Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I welcome the opportunity to speak this afternoon on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2006. This bill will increase the amount of total funding appropriated under the act from $343.6 million to $456.2 million over the period 2005-09. While we on this side of the House generally support the bill, I, along with my colleagues, have some strong reservations about the government’s approach to enhancing vocational training and education. We will not oppose this bill, because we do not want to play a political game and deter any steps which may improve the skills base—steps that are desperately needed to be taken in this country.

In my opinion, responsibility for the current skills crisis lies fairly and squarely at the feet of the Howard government. The government has had its head in the sand for 10 long years as our skills crisis has continued to grow. It has been warned time and time again. As our competitor economies invest heavily in their education systems, our government has been pulling funding out. Instead of funding our nation’s excellent TAFE colleges, this government has gone about setting up a whole new level of bureaucracy to duplicate vocational training services already offered through the TAFEs in the states. In fact, we raised this issue when the bill was first debated in this place some time ago now. If only this government had invested this money into the state TAFE systems we could have had graduates a lot sooner. As it stands, under the technical colleges program, we will not see our first tradesperson graduate until 2010 at the earliest, even later here in my local region. The Australian technical colleges represent a bandaid solution to Australia’s skill crisis. It is just too little and too late, with a very, very long lead time.

As I move around my electorate and the region, skills shortages and their impacts on the local economy are brought to my attention. The skills crisis is an inevitable part of any discussion about the long-term economic prosperity of the region and of our nation. I know that if I go to the hairdresser or if I talk to people from the local chamber of commerce—all sorts of people in my community and in this region—they always bring up at some point the question of skills shortage and the desperate need to be doing something about it.

I am greatly concerned that this government has allowed its ideology on industrial relations to delay the establishment of some of these technical colleges. In particular, I am concerned about the delays in the opening of the Queanbeyan college, which was announced in September 2004, to service the Southern Highlands region, the ACT and the region around the ACT. Despite being announced almost 2½ years ago, we do not have one student enrolled in the Queanbeyan Technical College. There is not one student studying to be a plumber, a carpenter, a mechanic, a hairdresser, a bricklayer or anything else, for that matter, and there is not one student on their way to realising their dream of attaining a trade. You must say, after 2½ years, that it is a fairly slow way of doing something about the skills shortage in this region. In fact, the recently replaced minister, the member for Moreton, announced the successful tenderer only in November last year. No wonder the Prime Minister moved him on. It took him over two years to find an operator for the Queanbeyan college, and we still do not have one student enrolled. I understand that the Queanbeyan college is due to open some time in 2008, so we will be waiting until at least 2012 before we see our first graduate.

There is only one reason for the delay in addressing the skills crisis that is impacting on our region, and that reason is the government’s ideological obsession with its extreme industrial relations laws. Back in April of last year, then Minister Hardgrave’s office was quoted in the Canberra Times as saying:

…the Queanbeyan region would have to wait for its college because the Government did not want the NSW Government’s involvement in the leading bid.

He went on to say:

…the strong bid would have to be restructured but was still preferred over the second bid which lacked strength.

That was in April 2006. The only reason this government rejected a bid by a local Queanbeyan consortium—the Capital Region Business Enterprise Centre, which included the NSW Department of Education—was that that consortium refused to put their staff onto AWAs, the same AWAs that are stripping workers of their penalty rates, overtime rates and other essential conditions all over the country, and the same AWAs that we believe are of some concern to a great number of Australian workers. This is further proof that there are no choices under Work Choices. The government, I believe, put its obsession with these IR laws before the needs of local businesses and students and the long-term prosperity of the ACT and the Southern Highlands and delayed the project.

It was not until 1 November 2006 that Minister Hardgrave announced the successful tenderer for the operation of the Queanbeyan college. It is not at all surprising that the successful tenderer is not the local consortium which had refused to take part in that IR agenda. I do not know what process was used by the minister to choose another tenderer; no-one seems to know. Is it the second bid which the minister said ‘lacked strength’? Did this government choose the successful tenderer based on their compliance with the IR agenda over the quality educational outcomes for local students and businesses? I do not know, and I cannot seem to find any other possible answer.

We have lost another almost two years on this project because of the obsession by this government in relation to the AWA question. I know that many people in the region’s business community are not impressed with this government’s what I would call ‘petty politicking’ over the Queanbeyan college. Local students are not impressed either, nor are the local governments in the region or the chambers of commerce—at least, not the ones I speak to. We have all been let down badly by this government’s mishandling of the project. As I said earlier, it is a pity that some of this money had not been put into the TAFE system, the system that is already up and running.

In Canberra, our TAFE is called CIT, the Canberra Institute of Technology. I want to refer in passing to three programs that that particular institution is running because of the skill shortage. They have attempted to make up and bring on stream faster than usual some outcomes for students, and all of these programs relate to areas of dramatic skills shortage. The first program I want to talk about is their chefs program. It is an intensive training program and includes a workplace training component. The four-year training program has been reduced to two years, and it is extremely successfull. Its outcomes are very highly regarded, and it is producing very productive, well-qualified people in an accelerated time purely because it can see the need and they want to do it.

I also want to talk about enrolled nurses. At CIT, if students have a Certificate IV in Health (Nursing), they can access an intensive bridging program of 150 hours in a block over two weeks. Credits are then given to move to the second year of the three-year degree in collaboration with the Catholic University here in the ACT. This is another area of desperate skill shortage and an example of something positive that is being done.

The third area I want to talk about is also of extreme importance, and that is allied health. We in this place hear everywhere we go about the shortage of qualified people in the area of allied health. The ACT department of health and the Department of Disability, Housing and Community Services have developed a Certificate IV in Allied Health Assistance. The people involved might already be in the workforce, but they need their skills increased to carry out further advanced work. We are talking about allied health areas such as speech pathology, occupational therapy and other similar areas that are desperately in need. This training can be done while these people are still in the workforce. They may be participating in the workforce at that lower level and want to increase their competency; we desperately need them to do so. Because they can undertake further study while they are working, they are actually freeing up university places. It is a very progressive program for an area of desperate need in the country due to the skills shortage.

When we are talking about the skills shortage, certainly we are talking about plumbers, motor mechanics and a range of other people, but also we are talking about nurses and allied health workers, all of whom are desperately needed to deliver services to our communities. I commend CIT for their progressive way of looking at how to improve the training programs they offer. Would it not have been a better idea to see the money that is supposedly going into these colleges given to a process like that? How much more inventive could they be if they had those resources? Rather, in the local case, I understand that the resources are sitting around doing nothing while we wait for the development of this college.

Like the rest of Australia, the Canberra region is in the grip of a major skills crisis. We need urgent investment in our skills base and not some bizarre obsession by this government with their industrial relations agenda, which is ruling how these colleges may or may not come on stream. Unlike the Howard government, we would work with the states and territories to implement the necessary advances in technical training, particularly through our secondary school and TAFE systems around the nation. Australia absolutely needs a more systematic approach to addressing our skills needs than what is being offered by the technical colleges program. It is a very important issue and one that we should be able to deal with in a competent, honest and progressive way.

I talk to people from around the country, and business owners, students and the local Canberra Chamber of Commerce alike speak about the need for training opportunities to address the skills crisis and to improve employment opportunities for Australian workers. As the examples I have given show, it is no different in my own region. We need skills training and we need it now. We do not need a government that will only come up with a solution if it fits a box of a particular shape and size. If it does not fit, then it fails to get legs; it does not get an opportunity. I really hope that the government can see its way to liberating itself and allowing these colleges to come on stream quickly if that is what they want to do and to not criticising this side of the parliament when we come up with ideas and views about how we might implement programs in this country to improve the skills shortage. I thank CIT for the examples they have given. I hope that we see honest investment in the tertiary level of education so that vocational training can actually improve and that we see absolute determination to attack the skills crisis in this country in a bipartisan and honest fashion.

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