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

It is my pleasure to speak to the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 today in the short period before question time. I will conclude my comments later in the day. The purpose of this bill is to amend the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Act 2005. In effect the act provides funding for colleges over the period 2005 to 2009. This bill is providing further funds for three more technical colleges to be placed around Australia. Those colleges are to be located in Penrith, Western Sydney; north of Perth, which I will come back to shortly; and south of Brisbane.

It is amazing to come into this place and find the opposition saying, ‘We support the bill,’ while subliminally they are out there trying to trash the whole concept of technical and further education in this country by saying that they will hand it back to the union bosses. I will demonstrate this shortly. It is what has happened in Perth in technical education.

In terms of the argument that the opposition raise about skills not being provided, the Prime Minister did the right thing in 2004—realising that Australia needed a shot in the arm to enhance the skills level of our young people, he created the opportunity for Australian technical colleges because the state governments, along with the previous federal Labor government, had dropped the ball on this issue. To demonstrate this, before we took office in 1996 the Australian Labor Party had driven down the level of apprenticeships in this country to just over 100,000. What did they replace them with? They replaced them with these so-called short training courses. You might recall Bill Hunter on those very expensive ads saying, ‘We now have all these people that are job ready and ready to go to work.’ They were not. They were only trained for three months. If you really want a bricklayer slapping up your house for you after a three-month training course, you are going to have a very teetering edifice some time later. These three-month, mickey mouse courses that were being run by the previous Labor minister, the member for Hotham, were a shame.

What have we done? We have put into place greater emphasis on and funding for apprenticeships. The proof of the pudding is that the number of apprenticeships has gone from 105,000 in 1996, when the Howard government took over, to well over 400,000 now—four times the number of apprenticeships are available to young people in Australia now, compared to what the Labor party offered. And they say they are the friend of the workers. It is cant and hypocrisy for the Labor Party to talk about supporting the workers. They do not support the workers; they were the ones who gave them record unemployment. What has this government done? Given 30-year record levels of employment. The best thing you can do for a worker is give them a job. If you really want to look after the workers in this country and not just talk about it—not use weasel words but really do something for a worker—make sure they get a job. They have a greater chance of getting a job if they have a skill.

In this case the Australian government realised that the state governments, through their technical colleges, had dropped the ball on apprenticeships in this country. So, correctly, the Prime Minister identified areas of greatest skills shortage. The Labor Party bang on, saying, ‘They’re not up to capacity and they haven’t graduated anyone.’ Of course they have not graduated anyone—they have only been going for a couple of years. We do not run three-month mickey mouse courses like they did. Of course it is going to take a few years for them to get through. It is for students in years 11 and 12, and it takes two years for them to get through the system in any case, so of course it is going to take more than three months to get through these training schedules.

At the end of the day, these courses are producing real jobs because they provide real skills. For example, in my own vicinity, the Perth South technical college is providing real technical skills for the construction industry, such as carpentry, and in auto-electrics and mechanics. These will lead to greater jobs. At the moment, if you are a young person with an apprenticeship in mechanics and you end up in the Pilbara, you are going to end up with a job paying far greater than my job in this House today. The real rich of this country are the young people who have a transportable skill and are using it to its best effect to access high-paid jobs, not only in the mining industry but throughout Australia.

What is the alternative? The Labor Party want to take these well-constructed colleges and put them back into the hands of the state governments. By doing that, they would be putting them back into a hole in the ground, because we know that the technical colleges at a state level at the moment are top heavy with administrators and short of good-quality teachers. Teachers are in short supply all over Australia. They say they will put money into secondary schools, but they cannot even fill the schools with teachers at the moment. How are they going to put all these extra trade teachers into secondary schools when they cannot even provide enough teachers for schools in Western Australia at the moment?

This is hypocrisy at its worst. The Labor Party are saying one thing and trying to do another. With their mates in the state governments they are trying to collapse Australian technical colleges by going to the schools and saying: ‘Whatever you do, don’t you talk to the people involved in running the Australian technical colleges. We don’t want you to have any of your students go into those colleges, because we can’t control them. We like to control the supply of blue-collar and trade-skilled workers. If these students go through your system, the union bosses will have no opportunity to grab them and dragoon them into their industries and unions and to control them that way.’ I will continue my comments after question time because I have greater information on the state governments and federal Labor trying to subvert the success of the technical colleges.

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