Peter Garrett (Kingsford Smith, Australian Labor Party, Minister for School Education, Early Childhood and Youth) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Fowler for his question. The government certainly understands that investment in skills is absolutely critical to enabling people to remain in the workforce, particularly in an economy that is modernising, and to enable Australia to be competitive in that economy. We are taking a number of important investment steps to make sure that we do skill up our workforce, not only for people who are in the workforce now but for kids who are starting on their education journey through school and high school, into vocational training and out into the workforce.

In the last three years, there has been an investment of nearly $11 billion in improving skills and training, compared with some $6.8 billion under the Howard government. There are record numbers of apprentices and trainees improving their skills and their future employment opportunities. Importantly, in the last budget, where there was a strong emphasis on skills, again there was one of the largest ever skills package that we have seen—some $3 billion invested over six years—driving a new skills and participation agenda, with a particular emphasis on what we on this side believe is crucial, and that is modernising our apprenticeship system. We have seen incentives for apprentices and employees totalling approximately $1.1 billion just over the last financial year, and there are encouraging signs in apprenticeship take-up.

But we do note that around 40 per cent of working Australians—that is some 4.5 million working Australians—do not have adequate literacy skills for employment. That is certainly the case for those who are unemployed, and we need to do something about that. So there are investments, specifically $500 million up to 2010, for those in the workforce; but, importantly, we are also conducting the first ever collection of national early development indexed data, which tells us how our kids are placed when they start on their learning journey. This is a world first, something that we on this side of the House are very proud of. It measures a range of indices—physical health and wellbeing, social competence, emotional maturity and the like—to give us a sense of the kind of investment and policies we need when kids are starting out on their learning journey.

In addition, we have a significant overall investment in education. I spoke about it yesterday in the House—some $65 billion that this government is investing, almost double what was invested by the previous government. Of particular note are the investments in things like literacy and numeracy. We know that literacy and numeracy are the basics, the building blocks, for people on their education journey, and we on this side of the House have committed some $540 million to make sure that literacy and numeracy support is in place so that people can go on to get good jobs.

Finally, I cannot help but mention the investment in trade training centres. As anyone who has been in a trade training centre—and I know there are many on this side of the House—knows, this is something that this Gillard Labor government is very proud of. Every kid in Australia will get the opportunity of skills training in first-class facilities so that they will have skills in the workforce into the future. It is absolutely central to our agenda. I was asked whether there were any obstacles to this investment. The fact is that the obstacle sits opposite. The opposition—Mr Abbott and Mr Pyne, who has been thrown out of the House yet again—

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