Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I will return to some of the comments made by the member for Casey in terms of the debate about the Skills Australia Bill 2008. He did stray from the topic quite considerably. I guess there will be opportunities at different times to return to the issues that were canvassed in relation to trade centres in the secondary school system. But the bill before us tonight has come to the chamber as a priority piece of legislation. It was decided to fast-track the creation of Skills Australia to do a number of things, including to help lift the productive capacity of our economy by dealing with the very severe skill shortages that exist. It seems the member for Casey is still finding it hard to acknowledge the profound problem that we have in terms of those skill shortages. In trying to address that systemic problem, we hope that it will also help in the commitment that we have to fight inflation.

As the member for Gorton indicated in his contribution, we hope the outcome of this legislation will lead to the provision of some additional 450,000 training places. With a sense of urgency, as I understand it, the first 20,000 of these places will be coming onstream by 4 April. Very importantly, over the four-year period, up to 65,000 additional apprenticeships will be supported. I think that gives you a sense of the urgency and the dimension of the problem that the minister and this side of the chamber are trying to comprehend and deal with.

You only have to look at report after report from a range of employer organisations to heed the warnings—and the alarm bells should have been ringing a long time before. Over the period of the life of the Howard government it seems all we had were knee-jerk reactions and ad hoc decisions, but it was really a failure to grasp the fundamental problems in the economy. According to even recent AiG reports that I looked at, they talk about the fact that one in two firms are still experiencing difficulties obtaining skilled labour and yet one in five young adults have not completed year 12 or a certificate III vocational qualification. So I think it would be wrong to see, as the member for Casey did, this as our only response to the issue of apprenticeship training and upgrading of skills and the skill shortage. There will be a whole raft of complementary initiatives and programs that will be undertaken by the Rudd Labor government.

This is a very important issue. The government’s own estimates show Australia facing a shortage of more than 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years. That is a huge problem that we are contending with. It is a big challenge made greater by the fact that, according to the Ai Group, nearly 90 per cent of all available jobs now require a post-school qualification. But, as we know—and I know it is the case in my electorate—around half of our current workforce lack these qualifications. So there is a great need to also upskill the existing workforce in higher levels of skill attainment.

These skill shortages—certainly in my own region—span right across our regional economy from unskilled jobs through to managerial and professional occupations but, very importantly, in the skilled trades we have a major problem throughout Australia. It is a problem that the former government really did not comprehend in terms of the magnitude of the issue. As the member for Gorton made very clear, the Reserve Bank had been warning of the consequences of skill shortages for more than a decade and continues to talk about the capacity constraints that the skill shortages are creating in our economy. The interrelationship between capacity constraints and the inflation genie being out of the bottle is one thing that is of concern to us all.

The member for Casey resorted to the usual obfuscation that members of the Howard government did when they were on this side of the chamber. I think he made reference to the record level of apprenticeships under the Howard government. The fact is, of course, that the Howard government and its ministers were very adept at obfuscating the issue of just what an apprenticeship was, and combining apprenticeships with traineeships to inflate the figures. In fact, I think our record under Labor prior to the Howard government stands up pretty well.

Over the 11 years that the Howard government were in office, the average annual number of traditional trade apprenticeships was about 120,000. This compares to the 137,000 annual average traditional trade apprenticeships under the previous Labor government. So in fact we had a better record than was occurring under the Howard government, despite the fact that they were constantly berating the then opposition as being an opposition that had lost sight of the importance of traditional trades training and the apprenticeship system. The facts tell quite a different story. I think it would be wise for the member for Casey and the shadow minister to have a look at the record of the Howard government.

We also know that when the Howard government were first elected there were substantial cuts to the TAFE and vocational system. They reduced Commonwealth investment by about 13 per cent in the three years to the year 2000. After that, despite the huge unmet demand and thousands of people being turned away, the allocations increased by roughly one per cent between 2000 and 2004. So I do not think the record is as the member for Casey has tried to portray it this evening.

I said earlier that the member for Casey resorted to obfuscation on the issue. I can remember the Howard government saying that 544,000 people completed apprenticeships over the last four years. The truth was quite different to that. Of the 142,000 apprenticeship completions in 2006—the apprenticeships as they were determined by the government, which included traineeships—less than half of those, just 56,000, were in the traditional trades. So they have got away with a lot of obfuscation and a lot of inappropriate criticism being directed to the then opposition about our lack of regard for the area of trade training and apprenticeships.

The member for Casey got up and made a virtue out of the Australian technical colleges. Really, when you look at the half a billion dollars spent on a stand-alone network of Australian technical colleges, that at best will only produce 10,000 graduates by 2010, you have to wonder what the merits are in the duplication of services and the wasteful expenditure of taxpayer funds that we saw invested in these colleges. The member for Casey talked about the issue of scale. Let me tell you, down in the Illawarra the scale was very small. I hope I am absolutely correct: I think the projected enrolment for the first year of our college was 50, and they did not make that; and, in 2008, the projected enrolment of 191 students simply will not be met. And yet the Rudd Labor government, in honouring the contracts that were entered into, is about to spend up to $13.6 million in building a brand new building for this small number of students. I do not think one can justify that at all. I think the Howard government’s belief that somehow these ATCs were the centrepiece of their attempt to deal with the skills crisis has been found very wanting.

In conclusion I just want to say that I am delighted that the Minister for Education and Minister for Employment and Workplace Relations has brought this bill to parliament very early in its sitting. It establishes the urgency with which we are dealing with this huge problem—a problem that has been building up over the last decade, a problem that came as no surprise to anybody, a problem that was talked about by employer organisations, by the ACTU and by a whole raft of people, including the TAFE directors. We all saw it coming, and the government’s response was too little, too late.

The member for Casey bemoans the fact that some of the programs that had been instituted are not going to continue into the future. I guess the reason for that would be that many of those ad hoc responses were not sufficient to deal with the endemic problem of skills shortages. This new body, Skills Australia, will provide the Rudd government with high-quality advice about current, emerging and future skills needs in Australia. It will have industry as its focus and will try to identify priority skills and training needs. Skills Australia will also provide advice on the allocation of skills training places, and those training places will be allocated according to industry demand.

I think this is a great initiative. I commend the minister for the speedy way in which she has managed to bring this legislation to the parliament. It shows the urgency of the problem and the fact that we are really serious about it. We believe that this new authority will provide our government with strategic advice about current and future skills needs so that our policy response and programs can do much more to address the gap between the demand for and the supply of skilled labour and skilled workers, which was sadly neglected by the former Howard government.

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