Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

My dad started his working life at the age of 14 at my grandfather's garage 'pumping gas', as the Americans put it. Some 71 years later, he still goes to work as a motor mechanic. By anyone's measure, that is a long time in just one career. I didn't follow my dad's footsteps into his motor mechanics business. In fact, like so many of my generation, I've had a number of careers, and only time will tell how many more I have here and beyond. This bill, Student Identifiers Amendment (Higher Education) Bill 2019, will be very important not just for my generation but increasingly for those who are younger than I.

It is a little known fact that I began my adult life pursuing a different kind of vocation. I studied to become a Catholic priest for a short while with the Pallottine order in Victoria. I know that for some that may be unpalatable with the issues that have arisen in recent times regarding sexual abuse, but I, for one, am proud of the work that I did and the many good men and women that I interacted with at the time. In my second career, I took up tools and worked with my hands as a carpenter. I studied for my vocational qualifications at Holmesglen TAFE as an apprentice carpenter and joiner. After establishing my own building business, with an incredibly supportive wife, two children and one on the way, I had a brain explosion and went back to uni and studied law at QUT. I went on and practiced as a barrister for 16 years after that. So I've received a formal higher education, I've received a formal vocational education and, on Victorian building sites at the peak of that recalcitrant union the BLF in the 1980s, you can safely say I've received plenty of informal education along the way.

For a person of my age that mixture is not unique, but it is unusual. For students growing up in Australia today it will be the norm. Students today don't think for a second that they will have only one job, one career or one skill set during their lives. With the pace of technological change, they have never known anything other than continuous learning. They expect that their working life will be the same, and it will.

The Department of Education, Skills and Employment's Australian jobs publication describes studies which estimate that soon Australians will make an average of 17 changes in employers across five different careers. Each career change will need fresh training and in many cases new formal qualifications requiring multiple types of learning. Our students today are going to need to mix vocational education with university courses flexibly, as they move from one industry to another. But it won't just be in moving between careers that vocational education and higher education will need to interact.

Recently, I visited the site of EndED Butterfly House in Mooloolah Valley with co-founder Mark Forbes. The coalition government has contributed more than $6 million towards the construction and operation of this Australian-first facility, and it's terrific to see it racing towards completion. I would like to take this opportunity to congratulate Mark, EndED, the Butterfly foundation and BA Murphy Constructions on what will become Australia's first residential eating disorder facility. While I was touring the site with Mark, we spoke to one of the carpenters installing cladding. He very kindly gave me the chance to borrow his nail bag and make some good use of my building licence I've been keeping for all of these years. We reflected on how much faster we were able to clad the building than I—or even when he—could have when I began my career. With strong, battery powered tools and nail guns everywhere saving labour, and the tangled wires of hoses a thing of the past, custom manufactured structures created by machines elsewhere are slotted seamlessly, with a little bit of gentle persuasion, into place.

It doesn't take a university education to work with building tools today, but on more complex builds it won't be long before it does. In some trades, the change is already happening. On my recent listening post tour in Fisher, I was helped out by one of my most dedicated volunteers John Pozzey. John was telling me about his first career decades ago in one of the most advanced machining tool shops in Australia. John, and the company he worked for, were tireless innovators in their day, building some of the most advanced components available. But I doubt that they would recognise them in the workshops of companies like the coast's own HeliMods today.

To work in today's aeronautical and mechanical engineering shop, you need hands-on skills. But you also need cutting-edge design, engineering and IT skills. At HeliMods, a pure vocational education is not enough but nor is a pure university education. You need both sets of skills and, as the industry's technology continues to change, you need constant refreshment of both. We must make gathering those dual skills easy, seamless and efficient. What I found was that each of the many stages of my education was anything but. Every time I took up a new course, I found that I was starting again. I was laboriously establishing my existing learning—trying to get it recognised, and studying how to make the system work—before opening my first book.

It can't be like that in the future. If we cannot encourage more Australians to study more, and to study in more varied ways, then we will all fall behind our international competitors. Certainly, we need to ensure that we are getting the right number of students into the right courses at university. The coalition government is helping to achieve that with record funding of some $18 billion this year. Those opposite like to talk about cuts, but you can't have cuts when you have record funding. The coalition government is helping to achieve that. In my own electorate of Fisher, the government has provided the University of the Sunshine Coast with additional funding for teaching and learning—from $165 million in 2018 to $172 million last year. That's on top of an additional $69.4 million that we are delivering for new students over the next four years at the USC Moreton Bay campus.

But, instead of degrees, we need to encourage more of our young people to get a trade. In Queensland in 2018, in the construction trades, 37 per cent of employers attracted no suitable applicants for trade jobs they had available. Only 49 per cent of vacancies were filled. Glaziers, tilers and cabinetmakers are some of the hardest types of employees to find in my state. These are facts. I know firsthand. When I tried to get a glazier to replace a window that had been smashed in a storm, it took six months to get a glazier out. We have skill shortages among sheet-metal workers, fitters, welders, bricklayers, plumbers, chefs, bakers and childcare workers. We need many more people to be learning a trade, yet our society tells young people that a university education is the only route to success. We must change that culture. In the meantime, we can also work with it to achieve the doubly skilled workers we'll need in the decades to come.

This bill, by extending the operation of the Unique Student Identifier to the university sector, will actually support recruitment for the trades. It will help show the direct paths which exist between vocational education and university education. It will help to demonstrate that they are part of the same continuum, reinforce for potential students that beginning in a trade doesn't have to mean ending in one, and show that movement between the two is seamless and commonplace. It will, with the passage of this bill, be literally built into the system. I believe this is an important message to be sending to our young school leavers today.

I would like to take this opportunity to mention a group who are particularly badly affected by the obstacles that currently exist in our education system, and that is ADF veterans. We are well aware of the challenges that face some former service men and women when they leave the ADF. It can be difficult for our veterans to find new meaning in their lives and to build a fulfilling career once they leave the ADF. I believe that, for many, education could provide them a new path forward. Former service men and women should be fantastically well-placed to begin a degree or a new vocational education course. The ADF demands continuous training and learning from its personnel, and in many cases it provides qualifications to recognise that work. However, achieving recognition for that prior learning in the civilian world can be very difficult. I hope and trust that over time we will be able to incorporate all of the ADF's training programs into the national unique student identifier system and make it that little bit easier for our service men and women to demonstrate the skills they already possess.

As the minister has described, this bill will set up a universal national system which will lay the groundwork for a much more seamless movement of student information across institutional and state boundaries, across the gulf between the university sector and vocational education, and across long breaks from study. This will particularly help women who take time out of the workforce to raise children. But it will have one further important outcome. Governments, just as much as a modern worker, need continuous learning to develop good policy. Up until now, we have had no means of tracking the contemporary student journey. The trail for government ran cold at the boundary between vocational and university education. This bill will ensure that in future we'll be able to understand these complex new educational paths and design policies that will deliver the learning that we need in the 21st century.

I enjoyed learning to be a carpenter and joiner and then a builder. I enjoyed learning to be a lawyer. I'm enjoying learning how to be a federal member of parliament. I'm excited for the next generations of Australians and the varied careers that they too will enjoy. This bill will make those paths a little bit easier. For them and to all young people who are studying or who are looking to study, I commend this bill to the House.

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