Alannah Mactiernan (Perth, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

That is just for one item. 'Just borrow it!''

If we go back to the basics, we see there is a decline in the take-up of trade training in this country. We are going to go out and stimulate that. How are we going to stimulate that? We are going to remove a tax free grant, structured over the life of the training; we are going to take that away and give them a loan. That is really going to get people fired up; that is a much better deal!

Not only that, it does not actually deal with some of the real issues around the attrition rate of apprentices. The member for Parramatta set out some very good economic arguments as to why this structure certainly will not be conducive to encouraging people to continue with their apprenticeship. One of the key things we have to do is expose young people to trades earlier. The development of trade training centres in schools was very much part of that. While they were still at school, young people in year 9 and year 10 on had the opportunity to try out different trades—to get an understanding of what it is like to work with metal, what it is like to work with machines or what it is like to work with wood—and acquire some of those cert I and cert II qualifications while they were in a structured environment.

School based, technical trade training has two real advantages. One is it gives kids an opportunity while they are still at school to get an idea of what those trade skills are like and whether or not it is something they like doing, even more so where schools have relationships with industry so kids can go out from school into structured workplace learning environments. The second thing is it allows young people of 15 and 16 to operate in the more structured environment of school, where there is a higher level of supervision and pastoral care. We had some very interesting evidence from Morley Senior High School, which is in my electorate and has been a registered training organisation for 10 years. Their trainees who do cert I and cert II through the school have a really high rate of success. They compared the environment that is offered at their school to the environment that is offered at institutes such as Polytechnic West, which is more suited to adult learners and perhaps people who do not have the same lack of development of the executive function that one might find with a normal 15- and 16-year-old. They said that introducing trade skills and doing the early certificates in the more structured school environment had been very successful, so that when their apprentices go out at the age of 17 or 18 they are much better placed and equipped to operate within an adult workplace.

I think it is highly unfortunate that we cut the trade training centres. If we were truly concerned about the lack of people going into trades and the very high attrition levels, we would have looked very closely at that model of VET being delivered in schools in those early years and seen how that can indeed augment the quality of young people taking up apprenticeships. But, no, instead of doing that we cut the trade training centres. And not only have we done that—and this is apropos a discussion I had in this place earlier in the day—we have been taking all the brakes off 457 visas, which is undercutting a requirement to have a culture of training our own people. There are many easy solutions available that involve just bringing people in, rather than training our own. As I said, we are supporting this loans scheme, but anyone that thinks that this is a superior option that will see us reverse the very unfortunate decline in the take-up of trades is greatly deluded.

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