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

Certainly not in photonics. I could guess that—otherwise you might know what the discipline is. I had 10 years as an English history teacher—and in fact have a master in both of those subjects—at the De La Salle College in Bankstown. I also taught diploma entrance I and diploma entrance II at Bankstown Technical College. So I not only have some idea of how the education system works at the secondary level, in years 7 to 10, but also a pretty good knowledge, gained from the five or so years that I taught at Bankstown TAFE, about the difficulties faced by those people who did not complete their secondary education when they first had the chance—those students who come in as mature age students who realise that they missed an opportunity while they were doing their secondary education. They come in after work and commit themselves to try to increase their level of capacity by getting further qualifications—whether that is certificate entrance I or II or diploma entrance I or II—with a view to getting equivalent qualifications to either the school certificate or the HSC, at that point in time.

There were also the students who realised that they did not have available to them an appropriate education in the trades area in the schools that they went to. Over a long period of time now, we have seen a fundamental transition in terms of what is provided at the school level and at the TAFE level and what is no longer provided on a vast scale by the major trainers of young employees, our major apprenticeship sources, such as Telstra—the old Telecom, which was the Postmaster-General’s Department when my brother Kerry went there. At the end of fourth year at school in the old system in New South Wales, he did four and a half or five years full training at the Redfern Institute of the Postmaster-General’s Department and came out as a fully qualified PNG technician and spent his entire working life in that area. He retired a while ago and now he is doing a series of other things.

His experience was the experience of many people of his generation—the pre-Wyndham generation—where going into the trades was virtually the only option for most people, particularly those coming from an Irish Catholic background in Bankstown. You could not front up and expect to gain entry into most of the professions, because you could not get into the universities in the first place. So forget about being a doctor, lawyer, dentist and all the rest of it; for most of the people who came from Bankstown in my era it just was not on. That is why the former member for Blaxland, Paul Keating, left school at the age of 15 and pursued electrical engineering. Where at? Bellmore tech, because that was available to him to do his training. That is where he connected with the Electrical Trades Union. That is where he got his fundamental understanding of and interest in engineering. That is why when you heard him speak as Treasurer and as Prime Minister, when he talked about the levers of power et cetera, you may have noticed that he used a series of motifs which were engineering based. That is how he understood the world.

That is also part of the reason why, apart from being influenced by the local nature of Bankstown-speak and the people he ran around with, not only with the ETU but also in the other places that he worked—which were pretty rough and ready, very much working-class and running back to Cockney and so on—the vibrancy of what he had to say rested on saying it from a different point of view, as well as coming from a different milieu. But for Paul, and for virtually everybody he went to school with, there were not the options in higher education. There were no options, either, in terms of where you would go. Almost the only other place to go was a safe place in the Public Service.

You could become a copper and work in certain parts of the police force—the ones that were not run by the Masons; the ones that were run by the Catholics—or you could go into particular government departments and become a clerk. You would sign up to the Federated Clerks Union, which was a Catholic union in a Catholic stratum of the Public Service. What was available to people otherwise? The option was to work as a labourer in the local factories or to work as a tradesperson, if they got the chance, if they picked up an opportunity to become an electrician, as did the former member for Kingsford Smith, Laurie Brereton. He became a fully qualified electrician. Leo McLeay, the former member for Watson did. Leo worked with the PMG, as my brother Kerry did. They got their training on the job and at TAFE.

What they understood intimately was how important it was for people to get a really good education in the trades, because that built their chance for the future. In the fifties and sixties in Western Sydney there was no way up and no way to improve the lifestyle of your family unless two fundamental things happened. You had to break the back of the discrimination against Irish Catholics in Australia and break the back of employment discrimination. You could only apply to work in certain jobs; there were only certain parts that you were allowed into. You were not allowed into the upper echelons. There was a glass ceiling, not just for females but for just about everybody. It worked on the basis of capacity to pay. It worked on the basis that you could get your entry point if you could pay. If you came from a wealthy background then you might be able to break through. To his eternal credit, Gough Whitlam broke the back of that disadvantage by allowing people from poor backgrounds into the system. Australia is immensely wealthier as a country and richer in all senses because he did that.

How dare the government attempt to reinstitute Dickensian, 19th-century notions, not only through their industrial relations reforms, which are all about the Master and Servant Act, but in the education area as well. Look at the changes they have made to the HECS program, particularly in maths and science. We have said we will address that directly and forcefully to deal with the dramatic decline in Australia in statisticians, in mathematically trained people and in science trained people, not only as teachers but across all areas of industry and all areas of the Public Service. There is a dramatic shortfall. This mob has tried to make education a privilege again, and a privilege for those people who can buy their way into the future.

I have had to sit here and listen, time after time, when this bill has come before us, to speeches about their 24 technical colleges. At one stage they made it 25 but I think we are back to about 24. We are told that three of them are open. Whoop-whoop! Isn’t that great? Here is a quick quiz: when will the first fully qualified person emerge from one of those technical colleges? 2010. Where are we now? My guess is that we are at the start of 2007. It will be another three years before we see the emergence of anyone from those colleges.

I will claim to be guilty on a number of counts on a range of things but I cannot claim to be guilty of agreeing with John Howard in relation to much—the member for Bennelong, a former Treasurer and the current Prime Minister. But I have to claim guilt in terms of one thing: I cannot condemn the idea of these technical colleges. They are a 1950s approach to education. This I will fully confess: I think it is right to concentrate on technical and further education. I was the first person in my family to go to university. To get there I had to win scholarships to go to fifth and sixth form and I had to win a Commonwealth scholarship to go to university. We could not afford it otherwise. I still worked my way through. I was privileged to do it and privileged to have the opportunity to work at it and to break through.

In the first part of the Wyndham program, pre Whitlam, there was an avenue—but a very small one—for those people who could either get a Commonwealth teaching scholarship or gain sponsorship from companies. Hardly anyone in my family understood why I wanted to spend my life learning out of books, given that we were a small business family. We were a working-class family, where people either worked for others or ran their own businesses. Historically, on both sides, that is exactly what we have done. People understood that you laboured and worked as hard as you could for your daily bread. They could not understand another world that they had not had entry to, where you could do things using what a university gave you access to—not just teaching but the rest of it. It was a foreign world. For a lot of people, it meant that they needed to learn about that.

In the seven years between Paul Keating and me and the three and a half years between me and my older brother, Kerry, the world opened up for others. But it opened up for those people who had a chance to get trade training—for example, with the State Rail Authority. In Chullora, at the great rail yards there, they taught people boilermaking, metalwork and sheet work. Now they are teaching people again. In carpentry, for example, they have two tremendous facilities. One deals with domestic carpentry and the other is the only place in Sydney where people are taught to work on building many-storeyed buildings. That facility has just opened, and it is the centrepiece for the whole of Sydney. Some features of the work that went on in the past can be seen there now, and they are related in particular to gathering up people who cannot find a place elsewhere. But this is within the context of the most massive skills crisis we have seen. This is a result of a decade’s worth of the most significant employers of apprentices—Telstra, the SRA and every major employer—having got right out of that game.

The end, in the last 10 years, for those kids who wanted to get trade training was to get into a situation under the Liberals in which they got a cut-down version of the whole show: Dr Kemp’s traineeships—the poor man’s version of a full apprenticeship. The skills crisis that we have is very directly related to that. The federal government blame it all on the states, but it is the federal government who have to bear the responsibility. What have they left out of the equation, which is so fundamental to this? It is the fact that without a full-blooded apprenticeship system operating, one that is as deep and strong as that we used to have in the past, you will not get fully qualified, knowledgeable people coming out and we will have a dramatic dearth of tradies.

I am 55 years of age. Guess what the average age of tradespeople is in Australia? It is 55. I bet their ages will just keep going up with mine. But we are reaching a critical crisis point. As those people retire, unless they are kept in chains forever—and they cannot be kept in there at the wheel for forever and a day—with our ageing population, we will not have those people in the workforce. They will not be there as skilled tradespeople, and they will not be there as trade teachers either. We face a massive crisis in that area, which will continue the skills crisis. What is the government’s remedy for this? I think it is entirely farcical.

The government has argued its remedy over 10 years. It started with the good Dr Kemp and has been continued by a series of government spokesmen, including the recently demoted minister, who spoke on this bill in December and who got the flick. He is now a parliamentary secretary, but he has been given the title of assistant minister for a bit of face saving. Why did he get the flick? Why was he demoted? Was it the fact that this whole scheme, this travesty of 24 places Australia wide, has been so poorly run and so poorly put together to provide a token technical college system for Australia? This is the government of tokenism. It is a government putting up a facade.

It is like the Soviet Union in the 1950s when, in Joe Stalin’s era, they used to run people down the major thoroughfares in Moscow and it was a cardboard city. They had whole avenues full of cardboard cut-outs to make it look like they were a prosperous country, that there was a great deal of activity, that there had been fresh building and so on. Behind the facade, you found that there was virtually nothing. The Communists in Russia at that time had the temerity to argue that they were the great new society and were well in front of the West not only in terms of dealing with their people but also in the way in which they trained people and in the whole gamut of things that you could compare East and West on during the Cold War. But the reality was that they were as hollow at the core as this coalition government is.

At this time, all you get out of the mouths of those in the government are claims that Labor does not speak for tradespeople, Labor does not care about technical colleges, Labor only cares about university education and that is all it ever cared about. That is so adverse to Labor’s entire history, which is based upon building everything we do on the basis of attempting to improve the lives of working people in Australia. What we did in the period of our last government was to attempt to reshape technical and further education in Australia and to reshape the whole way in which the states went about getting together and cooperating with each other so that kids could go from one end of the country to the other and have their qualifications.

So glacial is the approach to this problem that, more than 10 years later, this government still have not fixed it. It is almost ticking over to 11 years that they have been in the joint. They have not fixed the problem of kids in Western Australia not being able to take their qualifications from one state to the other. They have not fixed it in relation to teachers either. The state bureaucracies are simply Antarctic in this regard. Melting them down takes a great deal of time. I know; I was part of trying to do it. But this mob have not put the heat on them in order to get those kinds of results.

But to campaign, as they have time after time in this House, on the basis that Labor does not care about trade training is purely and simply crazy. It is ridiculous. We understand that it is a betrayal of the Australian people and of the 300,000 young kids who should have had access to full trade training, apprenticeships and even the modified traineeships over the past 10 years but who have not had that because the funding to the states has been cut back. It has been cut back in the health and education areas. Those people have been absolutely betrayed and this government has sought stopgap measures to deal with the skills crisis by bringing in plasterers en bloc from China.

I know that because in this very area, in the block of flats I am living in now, I saw some of these guys. It was in the middle of the afternoon and I thought: ‘Who are these guys? Do they have a ticket? No. Do they have vests on? No. Do they have work boots on? No. Do they have hardhats? No.’ They were covered in plaster. It was about an hour and half after everyone else was out of the joint. They were aged between about 22 and 50. And I really understood for the very first time what the government’s program was with their 457 visas. There are over a quarter of a million people on those visas, which used to be exclusive to major international companies who needed a specialised accountant to come here for four years, for example. This is a farcical, hollow government that has utterly betrayed the Australian people and all the young people who should have been allowed the opportunity to have trade training for the future.

I have to confess to actually agreeing with the 1950s approach to technical colleges. It is the one good thing to come out of this. Our education system Australia wide has not properly adjusted to the realities of the 21st century. There are not the proper opportunities, except in certain places, for kids to do full trade training while they are going to school. I actually think the old model of technical high school, where you get a comprehensive education and full trade training is the proper thing to do. That is how I would change the system if I had the capacity to do so. That is what I will continue to argue for.

I saw that in operation in Holland in 1975—32 years ago—and it worked magnificently. The Dutch, after a bit of experimentation over the last few years, have come back fully to what works extraordinarily well. We know, from the late 1980s, the Carmichael report and the work that was done based on that, that the work done in Europe had been taken note of by the Hawke and Keating governments, and they were putting into place a restoration of technical education in Australia because of its primary importance.

What have also been lost over the last 10 years are the opportunities to have Australians trained in Australia by other Australians while the skills could still be communicated, to build jobs and industries that are Australian and to export those skills to the region. Instead of doing that, we have imported all of those skills into our region. Our country has been impoverished because of a lazy ideological and hollow government that does not have any fundamental concern for the Australian people. It should be booted out at the first opportunity. (Time expired)

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