Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to participate in this debate on the Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up for Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007, not simply as the former minister responsible for many of the initiatives that this piece of legislation is meant to deal with but also as the son of a tradesman, a metal machinist by trade. My father remarked for probably 25 or 30 years on how sad it was to see a general decline in the psyche of presentations from government and from those with apparent influence on the importance of the nation-building skills—the trade skills. I see the member for Macarthur is at the table. I know he is proud to be a motor mechanic. On this side, we have a lot of people with trade skills who have come to this parliament. As the bishop in Port Pirie said last year, there is something absolutely noble about doing something with your hands and involving yourself in productive enterprise as a result of doing something constructive with your hands.

This government, in all of its breath, in all of its statements and all of its policy settings since 1996, has been about restoring the sense of importance associated with people with trade skills. It has always been gratifying to me to hear direct feedback from people who felt pretty well underdone in the Labor years, where they talked down careers in the trades. I always saw the great irony in that: a party that was built out of the loins of the working class and was set here—and still is set here—to do the bidding of the union movement spent so much time in government talking down the importance of trade skills. When we came to office in 1996, there was an enormously sad and bad set of circumstances that we had to deal with, despite what the member for Perth was trying to suggest in his contribution yesterday. The current situation in Australia makes the measures contained within this legislation so necessary. People around this country are seeking to take on apprentices, and we need to make sure that, if people in the early years of an apprenticeship are not able to sustain themselves as they might do in the latter years of their apprenticeship, they are given access to government assistance. Never before in the history of this country have things like youth allowance been extended to people in trade training. Never before have we seen this sort of wage top-up extended to Australian apprentices.

This bill, which reflects the changes made and the additions introduced in the most recent federal budget, makes sure that there is not an impost through the social security system or the taxation system on those who are on a sufficiently low wage structure that they qualify for the additional benefits that the government is now offering them. We are saying to people who are taking on an apprenticeship in trade occupations included on the migration occupations in demand list—trades listed as experiencing skills shortages—that they will be eligible to receive $1,000 for each of the first two years of their apprenticeship. Payments of $500 will be made biannually to full-time apprentices at the six-month, 12-month, 18-month and 24-month points of their training.

I think it would be wrong and inconsistent of me if I did not note that it is important that the parliament understands that we are not as a government endorsing the old industrial revolution approach of time based training. In Queensland and, increasingly, in Victoria—but not in the state of New South Wales, which has the worst apprenticeship system in country—we are seeing people having prior experience recognised under the recognition of prior learning. These people are able to start their apprenticeship with part of the requirements of that apprenticeship being acknowledged as already completed due to their own prior work experience and are able to complete their apprenticeships a lot faster than the traditional three-year or four-year period. To my mind and the government’s mind, the competency of the apprentice is far more important than the amount of time that they are actually in training.

This measure is about their first and second years of apprentice training—for school based apprentices, a concept new to New South Wales this year. For years the Australian Education Union and the New South Wales Teachers Federation railed against the idea of school based apprentices, certificate III and above in the trade. How dare kids in New South Wales have the opportunities that Queenslanders have had for a decade! The day after the state of origin series has been sealed—I will tempt the wrath of Deputy Speaker Hatton, as he is a New South Welshman—I make the point that finally New South Wales will allow kids to start trade training while they are at school at a real trade training level. This legislation covers that contingency as well. It allows them to gain access to it as part-time school based apprentices.

What does this mean? It means they can get to the end of year 12 with their year 12 leaving certificate, the New South Wales standard ticket, like they do in Queensland. These students will also have earned money because their part-time job has been the practical side of their trade training. They will also have advanced their trade apprenticeships so that when they start, if they choose to, a full-time apprenticeship they will be in a position to complete it after they have finished school, will accelerate through the whole trade training process, will have some of the competencies squared away, signed off and agreed to and will be in a position to be in their trade faster and, of course, will have earned money along the way.

Starting the process at school makes a huge amount of sense. It was a very good suggestion when the government put it forward in 1997. The first state to grab hold of it was Queensland, and 10 years down the track they have over half the numbers of students who are involved in school based apprenticeships in the whole of the country. Last year, while Queensland had about 8,000 out of 15,000 apprentices, New South Wales had none. I make the point again to be very consistent. This measure backs the students and the employers that invest in their businesses in the best way they possibly can—by taking on people as apprentices, and particularly as school based apprentices. It backs the parents by also making sure that this payment is amortised over a part-time scheme. In other words, they can gain it over several years, not just in the first and second years of training.

I greatly welcome this initiative. It allows the flexibility that is desperately needed in the system. It also acknowledges that in the first couple of years—despite my conversation about competency being the basis for advancement, not time in training—people in apprenticeships tend to be more poorly paid than in their latter couple of years. In saying that, it is important to know that something like 60 per cent of people in Australian businesses today are paying their apprentices way above the set rate because there is a very competitive market out there now for quality people taking on apprenticeships. Good apprentices are able to say to their bosses, ‘Pay me more, or I am going to continue my apprenticeship down the road’—and well might they because, as it currently stands, there are too many jobs and not enough people for them in Australia today.

Australian Apprenticeships Centres already service Australian apprentices right across Australia. They will be explaining this initiative and providing claim forms to eligible Australian apprentices to claim access to it. Once the form has been completed and returned, the payment will be made directly into the Australian apprentice’s nominated bank account. It is as direct government assistance as you can possibly have, and it is important, as this legislation spells out, that it does not then impact on their social security system or taxation requirements. Some people are saying: ‘The initiative seems to be only available to younger apprenticeships. Why is this the case?’ We already announced in the Skills for the Future package last October a series of assistance to Australian apprentices aged 30 and above which will take effect from 1 July. They are a series of measures to back the lost generation who started, or maybe aspired to, an apprenticeship at a time when the government in power did all that it could to dissuade businesses from taking on apprentices. It talked down the concept of the trades, talked up, ‘If you do not have a university degree you are a dud’—that was the kind of language that we were hearing—and said to businesses, ‘If you hire mistakes you can’t get rid of them.’ The unfair dismissal laws under the industrial relations regime had a huge impact on businesses’ decisions to invest in themselves by taking on apprentices: if they hired a problem, how could they get rid of them, and so forth. Under the contract of training, apprentices have to meet the requirements to progress, and business also has a requirement to look after apprentices. Nevertheless, the psychology in Australian businesses was: ‘We do not want to take on people. Apprentices cost us more than we gain.’

Equally, the trade training system was geared around—and in most places it still is, as a result of the domination of the TAFE sector—businesses having to work in with when TAFE wants to operate. TAFE does not want to operate 24/7 and does not want to operate 52 weeks a year. Too many TAFEs are still operating 36 weeks a year from nine to four on Monday to Friday with only 20 hours of average student contact time per week. Those sorts of things drive businesses away from taking on apprentices, but the government is working with the states to bring about a change to that approach. There is a lot more proactivity coming out of the state owned TAFE system now than ever before.

The Skills for the Future package announced on 12 October last year handed older apprentices support for mid-career apprentice initiatives. In other words, it backed businesses and individual apprentices of an older age to make the decision to go and do what they wanted to do years ago when the Labor Party talked them out of their apprenticeships. Of the order of 30,000 people missed out on an opportunity to take on trade training when the Labor government was last in power. So much for the party that supposedly—in their rhetoric, anyway—represents the workers of Australia. As a result of the Skills for the Future package, eligible Australian apprentices aged 30 years or over will receive $150 per week—$7,800 per annum—in the first year of their apprenticeship training and $100 per week—$5,200 per annum—in their second year of training. Again, competency based advances could mean that some of these mature age apprentices will complete their formal training, once there has been a proper recognition of prior learning factored in, far faster than the traditional three- or four-year trade training approach.

As I said, this legislation very much encourages the take-up of part-time and Australian school based apprenticeships. Twenty years ago I started a part-time university degree, but 20 years ago you could not start a part-time apprenticeship. We are now starting to see more and more people being able to transition from one career to another. Any one of us in this place might want to be a plumber. Previously, we would have had to cease what we were doing here to start the training for a plumbing apprenticeship, but not anymore. More and more businesses are understanding the value of giving people an opportunity, in an arrangement that would vary from workplace to workplace, to start their work experience and their training—the competency-building exercise—and become an apprentice on a part-time basis. We are putting in place the measures available under this legislation on a pro rata basis. That means that the first $500 payment, rather than being paid after six months, will be available after 12 months. The second $500 will be available after the first 24 months, the third after 36 months and the fourth after 48 months. If you, Mr Deputy Speaker, or I decided that we wanted to gear ourselves towards the lucrative trade of plumbing—and the plumbing industry hates being made the butt of jokes about the fact that plumbers are paid more than lawyers; all I know is that whenever I have a problem with the plumbing I am awfully glad that they have the abilities that they have—then we could do thast over a period of years. Perhaps we would not qualify for this payment, but others might if they were doing it on a part-time basis.

This is yet another measure from a government that have shown themselves to be strongly supportive of the workers and the doers of Australia. We strongly stand in the corner of those who aspire to be a part of the workers and the doers in this country. We are not the party that represents the non-productive culture and class in Australia—we leave that to the opposition. The Liberal Party and the National Party represent those who work hard and aspire to do better. We want to say to the parents of young people—in the sit-down chats that I hope they will be able to have, in the discussions about career paths to come—that working with your hands and feeling a great sense of personal satisfaction in working with your hands is a noble path to follow. It is the people who work with their hands who are more likely than others to own the fancy beach houses at Noosa. It is important that we back them in every possible way.

I want to take a couple of moments to reflect on some comments that the member for Perth made—and I am sure that the minister will do this in his summing-up speech. It is extraordinary that the member for Perth showed himself to be a puppet of the Australian Education Union. We have had a series of education spokespeople from the opposition who have done this time and again, and in his contribution yesterday the member for Perth did it also. He was talking about completion bonuses, an opposition plan to make a payment at the end of people’s training. He fails to understand that the statistics from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research show very plainly that something like 90 per cent of people who move from an apprenticeship that they start, either by dropping out or moving to another one—the so-called non-completers, and this is where the non-completion rate is drawn from—do so in the first or second year of their apprenticeship. The fact that the government’s initiatives have been very much tied to the first and second year of training, when the wage pressures are greater, focuses the money better. Under Labor, you get $1,000 at the end of 24 months; under the government, you get $2,000, plus the $800 tool kit, something that those opposite never dreamed of. I make this point very clearly: this side, by its actions, not simply by its words, has backed those who decide to take on trade training in every possible way.

If you listened to what the member for Perth had to say yesterday, the other difference is that the ambition of the Labor Party—again using the Australian Education Union’s view of the world—is to have something like 2,500 trade training centres, one in every high school around Australia. That creates an impossible situation. Teachers in my electorate are laughing about this proposal. How are we going to find 2,500 additional carpentry teachers, 2,500 additional mechanics teachers and 2,500 additional plumbing teachers? It can only ever be a holding pattern with a very low-level type of training, rather than the certificate III and above training which the government is providing through things such as the Australian technical college initiative and, indeed, the school based apprenticeships initiative which is being used in Queensland and Victoria. Labor is trying to slow down kids’ progress and trying to entrench the fact that they cannot start a real apprenticeship until they finish year 12. That kind of slowing down of progress is further deteriorating the attraction of apprenticeships.

Apprenticeship wages are geared around someone starting an apprenticeship at 15 or 16, in the main. But Labor seems to always want them to start at 17 and 18. This is straight out of the Australian Education Union’s mouths. They want to keep kids in the school until year 12 because it justifies the money that they want the school system rather than the vocational education system to have. I also believe that, under Labor’s enterprise approach on this, one of the first lessons would be to show them how to join a union, because under a Labor government it will be ‘no ticket, no start’, and everybody in Australia understands that.

This government is instead saying, ‘We’ll back personal initiative and personal ambition.’ We want to give a hand up to those who are unable, perhaps through the restrictions in wages that they face in their first couple of years of training, to justify taking on that training to start with. We will give them the extra assistance—assistance that was never on the books and never available under the previous Labor government. In every possible way, the Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up for Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007 furthers the ambition of this government to have a work-ready, capable and well-skilled Australian workforce for the decades ahead. The challenges are enormous in an environment in which there are so many jobs and not enough people. The competitive opportunities that kids have the power to choose from are immense. The earlier we get the kids involved in trade training the better, and the more encouragement they hear from people such as us, regardless of our political complexion, the better. I would simply ask Labor members to speak about things in that kind of positive way. They need to talk up the ambitions of the trades. I see that the member for Batman is next, and I am sure that he will. But there are others on the other side who frankly do not get it and do not understand the value of doing things with your hands.

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