Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am pleased today to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2006. It gives me the opportunity to say a number of things about the technical college system, and particularly about the technical college that is going to be in the region of my electorate of Canning in Western Australia.

Before I speak about that I am almost obliged to respond to some of the things said by the member for Fraser. He is obviously out there trying to brush up his credentials on federal-state relations and to demonstrate that he needs a guernsey on it. This is the person who said, in his speech, ‘Let’s stop the blame game and let’s stop playing politics.’ But what did he do throughout the whole damn speech that he just gave? He spent the whole time pouring scorn, in a snide and cynical way, over this whole process. That was his contribution: firstly, to try and showcase his federal-state relations credentials; and, secondly, to try and rubbish the whole system.

He knows that this system was in need of greater funding and in need of an alternative system, because the state TAFE training system is broken—and I will later give you some evidence about why the state TAFE system is in such bad shape. The member for Fraser is not somebody I take a lot of notice of because he is the man who misled this parliament on the ethanol issue. As a result of that we do not take what he says for granted; it needs to be examined very carefully. Mark Latham was right about him when he sacked him. Amazingly, the Labor Party wanted to go ahead with new blood but they went back and got a timeserver and put the member for Fraser in place. Putting a timeserver back on the front bench is a strange way of taking the party forward.

The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill, which is before us today, is very important because it is aimed at providing additional funding of $112.6 million over the years 2005 to 2009 for the establishment and operation of Australian technical colleges. We know that the original initiative was funded at $343.6 million for 24 colleges. That was increased to 25 colleges, and, when you add $112.6 million, we now have $456.2 million, almost half a billion dollars, that the federal government is committing to further training, particularly for our young people in upskilling them for jobs.

You cannot have it both ways. You cannot have the member for Fraser and those on the other side saying this is—what were his words?—‘needless duplication’, a funding mechanism which is a waste and a scandal, when the federal government is putting in place a world-class training regime for young people to upskill our workforce. We know that Australia at the moment is going through one of the biggest booms it has ever had, and it is going to keep running for some time. To all the naysayers over there that say, ‘You should have seen this coming years ago,’ and all that sort of stuff, I say that we have seen it coming and that is why we have put in place a mechanism to try and upskill our young people.

But in the meantime we have to import skilled labour through the 457 visa program and other regional and state government sponsorships to fill the void of this hugely growing economy. In this hugely growing economy we need skilled workers, and you do not just invent them overnight. The TAFE system has been a dismal failure in providing this. To give an example, one of the TAFE teachers in my area came to me and said: ‘Mr Randall, I can’t believe what goes on at this TAFE that I teach at. There are more administrators and teachers than there are students.’ The administrators all have a car and a fuel card and spend most of their time being bureaucrats, and the teachers are underemployed because there are not enough students there.

In Western Australia, as Mr Deputy Speaker Haase would know, in the north-west, for example, it is very difficult to attract students into training when they can go out and earn the sort of money that they are earning as trades assistants, for example, without any skills. My nephew, over Christmas lunch, happened to tell me that he earns $1,200 a week as a trades assistant in Karratha. Why would he now take up an apprenticeship or a skill training regime when he can leave school early and go and get that sort of money? That is the challenge—to try and get enough people into this system.

The proof of the pudding is in what is happening today, and that is that these Australian technical colleges are receiving very good enrolments. It is patchy in some areas. In my state, at the Perth South Australian Technical College, there are enrolments before they have even opened their doors—that demonstrates how popular it is. The young people are voting with their feet. They want to join Australian technical colleges that actually teach skills.

The Prime Minister put in place the mechanism of Australian technical colleges because TAFEs were not teaching skills. They were teaching everything but skills. You could go and do courses in aromatherapy, flower arranging or transcendental meditation, but could you get a real course in upskilling automotive electricians? It was very difficult. Because the state governments absolutely slugged through fees and charges students going into these courses, they were not interested. They were not interested because, firstly, it did not provide them with the course that they wanted and, secondly, they were getting slugged in the neck.

The state governments cannot have it both ways, and neither can the opposition by saying, ‘At the end of the day we have a very good system in place.’ The TAFE system is largely broke all around Australia. Then we get the member for Perth—the opposition spokesman who has been dumped as industrial relations spokesman because he could not sell it; now he is going to try and sell this—saying that if Labor were to come to power they would dump the college plan. An article in the Financial Review on Monday the 5th by Sophie Morris said:

The federal government’s new trade high schools are likely to be handed over to the states if a Labor government is elected.

He is their spokesman, so obviously it is Labor Party policy. Once these technical colleges are established, he would take them and hand them over to the broken and dismantled system of TAFEs in the states.

We are going to fund them properly. With half a billion dollars in the initial set-up plus the ongoing recurrent funding, we will see that this is done properly—properly staffed and properly resourced in terms of educational facilities and tools. But you cannot say that about the TAFEs. In fact, the TAFE system in my state in particular is almost laughable because people who try and get into it, as I said, do not get the meaningful courses that they want and the charges are exorbitant. The article goes on to say:

As Labor tries to make education an election issue, education and training spokesman Stephen Smith said that a Labor government would probably dump the policy, which was the coalition’s skills centrepiece ...

Mr Smith told The Australian Financial Review that he saw no good reason for the government’s Australian Technical Colleges for senior high school students.

“I don’t see a sensible public policy rationale for the commonwealth trying to start up its own technical system when you’ve got the states having primary responsibility for secondary schools and for the TAFE system for many years ...

“My starting point would be: is it possible to fold these ones which are already up and running, is it possible to fold them sensibly into what the states are doing, and in the course of that reflect our own priorities?”

That is the danger. I say to the parents of all the students out there in Australia who want to get into this system: the Labor Party, should you put your student into one of these colleges, will shove them back into the state TAFE system, with all its ramifications. It is scary to think what a Labor government in the future would do with training.

What is their history on training? What did the previous Keating-Hawke Labor government do in terms of training? The member for Hotham was their minister charged with the responsibility for training and employment. They started these beautiful things called Working Nation training centres, where you could do a brickies course in three weeks. I went out to some of these when I was the member for Swan. I have to tell you: I would not want them building my house. They were not put up by a plumbline, I can assure you. They were probably put up by somebody who was not too good at putting an eye down a bead. I would not want these people doing these quick fix, mickey mouse courses putting up my brick house, thank you very much, because it would not stay up for long.

But there they were. They had Bill Hunter—remember him?—standing there in those expensive ads saying, ‘We’ve got these people job-ready to go into the workforce.’ The only one who made any money out of it was Bill Hunter. He got an enormous amount of money for running the ads. He was probably the only one who got well remunerated. It was in effect a way of taking all these unemployed young people off the unemployment list and putting them in a short-term fix to alter the stats so they did not look too bad. It did not last long, because in reality with some of these jobs it was costing something like $60,000 per person to train them on these short, mickey mouse courses and to put them into some sort of training regime which did not last long. At the end of the day it was an absolute failure. So that is Labor’s past. That is what they have done in the past, and in the future their only alternative is, rather than try and put into place a decent skills training regime, that they are going to fold these colleges back into TAFEs, in the broken state that they are in.

I can point out quite clearly that the Perth South Technical College—which the member for Hasluck, Stuart Henry, and I have fought hard for—is going to be a success. One of the reasons I am very proud to be associated with working hard and making a strong argument to have it located in Perth South is that the eastern corridor of Perth in particular has been bereft of skills training and tertiary training. When the previous education minister, Brendan Nelson, was in place I was able to get him to agree to provide 20 university funded places for the Armadale region. That was most welcomed by the city of Armadale and the whole community of Armadale, and the Curtin university provided the facilities and the linkage to the local schools. In fact, they got more than 20 places, because they were able to maximise their funding to fund more than 20 students. This was a first step. We had the former member for Hasluck, Sharon Jackson, out there saying, ‘Ah, there’s nothing in the eastern suburbs,’ and all she was doing was criticising. Well, she is trying to come back again, but I think she will have a bit of trouble against the current member for Hasluck, Stuart Henry, because he is actually out there working and he knows a lot about skills training. He used to run this sector in Perth himself. I do not know if he is down to speak on this bill, but if he is then it will be an eloquent speech because he knows the subject like the back of his hand.

Anyway, Sharon is going to have a job ahead of her trying to do this, because at the end of the day there she was, bemoaning the facts. It is a typical Labor thing: yelling and screaming and saying, ‘Shock, horror,’ but not providing any alternative. We are providing the alternative. As soon as we provide the job training places out there, what do the Labor Party do? What did the member for Fraser say? He said they are ‘a waste, duplication and scandalous.’ This was a man who said, ‘Let’s not get involved in the politics of it.’

The Australian Technical College, Perth South is going to be located on two sites, one at Maddington and one in Armadale. Maddington is in the electorate of the member for Hasluck, just up the road from me. It is probably only about three to five kilometres from my electorate office, and the Armadale campus is just a couple of kilometres up the road. So the two campuses are very close. They are actually going to be involved in real, meaningful skills training. The Armadale campus will concentrate on the construction industry—that is brickies, plumbers et cetera—which is going to be fantastic, and the Maddington campus is going to be providing automotive training: for car electricians, upholsterers, panel beaters et cetera. That is going to be fantastic, and the young people in that region are taking hold of this straight away, as I will indicate in a moment in terms of enrolments.

In fact, I will indicate it now. Let me point out that the first-year intake for both campuses has been targeted for 90 people, and you will ask in a moment, ‘Why is it so low?’ Well, you will see in a moment that, as a lead-in to the construction and facilities available, 90 is quite appropriate. Currently, even before they open, the enrolment is 61. Enrolments are expected to jump once classrooms are finished, and there will be over 300 by the third year. At the moment the temporary classrooms for the students in Armadale are almost ready, and until then the students will be housed at Maddington. Industry is now enthusiastically joining the party, and enrolments for this year will be 90 within the next few weeks.

One of the keys to the Perth South college is flexibility. For example they are outlining the curriculum and the courses available, but it came to pass that steel fixing was an area that they need further support with. Steel fixing was not planned, but since the industry became interested there have been 14 enrolments for the steel fixing course. Given the fact that you can earn about a thousand bucks a week as a steel fixer no matter what age you are, is it any wonder that young kids want to get involved in the steel fixing side of the construction industry?

Interestingly, the Armadale campus will cost $4.75 million plus $1.5 million for the land—not inexpensive—and the Gosnells campus is going to cost $5.5 million. Can I say at this point—and I digress—that I am really aggrieved about the process, in that it missed out on an opportunity. The RAC had a magnificent site on the highway in Maddington which could have been had for something like $2.3 million. The previous minister was aware of this and wrote to the state department and to the Australian Stirling Skills Training group, who are running this institution, and said, ‘Look, even though you haven’t received all the paperwork yet, I’m telling you that you will be awarded this and you should go and get that centre.’ But they did not, and there was not enough courage from the board at that stage. A whole range of incidents came together so that they did not go and buy it, and they got beaten by Silver Chain. I do not know why Silver Chain would want a facility like that, but at any rate it is a magnificent facility. They could have got it for something like $2.2 million or $2.3 million, and now building a purpose-built one is going to cost $5.5 million. So I am pretty annoyed that they did not show enough initiative to go and do that.

One of the reasons this process has been slow is that they have had a lot of difficulty getting approvals from the state department of DEST. Thank goodness the new minister has intervened over the last few days and has made sure that DEST got on and signed their approval to lease, because what they wanted was the leasing arrangement for this rather than the purchase. As a result, this is going to happen now. The builder was waiting to build—the footings were poured and everything was ready to go—but DEST wanted so much compliance and further information, and there was duplication and a wrong form. But when Trevor Williams, from Stirling Skills Training, wrote to Margaret Cameron and said, ‘If you don’t hurry up, we are going to lose our builder,’ that was a cause of concern to me. So I got straight onto the new minister and made sure that we saw this happen. That is one of the reasons why there has been some lag time.

In fact, there has been a deliberate intervention by certain people to try to slow this process. A school principal, when we actually turned the first sod there, said to me, ‘Look, the Perth South district education has made it clear to me as a school principal that they want to see this process go slow.’ That is the state government again trying to put a bit of heat on with nefarious behaviour and trying to cause grief to a federal government initiative. He said: ‘I will not have a bar of it. I am just letting you know that that is the direction I have seen from the Perth South district office on this.’

In finishing, I would say that this is a great outcome. There have been frustrations and delays. DEST requires information about a three-year lease, which is not very attractive to someone who wants to involve themselves in a lease. It should be for a longer period than that. But the whole community is grateful for this federal government initiative. The young people are grateful for this initiative on training and educational opportunities, particularly out in the eastern corridor of the Perth area. I know that it will be welcomed in the Pilbara in the north. We are actually fixing something that the states dropped the ball on. We are going to make sure that young people get opportunities, which they have been deprived of, to be upskilled in the future workforce of Australia. (Time expired)

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