Stuart Henry (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The principle of this motion moved by the member for Hindmarsh is very important to Australia, but in reality it demonstrates the great hypocrisy of the Labor Party and its members. It was Labor policy that promoted university education above all else, at the expense of trade training. It was under a Labor government that we saw apprenticeship numbers decline from 151,000 in 1991 to 122,600 by 1993. It was under Labor that we saw teenage unemployment at record highs of 34.5 per cent, because there were no opportunities for either education or employment. In the early nineties the opportunity of finding an apprenticeship was almost as rare as finding a French antique clock on the mantelpiece of the average Australian home.

The country was in recession, as I am sure members opposite will remember. As we were all being reminded by Labor’s then leader, it was ‘the recession we had to have’. Labor has turned education in Western Australia into a complete disaster, with a huge shortage of teachers and total confusion among teachers and parents over the introduction of outcomes based education. In fact, it is reported in today’s West Australian that teachers of OBE English say they are still battling to make sense of a chaotic system that is changing from one week to the next. That is Labor on education.

It is one thing to ensure that all students stay at school until they complete year 12, but it is quite another thing to ensure that we create a learning environment that provides positive outcomes for these young people. The Department of Education and Training in WA have struggled for over 10 years to effectively introduce vocational pathways in schools. They are restricted by the inability to introduce school based apprenticeships, by a union movement that is strongly opposed to this and by Western Australia’s Industrial Training Act, which is prescriptive and only allows for time-served apprenticeships.

Ensuring that young adults have every opportunity to find their place in the world of work—with skills, knowledge and opportunity—has been my driving motivation since well before I decided to seek a career in parliament. Indeed, back in 1989 I embarked on a project to create one of the very first industry based training centres in Australia. With the support of the Master Plumbers Association and the Master Painters Association, in Western Australia we ultimately succeeded in that endeavour. The initial training focus was on youth at risk and the long-term unemployed, and then we focused on apprenticeship training and school-to-work vocational programs. So I have firsthand knowledge of the damage Labor did to our young people and those looking for employment at that time.

With the election of the Howard government in 1996, things started to change dramatically for the better—not only for this country and the economy but also for the education and training prospects of our young adults. In fact, training opportunities for 15- to 24-year-olds have increased dramatically, with the number of Australian Apprenticeship commencements in 2006 up by a massive 154 per cent since 1996. In 1996 there were fewer than 155,000 apprentices in training across the country, compared to over 400, 000 apprentices in training today. Participation rates have also increased significantly at school and in post-school education and training over the past 11 years. The year 12 retention rate has gone from 71.3 per cent to 75.3 per cent. Over the same period the number of 15- to 19-year-olds in school or full-time education has increased from 64 per cent to 68 per cent. The percentage of young people aged 25 to 29 with at least a certificate III qualification has increased to 56 per cent—up by 16 percentage points since 1996.

In the lead-up to the last federal election the Howard government made a commitment to establish 24 Australian technical colleges across Australia to assist in the establishment of school based apprenticeships and to provide an effective school based model for the delivery of vocational training with industry and employers.

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