Ewen Jones (Herbert, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much. I am happy to second this motion. I am glad the member for Cunningham brought it up. I will back the member for Cunningham in being very passionate in relation to apprentices and vocational education and training.

By and large, apprentices are employed by small businesses, and the area I would like to concentrate on is the area of construction and building in my city. The tender process done by governments has a lot to answer for in this space. We see governments of all shapes and sizes making these tenders bigger and bigger. Tier 1 tenderers no longer employ tradespeople—there is provision in there for training, but they will do anything which resembles training. They do not do apprenticeships anymore. They do not like doing apprenticeships. What we should be doing in this space is making sure that these things do turn over and that their subcontractors are actually employing apprentices–which leads me to another area which I will cover very shortly.

The problem we have with the money that is still being still spent on training is that that training is being done in the workplace. Health and safety training and other sorts of formal training that are done in-house, where they can be, for the small group of people that are actually there. It does not have the same impact as what we used to see, where a building site would go up or something would be built and you would have your tier 1 contactor, your lead contractor, with all your subcontractors there—and you would have a number of apprentices there.

What I would really like to see is pressure being put on the tier 1 contractors to employ subcontractors who do employ apprentices. We have group training organisations in Townsville like TORGAS who have parents coming to them and saying, 'My son or daughter will work for nothing'. It is not about wages. It is not about junior wages or mature apprenticeship wages; this is about people getting an opportunity. On the big government jobs where the money used to wash through our economy two, three and four times, more and more we are now seeing it wash through only once.

There are two jobs in Townsville at the moment which are up for grabs—one at the university and one at the RAAF base. We are seeing the tier one contractors win those, as you would always expect—and I still see that as being wrong, because the money and profits do not stay in our community. The government's infrastructure is not just about providing a building or providing a road; it is about facilitating trade and making sure our community is growing. What we are seeing at the moment is that we are getting the nice piece of infrastructure, but the profit is exiting the stage—and we are not seeing any benefit from that.

Too often we are seeing these tier 1 contractors sign up subcontractors who have enterprise bargaining agreements with the CFMEU, and they are not employing locals who have apprentices. I am talking about Townsville at the moment and I am talking about recent history. What we are seeing is groups come up—fly-in fly-out contractors—where the locals cannot compete and are not getting a job. We are seeing the opportunity for premises in my city completely disappear. There are two jobs in Townsville at moment and we are seeing local guys who have up to a dozen apprentices in line for these jobs—they know what the jobs cost and what the profit margins are—and they are being told that they are going to miss out. Whether it comes to plumbers, builders, concreters or metalworkers—that is what it goes to.

When you have an organisation, like TORGAS for example, that wants to place its apprentices, they cannot have these apprentices shifting all around the country from job to job. They must get work on these local projects. I think there is an onus on all governments to ensure that, because if we spend this money and do not get apprenticeships and the next generation of tradespeople coming through, then we as a government and as a parliament have failed. That is the real shame here.

There is an article in The Australian today about house prices going up because you cannot get a builder—because we cannot get these kids onto jobs. It goes all the way through. I know that the part I am looking at is a very thin slice of the entire vocational education training market. There are things that we are trying to do here, in this space—and I think Simon Birmingham is working very hard trying to get the right result. But we as a government and as a parliament must look towards our local councils and get back to the way things used to be done—more and more locally. I am talking about regional economies like the one I am so intimately involved in. I see a series of industries in my city under real pressure at the moment and I think it is something that we are going to be very sad about in the very near future. I back the member who brought this motion forward and I think it is a very timely item.

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