Tony Smith (Casey, Liberal Party, Shadow Minister for Education, Apprenticeships and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I will just take a brief moment to support the earlier remarks of the shadow minister for employment participation, apprenticeships and training, the member for Boothby, on behalf of the opposition. As he said, we give this bill qualified support but we do so thinking that there are a number of pitfalls and potential flaws that the new government should very much take heed of. Let me first of all deal with some of what the previous government did. Over a 12-year period from 1996 we had record apprenticeship funding and record apprenticeship growth. As the member for Boothby outlined, we introduced a range of incentives and initiatives to promote trades and apprenticeships. A great number of those—nearly all in fact—are being scrapped as the price of Skills Australia.

But let me first deal with some of the substance, as the member for Boothby did, and deal with the remarks of the previous speaker. Forecasting of this nature is notoriously difficult. I know the previous speaker acknowledged that. He also needs to acknowledge that the track record of this is not good, not just in Australia but anywhere in the world. That is a fact. Throughout the world no-one has done this well, and to put all of the eggs in one basket with this new body is certainly ambitious. If it works everyone will be happy. This is not a political point, but that needs to be recognised very much up front. As the member for Boothby said, the personnel of the seven-member board, how the board works, how those personnel interact with the industry skills councils and how all that plays out on the ground where it really matters will be critical. As he also said, creating places of itself looks and sounds good but creating a place does not mean that that place will be filled. In that sense, it will very much need to be the slickest and smoothest bureaucratic operation that this town has ever known if it is really going to work in the way those opposite hope it does.

As I said earlier, and as the shadow minister outlined in great detail, this body is being created at the cost of a number of key initiatives and incentives that were introduced by the previous government. Work skills vouchers are being scrapped, business skills vouchers are being scrapped and the Australian technical colleges are being scrapped. There are a range of other initiatives that are also being scrapped, including the living away from home allowance and, as we saw in the first days of this government, incentives for apprenticeships in the agricultural and horticultural areas. That is $47.7 million worth of cuts. We point out in this debate that those cuts are not in keeping with the government’s pre-election commitments at all. That has been acknowledged by those in the agricultural and horticultural sectors. The previous government pledged that none of the incentives whatsoever—

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