE have said time and time again that if you want an apprentice to finish their four years, give them a pre-apprenticeship program, then they understand what is going to be involved. It is not something where they think, ‘Gee, I would like to be a sparky or a plumber and I’ll get to hang out with my dog and run around in the ute,’ or something like that. There are actually fairly rigorous requirements. If they do the pre-apprenticeship training, they understand what is going to be involved, and they understand the rigorous educational side that they are also taking on. But these things have been allowed to slide. The pre-apprenticeship program run through TAFE was defunded. They had to go to the state government to get additional funding to run that. They did not want to lose it because they found that it was the most appropriate way of ensuring that a young person was ready to go into the workforce and that the employer they were going to knew that that individual understood what work readiness was all about.

In the Prime Minister’s statement he talked about the challenges for people who had left school early and who had not been back in the education environment for a while and that we needed to cater for these people—some of whom, as the Prime Minister said, do not have fond memories of school. Again, the Box Hill TAFE has run a very successful program of short courses. People might come in and do something totally unrelated to a career opportunity, but they are going back into the TAFE environment. They are going back into the educational sector so that they can re-understand what it is like to be educated, what it is like to be in these places, that they are not the only person over 30 there and that they will be able to deal with it.

The previous minister for education, Brendan Nelson, used to bag these courses quite mercilessly. He got up in the parliament on numerous occasions and had a go at Box Hill TAFE for running a belly-dancing course. What he never mentioned about this belly-dancing course was that it was a full fee course. It was a short course and it was run probably for a bit of fun for a lot of people, but it also gave people the notion that they could learn and that they could go back into an educational environment. A lot of these short courses then had a very good spin-off effect, where these older people thought: ‘This is not too scary. I can now retrain, regroup and go back into the TAFE sector.’

So, again, we have all these instances of a good package in some respects. A lot of initiatives that the government has announced in the $837 million spend are Labor party policy. But it has taken too long. It has taken 10 years of neglect. You did not need to listen to us. The Governor of the Reserve Bank has been going on and on about this. The August 2006 statement on monetary policy said:

Over the year to the June quarter, employment growth was strongest in the mining and electricity, gas & water industries—

but there has been a lack of skills in that area. It continued:

Survey-based indicators and vacancy data mostly suggest that demand for labour is still strong and that the labour market will remain tight. The ABS measure of job vacancies increased in the June quarter, to show a nationwide vacancy rate of 1.5 per cent, the highest level in over thirty years ... Private-sector measures of vacancies also show robust annual growth in job vacancies. ...

Continued strength in labour demand has led to ongoing labour shortages. Business surveys report that firms are experiencing difficulty finding suitable labour, and employers note that this remains a key factor constraining their output. Feedback from the Bank’s liaison program indicates that labour shortages are broad-based across industries and skill levels. However, shortages are most pronounced for skilled workers in the non-residential construction and resources sectors, and in much of the business services sector.

The Reserve Bank has been highlighting it.

I was recently in Karratha. It is an interesting and very dusty place, but it is a ‘boom city’ and they cannot get skilled workers. They cannot even entice them in on the massive wages they are paying to these young people, because there is no need for them to go there. One of the businesses in the area said that the hardest people to employ nowadays are people in fast-food outlets. Why work in McDonald’s for a couple of dollars an hour when you can go out to a mine or somewhere else and earn $20 or $30 an hour? These issues have been known for a long time and I think something should have been done about them. But we have been living with myth instead of reality.

The report released today by Bob Birrell, from the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, which is also in my electorate, and requested by the Dusseldorf Skills Forum, which does fantastic work in the area of youth employment and youth skills and training, says that there have been too many myths put out by this government. Australia is the beneficiary of great economic times, but the report asks if this is delivering the education and training dividend that the country needs. The report states:

Recent Australian Government higher education and training policy has been misguided, having apparently fallen for several popular myths:

Myth 1: There has been too much emphasis on university education

Myth 2: There is inherent conflict between expanding trade training and maintaining or increasing university education

Myth 3: In future years there will be declining numbers of young people entering the workforce.

In respect of myth 1, the report indicates:

The fastest growing areas of the workforce are in managerial, professional and associate professional occupations, most of which rely on workers with knowledge and skills derived from tertiary qualifications. However over the period 1996 to 2005 there has only been a marginal increase in university commencements by domestic students—

I repeat: domestic students—

During the Coalition’s decade in office the potential of the higher education sector to contribute to Australia’s workforce demands appears to have been neglected. There has been plenty of sectoral reform to universities but little improvement in access or opportunity.

Indeed, we have seen that there has been a decrease in access and opportunity with massive HECS fees and increases in up-front fees being more and more prominent. Regarding myth 2, that a choice must be made between trade training and university education, the report continues:

Training at the higher education and trade level should not be seen in opposition. We can and should be expanding participation in both. There are far too many young Australians ill equipped to provide the skills needed in a labour market where most of the growth is in jobs requiring technical, analytical and managerial skills. In 2005, 46 percent of school-leavers were not enrolled in any post-school education. There were large numbers of young adults not working or studying full-time: 21 percent of 20 year-old men and 33 percent of 20 year-old women, for example.

So we have this huge number of people who will take up no education or training at all. This means the skills crisis and skills divide will continue. On myth 3, that there will be declining numbers of young people entering the workforce, the report says:

Australia is not running out of young people. The total labour force will increase from an estimated 10.54m in 2006 to an estimated 13.61m in 2051, mainly due to migration. Despite this, the annual rate of growth of the labour force is estimated to fall from about 1.6 percent currently to less than half this rate by 2051. This is largely because of the waves of baby boomer retirements due to occur in coming years. The number of 15-19 year olds will increase from an estimated 1.4m in 2006 to an estimated 1.58m in 2051. National wealth will rely on productivity growth and increasing the skills of the Australian workforce. Migration and re-skilling of older workers are valid policy choices to help address this. However skilling young Australians offers both the greatest potential source of additional skilled workers, and is the most efficient and productive policy approach.

Australia’s future prospects will depend on the near universal engagement of young Australians in education and training. Not coercively but in ways that:

• sharply increase the number of funded university places for domestic students
• improve accessibility to university campuses
• offer financial support for students from families of modest income.

So instead of having this debate that it is either/or—it is either trade or university—we actually need both.

There is a fantastic book that I would recommend to anybody in this chamber, called Wittgenstein’s Poker. Both Wittgenstein and Popper, who are two of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, undertook trade training. One was a cabinet-maker and one was a plumber. They both said that they probably learned more from their masters who trained them in their trade than they ever learnt at university. It is not an either/or. We need to ensure that education is for everyone and that young people are taking it up now. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Wilkie) adjourned.

See this speech in context