Angus Taylor (Hume, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Few issues can be more important for my electorate and for the future of this country than chronic youth unemployment and skills gaps. Those opposite are always keen to crow about being the party of jobs, the party of employment, but the striking thing for me in the last decade or so has been watching what actually happened in practice. The really striking thing was that in the final years of the Howard government, from 2004 through to 2007, we saw a 13 per cent increase in youth employment rates, but between 2008 and 2013 we saw an eight per cent reduction in youth employment rates. We saw participation rates for people under the age of 25 falling from 71 per cent to 66 per cent. We are at the point now where we have youth unemployment rates of around 12 per cent or more, significantly more in some regions, compared to just under six for the overall economy. This is a very serious problem that we inherited from the previous Labor government and that they failed to address.

The other side of this, though, was the collapse in apprenticeship completions under the previous government. We saw something like a 40 per cent failure rate. That is a very serious problem, particularly when you consider what is happening on the demand side. I was finishing off some work in my office on Friday in Goulburn and a couple of plumbers came in to do some work. I had a chat with them. They were Dean Thompson and Troy Matthews, very good plumbers around Goulburn with a team of about eight. I said to them, 'How are you going for work?' They said, 'We've got heaps of work. In fact, we're going to take advantage of this accelerated depreciation. Lots of other people are taking advantage of that, and our workload is such that we really don't even have to pick up the phone before the calls come in—we don't have to actively market at the moment. It's fantastic. But I tell you what: we can't find apprentices.' We saw the failure of the apprenticeship policy under the last government. They thought everyone should get a university degree; in fact, we need more plumbers. So we have a very serious problem not just with youth unemployment but with matching those skills to the needs out in the marketplace.

These are problems that I know the assistant minister has been thinking hard about and working hard on for a considerable amount of time, and I note some of the initiatives that he has already talked about. Can the assistant minister please advise in some detail what measures are in the budget that will assist young unemployed people in my electorate to find work?

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