Gary Gray (Brand, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Resources) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the subject of trade training and the importance of trade-training centres. Next week will see the opening of a nearly $30 million trade-training centre in Rockingham, funded in the main by the Commonwealth government—over $20 million worth of funding from the Commonwealth government to build the new Building Technology Centre on Dixon Road in Rockingham. This centre will not just be state of the art; this will be the most modern trade-training centre in the Commonwealth. It supplies trade skills to the industrial strip of Kwinana but, most importantly, it will supply the skills and the training to build the careers of the people who build the houses that house Western Australians.

I am extremely proud that this facility is the result of a Commonwealth government investment in trade training in a community for whom skills, apprenticeships and trade training are so important. With the electrical trades skills, roof-fixing skills and plasterboarding skills that are so important to the homebuilding of the future, an investment like this in brand-new technology for over 350 young apprentices or pre-apprentices in Rockingham, Kwinana and the Kwinana area is so very important. It is important too that it opens next week. We all celebrate that fact. (Time expired)

See this speech in context