Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

As the member opposite says, this is a very good organisation and one that was very keen to participate in the mentoring of young people in apprenticeships—a really important thing to undertake. It was an $80 million program and it was critically targeted at improving those completion rates. Again, I am quite at a loss to understand why the program was simply abolished in the 2014 budget.

We also see cuts across the apprenticeship sector more broadly. The old Australian apprenticeship centres have been rebadged as the Australian Apprenticeship Support Network. The problem I have with this is that these network providers that work with apprentices at the local level are now doing that with $10 million per year less than the old apprenticeship centres had. Plus, they have been given the job-matching and mentoring work that used to be happen under other programs. So all up, instead of $170 million or $180 million per year, they are being asked to do with less money. So the reality is that there is still a lot more work with significantly less money, so I can only see that, with the best will in the world, those new providers are really going to be under the pump to effectively impact both apprentice commencement and apprentice completion rates.

In particular, I just want to make the point that one of the areas that are particularly significant in this space is to get small and medium businesses involved in being able to take on apprentices and trainees. Many of them are really keen to do this, but the management of an apprenticeship—the paperwork, the legal requirements, the follow-up with the apprentice and managing the apprentice—is just too much for them to take on as well as their business responsibilities. So for many decades they have had the option of the group training program in order to participate in training apprentices. The group training organisation did all of that work and managed the apprentice, who was placed with a particular employer. Sadly, at the end of last year, the government abolished the financing of the joint group training program which allowed them to do this. So we have seen a lot of slashing in the skills portfolio, at least half of which—about $1 billion—has been in support for apprentices and trainees in this country.

So the government, in bills like the one before us, has a very mean approach to dealing with young people who may find themselves unemployed and do not have the sort of extended family who can financially support them for a month. They will actually be unable to access any income support for that period. At the same time, we are seeing significant cuts across all the sorts of programs that would actually give them the opportunity to get some skills, some training and some work-readiness and to improve their ability to get into the labour market—and all this at a time when the labour market is becoming harder and harder for young people trying to get a start, particularly in those entry-level jobs, as I discussed at the beginning. We are now seeing increasing reports of university graduates who are struggling to get their first job, because they may have their degree but all the entry-level jobs in the professional area they are looking at require a minimum of two or three years experience. So it is not just young people with no post-secondary qualifications; it is increasingly those who are graduating from our TAFEs, our RTOs and our universities all facing this same challenge. So it just seems to me that the government is intent on creating a bit of a perfect storm that is just going to make it more and more difficult. If the OECD recognises that youth unemployment is a critical factor for the developed world, I think we should be putting in place decisions and legislation that lead to solutions to that for young people, not put more barriers in their way as I believe this bill does.

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