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

I commend the member for Cunningham for her concern about apprenticeships. I think she is quite right to raise this as an important issue, a critical issue and one that all Australians should be concerned about, because the truth of the matter is that we know we have demand outstripping supply for many trade apprenticeships in particular and we know that this issue has been with us for some time and needs to be addressed. I will talk a little about some of the things the government is doing to address it.

The member for Cunningham talked about some research done by the NCVER. I think it is very good research. I have stayed across it for quite some time, because this is an issue of such importance to my electorate. I went back to a report that they published in 2014 to see what had happened over time in terms of apprenticeships. I was particularly interested in the first chart, figure 1, of the 2014 NCVER report on apprenticeships which looked at commencements.

I was astounded to see that, towards the end of 2007, apprenticeship commencements had reached about 22,000 a month; however, suddenly, just about the time that the Labor government got into power, they collapsed. By mid-2009, the number was closer to 17,000. So we saw very soon after Labor got into power a sharp reduction in the number of commencements—

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