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

I am delighted to speak in support of the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 because this is another element showing the success of the Australian government’s Australian technical colleges program, a program which was promised during the last election campaign. This program not only has met the expectations created in that promise but has now exceeded those expectations in every possible way. Originally there were to be 24 colleges, with $343 million allocated over four years. That was the figure promised during that election campaign. With this legislation we will see further funding of almost $75 million. This will mean an expansion of the original program. The government found, through the community consultation process which it undertook in the early part of this parliamentary term, that the ambitions of local communities around Australia to have an Australian technical college were very strong indeed.

The Australian Labor Party have fought this tooth and nail in every possible way. Labor members come in here, one after another, and say, ‘We are quite in favour of any additional funding to education,’ but it is an iron fist inside a velvet glove. The Labor Party, through the state governments, through education unions around this country and even in members’ utterances in this place, have shown complete contempt for local communities around this nation.

Twenty-four original localities were identified, 25 colleges were eventually announced and a further three were announced in the budget, to expand the program to a total of 27 regions around this country. This means that, while the Australian Labor Party may do all they can to try to prevent this program from occurring, communities right across the nation are very much in favour of the idea of working with the Australian government in this way.

The thing the Labor Party does not get about the Australian technical colleges program is that it is all about trust. It is all about (1) a very clear statement from the Australian government that additional resources are available and (2) local communities being trusted to spend the money in a way that works for them.

There is a big, glaring misunderstanding that is inspired by Labor’s first point of duty, which is to whatever the union movement demands, not to the local communities that Labor members are meant to serve and that they are elected to serve. It is not always understood that the people in local communities around the country that support Labor candidates do not end up with a local member: all they end up with in this place is a delegate from the union movement. It is a great pity that so many communities do not get the kind of service that they should from their local members. Why is it that local members have come into this chamber and argued against a program which provides additional resources to fund the educational opportunities of year 11 and 12 students? Why is it that Labor members, one after another, get up and demand that the moneys simply go to state governments, in spite of the fact that people did not trust state governments to deliver, particularly on core services such as education, police and hospitals?

A third of the money that goes from the Australian government to state governments in education resources gets lost in the bureaucracy of those state governments. They will spend it on card-carrying members of the Labor Party who are in the bureaucracy, ahead of resourcing the area it should go to—that is, the teacher-student equation. I see students in the gallery here today. I am not sure what school they are from, but the key thing that they need to know is that this side—the Liberal-National parties side of this chamber—believe that the No. 1 priority when it comes to education spending is the relationship between professional educators or teachers and their students.

What the government has done during this term is find a number of new ways to resource people directly, to cut the very expensive middleman out of the equation. By funding directly local community consortia through the Australian technical colleges program, we are able to see more people engaged in school based apprenticeships and employment opportunities, earning while they learn. We see less money spent on paying big dollars to bureaucrats and education head officers, all of whom have to have a membership card from the Labor Party to be able to advance into those positions. I have yet to be proved wrong on that claim on the many occasions that I have made it. We have prioritised ahead of anything else the advancement of local students and their opportunities to do so.

What the Australian technical colleges program has done is re-establish the status of the nation-building skills at the heart of the important trades that are being targeted by this agenda. We have reversed the decline which the Australian Labor Party presided over. There were just 30,000 people in training when we came to office; there are now 400,000. The so-called ‘workers party’ forgot about the workers and about promoting the opportunity for young people to go into trades. They talked the trades down and, instead, promoted non-productive elements in society ahead of the trades. They forgot that, if you do not have people with electrical, plumbing, carpentry and motor mechanics skills, nothing in Australia can work. This side, however, have understood clearly that the challenge for Australia’s workforce base is to make sure that it is competent and capable and that there is prestige attached to the core skills which underpin the way in which our society operates.

We are the ones who stood for the workers. We are the ones who promoted the value of the trades and have made sure that tradespeople and other people in the workforce have been able to enjoy a pay rise in the order of 20 per cent over the last decade. With those opposite, it was at minus two per cent—they went backwards.

The Australian technical colleges bill fits into a broader picture of the way in which Australia operates today versus the way it did when Labor were last in office. It also provides real proof of the way in which we are gearing up for the long-term, sustainable good of Australia and championing the way young people should be rewarded for the abilities they get. We are also about saying to the business community, ‘The best investment you can make in your business is in your people.’ That is not simply an investment in the trade skills to get them started in the business but also an investment in retraining them. The Australian technical colleges program very deliberately says this to the business community, who have bemoaned for years their absolute dissatisfaction with the way institutional trade training through the TAFEs has turned out apprentices who have a piece of paper but who do not necessarily have the real-world skills that they need. We have challenged the business community to put up or shut up, to get involved. That is why there is a very clear difference in the way that the Australian technical colleges program operates. It demands that a real employer chair the board of the community consortium and that the board be dominated by a simple majority of employers. What is absolutely vital is that the business community knows that there is a difference in the way this system operates, compared to others.

This system is also a fast track to the real outcomes of real trade apprenticeships because it means that young people can start a trade apprenticeship while they are actually at school, in years 11 and 12. The school based apprenticeship program was something that was announced a decade ago when David Kemp was the minister responsible. It was only the state of Queensland that grabbed hold of this in the early days, when former Senator Santoro was the Queensland minister for trade training, and Bob Quinn, the former Queensland Liberal Party leader, was the Queensland education minister. Those two gentlemen grabbed hold of school based apprenticeships and introduced them into Queensland; the Queensland government of today have kept them going. The point I make is that trade training while kids are doing years 11 and 12 studies is a very regular part of the Queensland school experience these days. It has also become a very regular part of the Victorian school experience.

Yet another way in which the Labor Party have fought the Australian technical colleges program tooth and nail is demonstrated by the way state governments have reacted. The union control of the New South Wales education system is legendary. Nothing works in New South Wales unless the New South Wales Teachers Federation say it is allowed to work. From their point of view, the Australian technical colleges program has to be defeated, and they are still doing all they can to defeat it in that state. It is a great pity that the biggest economy in the country offered no school based apprenticeships until this year. It was dragged kicking and screaming to this very sensible program, a program which has not caused the sky to fall in either in Queensland or in Victoria. The New South Wales government has this year finally begun to offer school based apprenticeships.

In New South Wales, when the technical colleges program was announced, it was a no-go zone, yet there were eight colleges announced there. The fact that local communities wanted to take on the New South Wales government meant that it was met with a response of complete resistance to the cause. ‘Who cares what local communities think?’ say Labor. They say: ‘We want complete, centralised control and union domination of the spending of money. We’ll decide who wins and who fails. As far as we’re concerned, anything that offers a sense of trust and direct connection between the Commonwealth and local communities can’t be supported.’ That has been the approach of Labor.

The Victorian government is a partner on the board of three of the six Australian technical colleges there. The Victorian government had a completely different attitude. We welcome the fact that the Victorian government did not stand in the way of the Australian technical colleges program. I believe that, in each case, the colleges are going very well and will continue to go from strength to strength.

The arrogance of the Queensland Labor government is breathtakingly obvious. We have introduced sanctions on countries like Fiji for far less than the discretions we have seen in the way in which the Queensland government has been operating in recent days. The idea of denying democracy and threatening to imprison anybody who wants to embark on the democratic path of checking with the people about local government amalgamations is absolutely breathtaking. With technical colleges, the Queensland government also said, ‘We’re not going to stand in your way, but don’t expect any cooperation.’ They robbed state government students of the chance to attend an Australian technical college. The Queensland government’s attitude was, ‘Our way or the highway.’ The arrogance of then education minister, Anna Bligh, now Deputy Premier or Premier-in-waiting, was breathtaking—matched only by that of the current incumbent, Rod Welford.

South Australia had no idea what to do. To the credit of the South Australian government, they did cooperate when the Commonwealth bailed them out over the Adelaide South technical college proposal to purchase a former high school site—and the work of the member for Kingston made a difference.

In the case of Western Australia, the then education minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, was so bad that she had to be embarrassingly shuffled off to some other place. The Western Australian government refused to do anything. It has possibly the worst TAFE training system in Australia, yet the Western Australian government chose to do nothing but try and prevent the Australian technical colleges program. Tasmania became an active partner in the program, as did the Northern Territory.

I detail all of this based on my own personal, intimate knowledge about the early days, the formative months, the formative years, of the Australian technical colleges program. It is important to put on the record the inconsistency at best and the downright belligerence of the Australian Labor Party in doing all they could to stop this program. The alternative could have been a far stronger environment for the Australian technical colleges program. All we needed was the states to simply say, ‘We’ll trust local communities; we’ll let local communities make a decision.’ Instead, a central politburo style of education planning that says, ‘If we didn’t come up with the idea it can’t be any good’ seemed to prevail.

Even the Department of Education, Science and Training did not well understand what the Australian technical colleges program was all about in the early days. I suspect that some of the early technical colleges announcements were not as well founded as they are today. There was a sense of working with people, based on the surface statements of people like those in the South Coast of New South Wales and Wollongong consortium, which was beset with people from the education union, the TAFE union, who were doing all they could to prevent that particular technical college from growing in the way the community would have liked it to do. DEST advised the then minister on the best course to follow, and DEST’s advice was ambitious at the very least. The point is that education officials these days have a far clearer understanding than they did early on. In their defence, even though my criticism will probably have hurt them, it was brave new world stuff we were embarking upon.

A direct relationship between the Commonwealth and local communities is something we need to foster—a direct relationship built around a sense of trust. Furnishing resources to meet an ambition of a local community to give kids in those areas an opportunity is something that is worth while. What I find extraordinary is that member after member opposite will get up and say, ‘No, just give the money to the states.’ To do that would be to maintain a system that we already know has failed—a system that, in the case of six of the eight jurisdictions in this country, does not want to give people an opportunity to start a real certificate III plus apprenticeship in the trades.

It is only Queensland and Victoria that have their hearts in it. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales were dragged kicking and screaming to the table when it came to school based apprenticeships. How on earth are you going to give kids the power today to make the decisions for their tomorrow? How are you going to give them the right signals unless you engage with them early? The pressure now is not to keep kids in a holding pattern just so that their bottoms are on seats in nice neat rows in schools around this country and so that the education officials at head offices in all the different states and the Education Union officials in their little lofty ideals of centralised control are well satisfied that all is good in the kingdom of God. Why on earth they are not allowing kids their full range of opportunities as a given is beyond this particular member of parliament. Why is it that the circumstance and convenience of bureaucracy is more important than opportunities for young people?

The Australian technical colleges program is about saying to young people who have the ambition and the skills that, if they can meet and work with the employers who also have the ambition to grow their business by investing in people, that will produce great fruit. It will be about saying to young people at the age of 15: ‘If you have the mental capacity, the physical capacity and the ambition to learn a trade, society is going to back you. Society will not only back you but nurture you and pay you to earn while you learn, to start your apprenticeship while you are at school, to finish your years 11 and 12 academic studies and, at the same time, complete the early parts of your trade training requirements. It means that, by the time you have finished year 12, you have not only money in the bank, if you have saved it and you have been sensible, but also a credential that allows you to go on to further study at university if that is what you choose. It means you have work experience in the real world with an employer who wants to nurture you on to further trade training and it means that you can complete your overall trade competencies in a faster way than the system currently demands of you.’ It is wrong that our children are being used as some sort of fodder to maintain an education system that does not want to really educate them but just wants to keep the funds flowing through to employ people—bureaucracy—and at the end of it we might even pay our teachers some of the money they are worth.

I am very much in favour of the additional resources that are voted in this bill today. Apart from everything else, one of the three new Australian technical colleges will be on the south side of Brisbane. I am optimistic that the announcement will be made that the Education City consortia based on Springfield—and the construction training centre at Salisbury—will be a very positive thing for young people in my area. They are very used to doing school based apprenticeships through the various great state and non-government schools in my area, but the opportunity will also come their way for them to earn while they learn through a school based apprenticeship at the Australian Technical College Brisbane South. The money voted in this bill will make all of that possible. On that basis, I greatly commend this bill to the House.

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