Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It is possible that the Australian skills college in the member for Herbert’s electorate may be the best-performing college in the country, given that the rest of them have been an abysmal failure and an extreme waste of taxpayers’ money—misdirected public funds.

I start by congratulating the member for Bendigo on what is an important motion, one that goes to the very heart of the many challenges we face as a nation when it comes to securing Australia’s long-term economic prosperity. These challenges include lifting Australia’s flagging productivity growth rate, reinvigorating Australia’s manufacturing and industry sectors by introducing new government initiatives aimed at fostering a greater emphasis on innovation, tackling Australia’s skills crisis by investing in the education and training that are crucial in today’s knowledge economy and reinvigorating workplace relations and workplace practices to better achieve these ends. As this motion argues, equal weight needs to be given to each of these areas.

My own electorate of Calwell is home to a large manufacturing base. As anyone with any involvement in the sector knows, the news has not been good for Australian manufacturing and industry over the last decade. The reasons for this are many and varied and involve both domestic and external factors. On the one hand, we live in an increasingly competitive global environment, where the competition for resources, skills and technical expertise, as well as access to both emerging and established markets, has become more and more pronounced. On the other hand, a downturn in some of Australia’s key economic indicators, like productivity growth, export growth and our diminished skills base, reveals the extent of the former Howard government’s failure to plan for Australia’s future by investing in the drivers of economic growth—in skills, education and training, innovation, technology and infrastructure.

In the last years of the Howard government, productivity growth rates fell from an average of 3.3 per cent a year in the five years leading up to 1998-99 to just 1.1 per cent. The same story is repeated when you look at the figures for Australia’s export industry. Australian manufacturing has fared particularly badly, managing only a three per cent increase in export growth compared with an average growth rate of 13 per cent since 1983—and this is despite the fact that world trade has grown at twice the rate of world output over the last five years. The net result was, of course, 70 consecutive months of trade deficits under the former Howard government and a current account deficit that has reached record levels. Simply blaming today’s competitive global environment ignores the important role we can and must play in this place when it comes to showing leadership and getting the policy settings right, especially in areas like industry and trade. That is why the Rudd Labor government has adopted a coordinated approach to tackling the economic challenges Australia faces both now and in the future, significantly boosting government investment in education through our education revolution initiatives, committing $4.7 billion to build Australia’s first national broadband network, introducing new industry policies like the government’s Green Car Partnership Program and establishing Infrastructure Australia, charged with providing a strategic blueprint for Australia’s current and future infrastructure needs.

In concert with these efforts, this motion draws attention to the additional productivity gains on offer when Australian companies adopt best practice models in creating working environments that foster creativity, innovation and strong working relationships amongst employees. Research shows that companies that encourage creativity and independent thinking among their employees clearly outperform those companies which do not. Building a strong corporate culture that values innovation, creativity and respect between employees and employers promises to pay enormous dividends for Australian companies in increased productivity, faster revenue growth and higher rates of job creation. This, of course, is an alternative route to the one taken by the former Howard government with its unfair Work Choices laws. The logic behind Work Choices was very simple: it sought to tackle today’s economic challenges by targeting the wages and conditions of working Australians and by robbing them of their basic rights. Under Work Choices, working families alone were being asked to carry the burden of these challenges.

This is not the answer. Rather, the answer lies in investing in our own people, in skilling our workforce and in encouraging a culture of innovation in our workplaces. It includes tackling infrastructure bottlenecks that place enormous constraints on our economy and encouraging best practice models when it comes to building Australian workplace environments conducive to these and other efforts. I am, therefore, happy to support this motion and to again commend the member for Bendigo. (Time expired)

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