Nick Champion (Wakefield, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak in support of the Trade Support Loans Bill 2014. Like everything that the Abbott government do, there is a nasty surprise in this set of arrangements around trades. On the face of it, the government have kept their commitment—that is, they are implementing this loan-based scheme. We find and we discussed last week that they are cutting a whole lot of programs that assist apprenticeships and apprentices. The key program is Tools for Your Trade—not a mention about cutting that program before the election, not one skerrick or intimation to the people of Australia that they might consider cutting that program. Yet here we find this nasty action post election.

We hear those opposite talking about these programs, but the effect of their actions is to stop people joining the middle class. Whether you are studying for a degree or undertaking an apprenticeship, they want to saddle you with debt and, when you remerge from your period of training, the consequences will be that you will put off buying a house, starting a family and starting a business, because of these debts being loaded onto apprentices in this case but all other students and trainees.

This goes against the Australian compact. We heard those opposite talking about mutual obligation. There is an obligation on individuals to do well, train hard and advance themselves then they give back to this country by paying taxes and being good citizens. This scheme will break that compact and insert onerous debt in its place.

Labor has always been the party of trades and, if you look at the Labor Party's No.1 most quoted Prime Minister, Chifley, was a tradesman. He was a locomotive driver, which was a trade in those days. He gave technical education lectures in Newcastle. The Labor movement more generally has been a movement of tradespeople. We have done many things over the years: protecting and advancing wages; making sure that employers had the required number of apprenticeships; and pushing more training numbers through the economy through actions on the shop floor and the floor of this parliament.

Tools for Your Trade is a classic example of this—a grant to help apprentices with their No. 1 cost: tools. It was a good program, and there are lots of other good programs like the National Partnership Agreement on Training Places for Single and Teenage Parents, and the Australian Apprenticeships Mentoring Program. There are a lot of programs that have been cancelled by this government which were there to help not just the recipients of the schemes but also employers.

Trades in Wakefield have always been a topic of a lot of discussion. We have the Roseworthy Campus at Adelaide University, which is a working campus, where people learn professions. They go to work on farms as vets and previously on vineyards and the like. It is very much a university campus which is linked to work. Our view of higher education and technical education has always been about that link to work. If you look at the schemes that used to exist in the electorate at Holden, DSTO or many of the textile factories in this area, it was very much where you trained to get a trade. It was the height of work in many ways. There was never any snobbery or inverse snobbery towards trades. It was properly seen as a very important part of our economy and it continues to be.

Places like St Patrick's Technical College, which has always done a very good job, emerged from what was a troubled program, the Australian Technical Colleges program, under the Howard government, but it was always a very good school and that is why it found support from the previous government and the Catholic education system. It is a good school that trains about 300 students who do school based apprenticeships in years 11 and 12. On their website today, I saw that Geoff Goodfellow, a workplace poet, rather famous in South Australia, had visited the young students, the apprentices, and given them a different view of work. We know that that school does a really good job in the local area.

Likewise Craigmore High School—and I cannot speak more highly of this program—has got school based apprenticeships which are linked directly to jobs like SA Power Networks. They have been very supportive of a program that links young people who are at school with real work opportunities in the electricity power network to the extent that that school has got a Stobie pole—a very famous thing in South Australia—out the back for young people to train on. When you see young 15-, 16- and 17-year-old apprentices and students training on the pole with proper harnesses, learning what it is like to be at work, getting a feel for being a linesman, I know that this is a program which directly benefits not just the school but SA Power Networks.

Likewise at Balaklava high, which is a country high school in my electorate, the students there drive very modern tractors on their parents' farms at harvest time. When they went to school under the Howard government, they had to drive a tractor that was probably 20 or 30 years old. It had no GPS or any mod cons. It was an anathema to modern farming. One of the important things that that school did with its trade school program was to buy a new, modern tractor so that they could train students in modern practices. That school still has the old stooking machines—I reckon I might have been one of the last hay stookers around Kapunda. Those days have happily gone and now farmers work in a more efficient and more modern way.

We hear a lot from those opposite about the minister's comments about Tools For Your Trade. It travelled a long way. You can see their denigration of apprentices and of the trades. The minister's denigration of apprentices and the trades was repeated over and over again in this House during this debate. He said that the Tools For Your Trade program was somehow misallocated, misused or abused. It travelled as far as the Daily Mail. The headline was 'Tattoos, parties and cars: how apprentices are spending $1 billion in government grants for tools on "whatever"'.

That is a damaging message for a minister to put out there. It is a really damaging, nasty message for those opposite to put out there. And it is an unfair message because the reality is that most apprentices are very happy to get their apprenticeships and the completion rate has nothing to do with the sort of anecdotal garbage we hear from those opposite on this matter. It has to do with wages, how you are treated at work and whether the apprentice has the perception of a fair deal between the employer and themselves. All of that is outlined in the occasional paper 'Understanding the non-completion of apprentices' by Alice Bednarz from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. I know other speakers on my side of the House have talked about various reports, but I recommend this to those opposite because there is not one mention in this of tattoos, fast cars, parties or any of that. There is a lot of talk about the way apprentices feel in their first year of work, about whether they are welcomed and about whether they are properly mentored.

We know that in most cases the completion rate is higher with big employers and the completion rate is low with small employers, so we have to help small employers with those completion rates. We know from these sorts of reports that mentoring, wages and how you are treated at work are terrifically important. The idea of mutual obligation between the apprentice and the employer is tremendously important. This paper talks about the nature of that deal and says:

Apprentices will put up with a lot, including low wages, if what they get in return is fair … If they don’t get a fair deal, then any aspect of the apprenticeship—like pay, repetitive work or a lack of workmates—can become a source of dissatisfaction and restlessness and impact on their commitment and likelihood of completion.

That is on page 19 of this very good paper. I think it goes to the heart of some of those issues.

We need to have an honest debate about completion rates. Some of the programs Labor put in place were about having an honest debate to try to address the reasons why people do not complete their apprenticeships. This government has cut all of those programs—not just Tools For Your Trade but the others I mentioned: all the mentoring programs and the programs where a small business might get some assistance in helping an apprentice in their first and second years. They are the things that have been savagely cut in this budget. What have they been replaced by? A loan. Those opposite might hail this loan as a great deal, the best loan that someone will ever get and all the rest of it, but we know what is going to happen to that loan. Slowly over time those conditions will be removed and an onerous interest rate will be put on, the loan book will be sold to a private provider and apprentices will be pursued by debt collectors and the like. It will be a very unfair system.

As I said before, what it will be all about is loading individuals up with debt. If they cannot take on that debt or do not have any capacity to service that debt, it will delay them entering the middle class, buying a home, beginning a family and starting a business. That will be the practical effect of these loans and these debts. That will be the practical effect of the Abbott government's intentions in this area not just in relation to those on the tools but those undertaking a higher education degree. Often there is a misnomer put about by those opposite that you can do either trades or a degree, but we know in the modern world so many people often do both. That is a good thing, not a bad thing, and that should be encouraged.

What we have got is the Abbott government damaging trades, shifting the obligation onto young apprentices, making the deal worse, making that idea of mutual obligation worse, not addressing the real issues in relation to completion rates and delaying people's entry into the middle class. This is a particularly savage thing for the government to do. Like with so much of those opposite's rhetoric, beneath the thin veneer of gloss there is endemic rust on the middle class of Australia. It is savage and wrong. We should not put up with it. We are going to support these bills but we do not support where this government is going in relation to apprenticeships, higher education and the entry of people into the middle class of this country.

Debate adjourned.

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