Karen Andrews (McPherson, Liberal Party, Minister for Industry) Share this | Hansard source

We recognise how important skills are going to be for the future and to lead us in this recovery. We need to make sure that we are supporting businesses to help them to produce the pipeline of skilled workers that we need, because that is going to assist them as they come through this crisis. We are investing over $6.5 billion to keep apprentices in jobs, to help out-of-work Australians to reskill, to promote vocational training and to fill skills shortages.

Let me take you through just some of the ways that we are helping that to occur. We're partnering with states and territories to establish a $1 billion JobTrainer fund, to rapidly provide more Australians with access to free or low-cost training places in areas of identified skills needs. The JobTrainer fund is going to create almost 350,000 training places, starting from next month, to help upskill and retrain school leavers and jobseekers. This fund targets training that is going to give people the best opportunity of getting a job in the future and provide the skills that businesses truly need. There are many things that we are doing as a government, and I've just gone through some of them, but it is important that we recognise how significant it will be to our future to make sure that we have the skilled workforces that industry need right across Australia. We have done a lot of work in the vocational education sector to rebuild the sector, and we are now turbocharging it with JobTrainer.

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