Sharon Claydon (Newcastle, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to be able to make a contribution this evening to the debate on the National Skills Commissioner Bill 2020. I should say at the outset that Labor will, of course, support the creation of the National Skills Commissioner, because we know that critical national decisions should be based on expert advice and evidence rather than on the hunches, biases and ideology that so often drive the thinking and practice of conservative governments.

Really, this is another case of too little, too late, from a government that has been waging a campaign of starvation and unrelenting attacks on our skills and training sector for seven years. Seven years and $3.2 billion worth of cuts: it is actually unthinkable, but, sadly, it is true. When I set up a community petition against these cuts, close to 1,500 people signed it. Many told me of their white-hot fury about this intentional neglect. As a result of that neglect, 140,000 apprenticeships have disappeared nationally, more than 1,000 of them from my electorate of Newcastle. Now we have a critical shortage of skills, something we've been warning the government about for years and years. There is a shortage of trade skills in bricklaying, plumbing, hairdressing and baking and of electricians, mechanics, panelbeaters and so many other vital trades. All of this has taken place at a time when, tragically, we have millions of Australians looking for work.

What is most heartbreaking is what the Liberals have done to our once very proud training icon, TAFE. Make no mistake, this once proud public institution of vocational education and training is in a diabolical state, and unless urgent remedial action is taken our economy, indeed our nation—our people—will pay the price. New analysis reveals that without urgent action a further 100,000 apprentice and trainee positions will be lost this year. That is an astonishing figure for anyone to contemplate. TAFE should be at the absolute centre of the government's thinking and of the skills and training system in Australia, but, instead, the Prime Minister and his fellow vandals have ripped $3 billion out of this system: in New South Wales we've seen over 6,000 TAFE jobs and 175,000 enrolments disappear as a direct result. This is a false economy. The small mindedness of this is too astonishing and too shocking for words. Any savings made come at the direct expense of our national capability, our economic resilience and our ability to ensure that we have the skills we need to prosper into the future. By locking Australians out of education and training the Liberals are locking Australians out of jobs.

There could be nothing more shameful in an environment where we're confronted with a global pandemic and now record unemployment numbers than that we go into that chaos not well placed at all in terms of the kinds of training that we have been providing young people in the lead-up to this crisis. I don't think we should pretend for one minute that Australia entered this crisis with our vocational education and training system in good shape, and any suggestion otherwise would be complete pretence and, indeed, folly. The government are now really forced to put this forward—despite having had industry tell them for so long just how badly prepared this nation is for providing the skills basis that is required for not only the jobs of today but also the jobs of the future—because they're facing record levels of unemployment. And, in regions like mine, that hits really hard.

Nobody in this chamber would forget those long lines out the front of their Centrelink offices. The last time I saw that in Newcastle was when there was mass retrenchment from BHP, back in the mid-eighties. It brought a chill down everyone's spine. Those of us that have lived in Newcastle long enough to recall the days before BHP, before they pulled the plug and left town, know full well of what mass unemployment looks like and feels like in your city.

The government were put on notice about skills shortages, not just by Labor opposition members here in this chamber but also by industry groups around the nation. Ai Group has long warned about the shocking skills shortages and the challenges that are confronting industry in terms of not being able to find the skilled workers that they need to undertake jobs in Australia. For too long, through our immigration programs and skilled worker visa programs, this nation has relied upon being able to bring in skilled workers from overseas. Well, that option no longer exists. With COVID-19, you don't have an open border anymore. Industry players don't have the option of recruiting labour from offshore. That's when the brutal reality really hits you in the face. This nation is so ill prepared for the training of a strong workforce equipped with the sorts of skills that it requires in an ever-evolving industrial landscape. Our manufacturers in Australia have done extraordinarily well in being able to pivot through the COVID-19 pandemic to be able to produce other sorts of goods and services that were required in our community and that we would previously just have imported. They did a terrific job in trying to very quickly turn around what was a very diabolical situation for them. But they are also looking at the future and what the next generation of work looks like for them. They have for a long time been putting us on alert about the need for increased numbers of skilled workers in Australia.

So it's of some relief, I guess it is true to say, that this National Skills Commissioner Bill is before us, because at least there's some inkling now that the government is giving serious consideration to these issues. As I said at the outset, regretfully it really is a matter of too little, too late, but Labor will support this bill because any efforts, quite frankly, have to be better than the seven years of utter neglect so far.

When it comes to thinking seriously about these issues, Labor went into the last election with a terrific set of policies around ensuring that TAFE could regain its position as a strong, central, public institution of vocational education and training excellence. We wanted to see TAFE positioned at the very centre of our decision-making around options for young—but not always young—Australians in terms of their tertiary education options in Australia. Not everybody wants to go to university; we know that. In my part of the world, Hunter TAFE has long enjoyed a very strong reputation for producing highly skilled workers. We've had a very strong industrial base in my part of the world, over many decades, and we've always required a good steady pipeline of trades, apprentices and traineeships coming through. But, as I said, in the last seven years that pipeline has really dried up. Even before this pandemic, small and medium-sized enterprises and manufacturing businesses were not engaging apprentices and traineeships. There is a real problem when your industry is no longer training up the numbers of apprentices and trainees that it did once upon a time. When we're not investing in the pipeline and not insisting that there be good, strong public institutions of vocational education and training, we then become part of the problem too.

The reason I emphasise the importance of public institutions is that we saw the diabolical effects of privatising vocational education and training schemes. Some of the shonkiest cowboy operators out there were just skimming cream from the public purse and providing absolutely zero in return—or, even worse, entrapping people who didn't understand the documents that they were signing in order to gain an iPad and who found themselves thousands and thousands of dollars in debt after signing up for courses that were completely inappropriate. There were some seriously dodgy private RTOs operating out there, and this government has had to confront that brutal reality. It beggars belief that there isn't a much stronger level of support for insisting that TAFE—an institution that we know can be accountable to government—be the government's preferred provider.

Anyway, as I said, Labor is happy that the government is finally starting to think about these issues again and bringing some legislation before the Australian parliament. I can assure you that Labor has never forgotten about these issues and the importance of training the next generation of Australian workers. Indeed, I pay tribute to the Labor leader, who, in his most recent 'Jobs and the future of work' speech, which was delivered last October, outlined Labor's intention in government to establish Jobs and Skills Australia. Unlike the National Skills Commissioner, which is before the House today, Labor's Jobs and Skills Australia would be an independent statutory authority, providing a very genuine partnership with business leaders both large and small; state and territory governments; unions; education providers; and all of the people that you need present at a table to make this work, including those who understand regions and specific cohorts that are often hard to reach. Making sure that those people are part of the national conversation is important.

In government, Labor would enhance the National Skills Commissioner so that it could become this independent statutory authority that we would prefer—Jobs and Skills Australia. It's a much more collaborative and enduring structure. It's a shame the government hasn't seen fit to really just pick up Labor's policy and run with it. We would have happily gifted it to the government. It's an excellent proposal and, given that the government has really struggled for seven years—and 'struggled' is a polite way of putting it—to get its head around vocational education and training, it could do worse than to actually adopt Labor's policy positions right now.

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