Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Start a culture war, exactly! A whole lot of things are put out there as a massive response; that only they understand the problems in the vocational education sector and they're going to do something about it. There's no detail, definitely no funding and no outcomes that they're ever held to account for in any of those announcements. It was no different when the Prime Minister stood at the National Press Club the other day and said that one of the key things he was going talk about was skills and the vocational education sector. Again: a massive disappointment, 'Let's just move on—we'll move on to the next announcement and no-one will notice that we actually didn't make any difference at all to the number of people being able to access vocational education, or the numbers of people engaged in apprenticeships and traineeships.'

It's simply not good enough. It's not good enough for the young people who need those pathways into good careers across so many industry sectors—in growth areas such as aged care, child care and disability care—and the opportunity to have meaningful traineeships in those sectors and create careers for people. It is not good enough for young people. It's not good enough for mature-age workers, who could take up apprenticeships and traineeships as an opportunity to restructure their own careers if they're in industries that are in decline. Labor at the last election and the one before had policies about getting mature workers those opportunities. But we hear nothing but crickets from this government.

It's not good enough for our economy. It's simply lazy to think that you can continue to use temporary migration programs to fill skills gaps that you're doing nothing about addressing in the first place. Those programs are good programs designed to give this nation the time and space it needs to train Australians up for the industry sectors that might be emerging or where we've got shortages. That's a sensible thing to do. It is not sensible—in fact, it's a dereliction of duty by a national government—to use that program simply to keep papering over the problem and never do anything about it. Over $3 billion has been either taken out of or underspent in vocational education and training by the federal government. Let's not exempt state governments. I certainly think many of them could pick up their acts as well. But the federal government has a national responsibility for economic diversification, for economic development, for participation and for productivity.

All of these big issues are underpinned by a vocational education and training sector that delivers for people and for the economy and it was never treated that way until the Abbott government. The Turnbull government was no better. The Morrison government, I would argue, is even worse, because it cynically seeks, at so many opportunities, to do the photo op, to do the marketing spin, to do what looks like a big announcement and then to walk away and actually deliver nothing. It is time they were held to account. This bill is a very minor tweak to the quality system. It is good that it's being done. But, I tell you what, there's a whole lot more they need to be doing.

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