Tanya Plibersek (Sydney, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

I congratulate the member for Bruce for taking on such an important issue. He's very right to raise it as a concern. Well done.

It's been some months, of course, since the Governor-General's speech, and I was interested to note, at that time, that the Governor-General's speech focused a lot on our economy. Of course, it is so important that we do focus on our economy, because, when you look around the world at how economies are improving and recovering after the global financial crisis, it is extraordinary that the Australian economy continues to do worse and worse on so many important indicators. It is distressing in the extreme that the Prime Minister has been ignoring the decline in so many economic indicators and pretending to Australian families that they've never been better off. Whenever you hear the Australian Prime Minister talking to Australian families, you hear him saying that times are good, that times have never been better. Families don't feel that way. Ordinary families don't feel like they've never been better off. Most people I speak to are so very aware of the fact that they haven't had a pay rise in years, that all of their expenses are continuing to increase but the family budget is being stretched thinner and thinner.

The economy is growing at the slowest pace since the global financial crisis. We've turned our backs on the efforts that we made during the global financial crisis to keep Australians working. We went from being one of the fastest or the second fastest growing economies during the global financial crisis to now being 20th on the list of fastest growing economies around the world. The OECD, the Reserve Bank—all of them—expect our economy to remain slow and for unemployment to remain higher than budget forecasts over the next two years. The OECD's economic outlook forecasts weak, below-trend growth of only 1.7 per cent this year and 2.3 per cent next year, and forecasts unemployment of 5.3 per cent in 2020. Net debt has, of course, doubled under this government. I find it so extraordinary when I hear the Treasurer talking about Labor's debt. This is a government, which is now in its seventh year in office, that has doubled our debt. It has doubled our debt and refuses to take any responsibility for this fact. Having doubled our national debt, it is refusing to take responsibility for it.

We've got almost two million Australians who are looking for a job, or looking for more hours of work. Living standards are falling. We've got the combined impact of the lowest wages growth on record and two million people who are unemployed or underemployed. That is being felt in the family budget. Wages are growing at one-sixth of the rate of profits. People will tell you that themselves. They'll tell you that they're finding it harder to meet the bills as they come in. In fact, household debt has also surged to record levels of 190 per cent of disposable income. Real household median income today is actually lower than it was in 2013. So, on the one hand, we've got the Prime Minister telling us that Australian families have never been better off, yet every economic indicator—wages, unemployment, underemployment, living standards, household debt—are all pointing to a very different picture. The fact that households are now in so much debt is the reason that successive interest rate cuts have not had the desired impact on our economy.

People are nervous. They're keeping their money in their pockets and paying forward their mortgages, because they're not able to count on a wage rise, are not able to count on getting the hours of work they want in their jobs and are not able to count on having a job, having an income, next year. So, the interest rate cuts and the tax cuts that have already been provided aren't making a difference in stimulating consumer demand in the economy, because of this nervousness.

Business investment is down, too, not just because of poor consumer demand but because businesses don't have the confidence to invest. Business investment is down 20 per cent since the Liberals came to office, and it's now at its lowest level since the 1990s recession. This is a government that likes to pretend they are working cooperatively with business to support activity in the Australian economy, but the proof is just not there. In fact, the figures tell a completely different story. Retail trade is at its worst since the 1990s recession. Consumer confidence is absolutely affected. If people don't have a wage increase, if they know that their wages are flatlining, if they continue to struggle with high levels of household debt, then they don't buy a cup of coffee on the way to work, don't make an impulse purchase at the shops on the weekend and don't take the kids out for pizza on a Friday night.

The figures on retail trade tell the story maybe better than any other statistic, other than wages growth, about how families are feeling—the lack of confidence, the lack of security. And we've got a Treasurer who continues to absolutely put his head in the sand on this, to ignore all the statistics. Most ordinary Australians don't want to be poring over retail trade statistics or consumer confidence or wages growth figures, but oh my goodness, we should have a Treasurer who does. We really ought to have a Treasurer who understands that when you get low wages growth, low consumer confidence, low business investment and low productivity growth then these things spell trouble for our economic fundamentals.

You can't have a strong economy unless you've got a government that has a wages policy that would see decent wages growth. You can't have a strong economy if you don't have a government that sees the sense of investing in services like education that improve our productivity, the health of our community and our economy over time. So, I want to go from speaking more generally about the economy to focusing on education and training. When you lock an Australian out of an education you are locking them out of a job. Business after business is telling me that while they see and are concerned about high youth unemployment in their area the people who are coming to them are not trained for the jobs they've got in their businesses. So, what have we got? We've got parts of Australia with youth unemployment as high as one in four or one in five young people; we've got employers who complain that skills shortages are restricting their ability to grow their business; and we've got a failing education and training system where the government has cut billions and underspent on top of those cuts.

We will always be the party that will stand up for working people getting better wages as well as the party that stands up for properly training our young people for the jobs of today and the jobs of tomorrow and retraining our older workers as our economy changes. We know that we need to invest right through our education system, from early childhood education and care, where this government refuses to commit to preschool funding, through to a proper needs-based funding system for our schools. And I note that while it's terrific that the government has provided extra funding to schools in drought affected areas, that only goes to Catholic and independent schools. There are a lot of kids in public schools whose families are doing it tough in drought affected areas. Those schools are finding it hard to fundraise. Those kids are finding it hard to afford books and school uniforms and, perhaps, an excursion. Government continues to cut preschool education, school education, and universities—our system has to address this. But in regional communities in particular, TAFE has been the backbone of our training system. This is where this government has failed to invest in training those unemployed young people, and those workers who are facing changes in their workplaces, for the jobs that exist.

What we've seen is that nine out of 10 new jobs that will be created in coming years will require either a TAFE education or a university education. Labor insists that we need to properly fund both. The government talks about funding for vocational education. In fact they've been actively discouraging young people from seeking a university education, saying that they believe a TAFE education is important and good and so on. But they've actually cut vocational education funding by $3 billion. So on the one hand they say it's a good thing and there should be more of it, but on the other hand they've cut TAFE and vocational education funding by more than $3 billion.

On top of that $3 billion cut—which is there in the budget papers for anybody to see—the government has actually underspent. Even in the programs that they've committed to, they've underspent by close to $1 billion. In the 2014-15 financial year, they underspent by $138 million. In the 2015-16 financial year, it was $247—

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 12:12 to 12:30

Before the suspension, I was running through the annual underspends of the TAFE and training budget and, as I said, in 2014-15 the underspend was $138 million; in 2015-16 it was $247 million, almost a quarter-of-a-billion-dollar underspend that year; in 2016-17 it was $118 million; in 2017-18 it was $202 million; and in 2018-19 it was $214 million. This is a total of $919 million underspent in the TAFE and training budget. What this means, in real terms, is that apprentice and tradie programs, including things like apprentice incentives for business, support to help people finish apprenticeships and a fund designed to train Australians in areas of need, have all been underspent.

You don't have to look very far. You visit a TAFE and see the desperate need to upgrade facilities in many areas. Some TAFEs are in disrepair. Apprentice and trainee numbers are falling off a cliff, and in many states and territories TAFE programs or whole TAFE campuses have been lost. As you know, Madam Deputy Speaker Bird, they have been closed or sold off, privatised, by conservative state governments.

The Prime Minister claims that his government wants to 'really lift the status of vocational education in Australia'. But how do you do that when you cut $3 billion and throw in a $1 billion underspend in the same area? Senator Michaelia Cash, the minister, admitted in estimates that these underspends are as a result of what she calls 'less demand than forecast'. We saw another demand-driven program, the National Disability Insurance Scheme, being underspent by billions of dollars—and how do you do that? If you're a government that does not want to invest in the National Disability Insurance Scheme or in TAFE and training, the money might be technically there in the budget but you don't employ enough staff to spend the money.

In this case, what they've done is design programs that are so unwieldy and so unappealing to employers or to people who are thinking about studying in TAFE or doing an apprenticeship that people go, 'Why would I bother?' If you're an employer, you think, 'Why would I bother taking on an apprentice when you've put all these roadblocks in front of me so I don't use this program?' If you're an apprentice, you're turned away at the door. This is not an accident. It's what happens when we consistently design programs that don't meet the needs of students, apprentices or trainees and don't meet the needs of the businesses that are crying out for employees, particularly in areas of skills shortage.

After many years of neglect now by the Liberals, too many Australians, particularly young Australians, are locked out of TAFE. In South Australia, in recent years, seven TAFE campuses have closed and 700 jobs have been lost. In New South Wales one-third of the TAFE workforce have lost their jobs. We saw reports just last week of further job losses in TAFE. In New South Wales we've had campus closures at Dapto and Quirindi, and many more are reportedly being considered by the Liberals in New South Wales. At Padstow College, the impact of the government's cuts to TAFE have been seen in the commercial cookery courses being cut, a lack of information technology classes and the closure of the automotive workshop. There are shortages of workers in all of these industries, yet the New South Wales government's response is to close the courses needed to train the people to meet those skills shortages.

This is a skills crisis created by the Liberals through their failure to invest in TAFE and training. We've got shortages of workers in areas like plumbing, carpentry, hairdressing and motor mechanics. And today, we've got 150,000 fewer apprentices and trainees than when the Liberals first came to office. The number of Australians doing an apprenticeship or a traineeship today is fewer than it was a decade ago. There are more people dropping out of TAFE and training this year than are finishing their courses. Businesses are the ones who are raising this with me consistently. Parents and young people locked out of training raise it too, but business owners will be the first to tell you that they are desperate for greater investment in this area. The Australian Industry Group says that 75 per cent of businesses surveyed are struggling to find the qualified workers they need. So you've got 75 per cent of businesses saying that they can't find the staff they need, yet there are two million Australians who want work or want more hours of work. What's missing? What's missing is the link that trains those two million people for the jobs that 75 per cent of employers say they need filled. We've got this terrible mismatch.

I'll finish on this: what are the human consequences of this mismatch? We've got regions in Australia where one in four, or maybe one in five, young people don't have a job. If you look at the devastation wrought across Europe during the global financial crisis where some countries had youth unemployment rates of 50 per cent or close to 60 per cent, those youth unemployment rates have never really recovered. We've been working through the global financial crisis. There have been economic improvements in most economies around the world since the global financial crisis, but, in countries like Greece and Spain where youth unemployment was at those rates—50 per cent or 60 per cent—you still see unemployment rates of 30 to 40 per cent for young people. That's what we saw in the 1990s recession. If you lock a person out of work during a recession, many of those people never work again or never really successfully participate in employment again. That's why we were determined to act during the global financial crisis, and that's why this government should invest in TAFE and training.

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