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

I thank the member for Blair, who happens to have the Ipswich Trade Training Centre in his electorate. At that trade training centre, high school kids get the opportunity to go up to a Certificate III in automotive. That is an important message that I want to emphasise as I answer the question that the member asked me. The fact is that this government is strongly committed to making sure that young Australians have the right education and the right skills training so that they can get good jobs for the future, jobs in the new economy. We recognise that the link between education and skills and future productivity and the link between education and skills and job certainty is a very, very direct one.

That evidence can be seen in the commitment in spending on education by the Gillard Labor government, which has nearly doubled the spending of the Howard years. In particular, the evidence can be seen by looking at the commitment that we have made to kids learning the basic skills of literacy, numeracy and mathematics under NAPLAN testing. The evidence can be seen in the very welcome figures that we saw about the numbers of young women who are going on to university to learn, which show that we are ahead of the target that we as a government have set. The evidence can be seen in the commitment that we have to invest in trade training centres, and we already have funded projects benefiting over 1,000 schools around Australia. They are terrific facilities, as members behind me know very well, because they are places where students can get hands-on experience and good vocational learning that sets them up for life with skills in that career path. It is evidence too that those people who might want to work in industries like automotive can start getting on that skills pathway in those trade training centres.

Before the last election, the opposition promised to cut over $1 billion from the Trade Training Centres in Schools Program. That would have meant that tens of thousands of young kids who might have chosen not to go to university but who might have wanted to get those skills under their belt would have been denied that opportunity. That is not an opportunity that this government is going to deny them. In particular, I make this simple point: Mr Abbott does not seem to get it about what we are doing for young people in schools. When we made the announcement that we would help eligible families with teenagers aged 16 to 19 to have a boost in family payments so that they could stay at school or in vocational training he said on 2UE on 28 November:

I guess I would want to carefully study this and make sure that the right kids are getting the money and that we really were keeping the right kids at school.

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