Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to follow the member for Cunningham today, because she has an unrivalled history in this space in this place. There are few people in this building with a deeper knowledge or understanding of this sector—what it needs and the history of it, the mistakes that have been made and the way we should move towards fixing them. So I welcome her contribution today on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment (Governance and Other Matters) Bill 2020 and the amendment moved by the member for Cooper, who is seated in front of me today.

I welcome the amendment from the member from Cooper because I welcome the opportunity to talk about vocational education and training—and the sector itself—because we are in a desperate, desperate state. That fact is only highlighted further by the economic impacts of the COVID-19 health crisis and what's coming at us now, which is the recession, and what that's going to mean in terms of both industry pipelines and, as the member for Cunningham so eloquently demonstrated for us, the pipeline of workers that we are going to need.

I had a conversation last week with a young person in my electorate who said that they were looking to do a civil construction certificate IV. As part of that course, they would get heavy machinery certification and their truck driving licence. Do you know what they said to me? They said that they were going to be working with pilots in Victoria who were retraining to get jobs as truck drivers. That's where we are. Highly qualified people are seeking to retrain wherever there is a shortage. My heart breaks at that point for the pilot who is not working and for their family, but also for the young person who walked away thinking that they weren't good enough to compete in that space and that it didn't matter what qualifications they pursued, because they wouldn't get employment in this tough market. That's what this government should be addressing.

As the member for Cunningham said, this is a tweak. Yes, we need quality. Yes, we need changes to ASQA, and this process may be part of improving quality in TAFE. But, let's face it, since this last decade, not a lot of people in the community have a lot of faith in this sector anymore. That's because of bad headlines but it's also because of bad administration in this sector by this government, which continues to go for the sugar headline and fail on the substance, and which continues to grab the good-news story at the front end with no accountability and no outcomes at the back end. This space is no different: all spin and no substance. This legislation is a small tweak. We're in here talking about vocational education and training, and this government hasn't sat and talked to the peak bodies and hasn't been out on job sites time and time again to talk to people in the training sector.

In my electorate, it is absolutely clear where the issue rests. As an educator for many, many years, who worked in techs a long time ago, let me tell you that the private sector will go hard in this space where delivery is cheap, where equipment is cheap and where you can make a profit. That leaves our public sector to do the heavy lifting where the equipment is expensive. Do you know how long a lathe lasts on the ground in our tech schools—the John Howard tech schools or ours? It's about five years before a lathe is out of date. Do you know what they cost? That's why public TAFE has to be public TAFE. This is expensive, and the private sector doesn't want to pay for it. The private sector doesn't want to be involved in our licensed trades where accountability is high and there are exams at the end of it that are externally assessed.

I listened to the member for Bruce's contribution earlier and I thought he had some terrific ideas. Lo and behold: they are not new ideas. How do you get integrity into this sector? You separate the provider from the assessment; that's how you get integrity into this sector. You do not rely on a tick-box exercise to deliver quality; you make sure it is connected at the hip to the industry that it is serving and to the community that it is serving. These are the things that this government needs to address—not tweaks, not doffs of the hat to the shortages that are being created. As the member for Cunningham said, there were 140,000 fewer apprentices before COVID. As the member for Sydney said just last week at that dispatch box, the projections at the moment are that we're losing 2,000 apprentices a week. Everyone in my electorate knows how this works. They all know. They can't figure out how we can have shortages. We've got no bricklayers. That's a skills shortage. We've got no bricklayers, yet we have unemployed young people. How is it that we can't put these two things together and fix it? It's not that hard: focused delivery.

I can't talk about this sector without adding to talk about government services and the jobactives and their interaction with the sector. It is often the case that young people are getting certification in spaces and are then applying for positions only to find that they actually haven't done the OH&S training that they needed to do. Without that card in their pocket, they're not going to get past first base. When I first became a member and I sat with my local jobactives, I saw that the people who were giving guidance to the young people who found themselves unemployed didn't know about the white card and didn't know you needed one. They were pushing kids out and sending them to interviews. The kids couldn't get past the first hurdle because, although they had done a VET subject, they didn't have a white card.

This is not difficult, but currently we've got a government that doesn't want to do the heavy lifting, doesn't want to do the hard yards and doesn't want to sit and talk to the peak bodies, the unions or the people providing the training. Worse than that, in the development of this legislation, they have not asked for the views of the trainers and the educators. They have not sat with them. They haven't spoken to the people who actually deliver this training to find out what they think would work.

I'm pretty sure most of the trainers out there would be pretty keen to get around a table and tell a government how to fix this system. I know that trainers, teachers and educators in the public TAFE sector are desperate to get that system back up and running. There is nothing more satisfying than working with someone in an education program and watching them walk out the door to their first day of work. There's nothing more satisfying. There's nothing more satisfying as a teacher than connecting a young person with an employer. People talk to me a lot about these things. Obviously I spent a lot of time in secondary schools. Obviously I was a senior level coordinator before I became a principal. Obviously I used to organised for young people to go and do their work experience.

We've got some terrific people and some terrific businesses in my electorate. We've got a plumbing company that has two kids a week from our local schools doing work experience with them—two kids a week. It's no surprise they're getting a lot of business. Every one of those families tells all of their friends, if they need a plumber, to ring that company. They say, 'They're good guys; they're training our kids.' It also means that that company gets the pick of the kids. They've seen them all on the job site, they've had a chat to them, they've had them in the van and they know who's keen so they get the pick of the kids. This is not difficult, but what it requires is goodwill. What it requires is a community based response. What it requires is that the jobs and the shortages out there are connected in.

I've listened for years and years and years to people saying, 'I'd really like to put an apprentice on but there's nobody out there who wants to be an apprentice.' It's really simple: ring your local high school and talk to the careers teacher. They'll have them lined up at your door tomorrow for an interview. This is not hard, but we've corporatised it. We've created a pool up here for the private sector to say they're going to give certification, but they're not connected to give anybody a job. This government needs to address these things. The member for Wannon, as the minister, should know this. He's from regional Victoria. He grew up in Victoria. He watched these things. It's really not that difficult.

What we do know about this government is that they're not interested in talking to educators—not in any sector. We saw that last week when they said, 'We'll just make a cross-the-board decision and get the sugar-hit line that we're giving free child care and a couple of weeks later we'll rip that away, we'll rip jobseeker away, we won't talk to educators, we won't talk to the service delivery people, we won't talk to the small centres in communities and we won't ask them, "At what level do you become unviable in terms of capacity?"' Do we talk to them? Do we talk to the educators? Does this government bother? No. They just make broad sweeping statements. They come in with a policy and walk away, and it's the same with this piece of legislation.

I welcome anything that muscles ASQA up. I welcome it because in my community I've seen a lot of young people pay for training and then have it questioned, or, worse, pay for training and not have a certificate delivered even though they were told they completed the training. They're paying off loans for things that have no value for them. This piece of legislation muscles up ASQA, and I'm all for that. But how on earth is it going to be self-funded? How on earth are you going to get quality but not give the funding for ASQA to do the work that they are doing? How is that going to make sense? How is it going to work?

Again, to the member for Wannon, the minister in this space: it's a broad portfolio and it goes to your government's value of education that one person is to oversee all levels in education, making them an expert in nothing. It means they can't get their head into the detail in any of these sectors. I feel for the member for Wannon. It's a big job. It's an extraordinarily big job, and he works inside a government that has cut and cut and cut and cut this part of his responsibility out of his whole portfolio. The poor minister gets to walk in here and front us and the cameras every day to explain how we're supposed to, in a crisis and in a recession, fill these skills shortages and match up the unemployed with the skills shortages when there is no funding to do it. How are we supposed do that if we're not all working together? How can we on this side work with a government that devalues education and training at every level? Do you know how I know it's devalued? It's easy: if you value something, you fund it. If you value education, you see it as an investment and not as a cost. This government's failed on every measure since I came to this place in 2013, and this piece of legislation is no different.

The government says: 'We want to muscle up ASQA. We'll write some pretty lines here about how it's all about quality. We're going to improve the quality of the sector by muscling up ASQA to help them to do that. What's the fine print? ASQA have to do it with no funding. In fact, we're going to change the funding model and they're going to have to become self-funded.' Who's going to pay? Young people in my electorate seeking certification so they can get a job—that's who is going to pay. When we are confronting a recession and when we are going to be trying to rebuild our economy, we are going to have skills shortages with a lack of apprenticeships. We have temporary migration, on the one hand, suddenly not available for this skills shortage. What is the government doing? The government's saying, 'Well, ASQA will have to do that, but they'll have to find the money to do that from the clientele.' Are they going to go out to business and ask them for money? Why would business give ASQA money? No, they are going to pass on the cost of this to the young people in my electorate needing a job. They are going to pass on the cost of this to the recently unemployed pilot who is trying to retrain. That's who's going to pay for this self-funded improvement in quality in our vocational education and training sector.

I complete my remarks by reminding this government and by appealing to this minister. You want to muscle up ASQA? Well, all I want you to do, Member for Wannon, is muscle up in cabinet. Can you muscle up in cabinet? Can you be a force in cabinet? Can you walk through those doors, look the Prime Minister in the eye and say, 'You cannot fix the things you are trying to fix until you value education and fund education properly in this country'?

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