Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Like a number of other speakers on this side, when I saw the MPI I thought we must have put it up. It is about the 'government's failure to properly invest in Australian skills training and education, and its impact on Australian jobs'. In 2007, the then Labor Prime Minister Kevin Rudd declared a war on skills shortages. He announced $2.5 billion for Trades Training Centres in all of Australia's 2,650 secondary schools. The problem is they only spent $1.4 billion of that money, which is over half, and they started the allocations for 511 of these Trades Training Centres—servicing 1,297 schools—but only 320 of these are actually up and running. So they have spent over half the money for 25 per cent of the actual number of Trades Training Centres, but only 12 per cent of them have actually been operating. So where will the rest of the money come from?

When we are talking about properly investing in education and training in this country, and allocating the right amount of funds, they have fallen at the first level, in the same way they have with so many things, whether it is the Early Childhood Learning Centres or the GP Super Clinics, which we have been hearing so much about. At every level the previous Labor government came out and made these grand promises about delivering all these magnificent things, yet when it came to implementation they have fallen at the very first hurdle.

The problem with the previous Labor government is that they think that writing something on paper actually delivers it. It does not. You have to actually employ the tradespeople to do it. When Labor came to office in 2007 Australia had a perfectly good technical college system. We had a fantastic one in Townsville for instance. The best part about what this government did to it—and it shows you what their commitment to education is—is that they made the Townsville technical college change their name from the Australian Technical College North Queensland to Tec-NQ, at a cost of $50,000. And then they just pulled their funding. That was their commitment to school based education. Tec-NQ is still providing these quality services; they are still working as an RTO. Those are the sorts of things the previous government did. They just pulled the funding out, proving they just do not get education when it comes to these things.

We are shifting the VET sector out of education and into industry, because we believe that is where the focus should be. The focus should be on outcomes and on jobs. All the way through we have seen the previous government get up and talk about what their commitment has been. Last week I heard an absolute cracker about how the former government was working on bettering education and on job placements. During a Certificate II in Active Volunteering, you did not have to volunteer. Part of the course on active volunteering was that you did not have to volunteer. All the way through a Certificate II course on active volunteering you did not have to volunteer. Only Labor could do that.

The Education and Employment Committee is going to actually finish off the work of the 43rd Parliament, because we want to make sure that TAFEs in particular are not being hurt. TAFEs have to do a very big job when it comes to the capital work, and to the big trades. We want to make sure all the other RTOs are not just taking the cream off and making TAFE a stand-alone facility where the capital cost is high, making them a target for cuts. This is because we believe in the TAFE sector, and we believe in the VET sector.

We have real challenges in youth unemployment, and they are not all related to training, skills and education. The member for Brand spoke earlier about refining. One of the key things to making sure that refining works is to make sure that your input costs are low. The one thing you do if you want to make sure that you keep jobs in manufacturing and refining is keep your electricity costs low, and you do not introduce a carbon tax. That makes people shift refining, and other energy intensive occupations and practices, overseas. The Abbott government is committed to real job growth; the Abbott government will deliver on jobs and education. We are a good government.

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