Peta Murphy (Dunkley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to take note of the report into Australia's skilled migration program. On the weekend, somewhat to my surprise, I was privileged to be invited to the family celebration of a family I had never met before. The Joseph family invited me to their barbecue at Ballam Park in Frankston to celebrate 50 years since the Joseph siblings had come to Australia. Their family was originally from India and they had lived and worked in Karachi, but, because of the disruptions of war and the economic circumstances in India and Pakistan, they had to flee, and they came to Australia. Fifty years later, the Josephs are the picture of multicultural Australia. They have family members of Indian, Pakistani and Sri Lankan descent. They've got German heritage, Croatian heritage, Irish heritage—they are a big, happy, loving, wonderful Australian migrant story.

What's really important about this country is that we do have a very welcoming approach to migration, and we should always have an incredibly welcoming approach to migration. We also need to make sure that people who are in Australia now have the skills and training to get the jobs that exist now and the jobs that are going to exist in the future. There are more than 1.3 million Australians on either JobSeeker—soon to be returned to Newstart, at $43.75 a day—or youth allowance. There are more than two million Australians who are looking either for work or for more work. We live in a country where, for the last eight years under this Liberal government, some $3 billion has been cut from TAFE and training systems and apprenticeships have been lost. We know because of this report that we live in a country where there are significant skills shortages in various industries, and those of us who talk to employers, young people and workers in our electorates know that there is a skills shortage.

Before I entered this parliament I was on the board of Peninsula Health, and I was shocked to hear at one of the meetings that we were advertising in the UK for mental health nurses because we couldn't get Australian trained mental health nurses for the hospital. That should never be the case. We have magnificent medical practitioners at Frankston Hospital and Peninsula Health who have come from all over the world. When I think about the people that work there—for example, Professor Srikanth, the amazing medical research director, who came from India—I am so pleased that we have people from all over the world working in our health system in Frankston. But it cannot be the case that, because we can attract the best talent, we neglect to train up our own people at the same time.

It should not be the case that we have 40,000 Australians stranded overseas wanting to come home, and yet we have a government that is looking to weaken labour market testing to expand the number of occupations on the skill shortage list to include chefs, veterinarians, seafarers, motor mechanics, cooks, carpenters, electricians, cafe managers and other hospitality roles. Each of those occupations are pretty popular in Dunkley. Seafarers—we don't have as many as some other electorates, that's true! But the others are pretty popular occupations in Dunkley, yet we're not training up our own people enough so that they can get jobs that they need. It's an indictment of this government that it has failed to properly appreciate the role of skills, traineeships and, most importantly, the public TAFE system over the eight years in which it's been the government. The approach to skill shortages needs to be training up Australian workers and then turning to overseas workers to fill skill gaps, while at the same time attracting the best and brightest to come and work here. That's a comprehensive approach.

This is a government that, by stealth, is pretty happy for our public TAFE system to be outsourced and privatised. We've seen it happen with employment services. Not a day goes by that my electorate office doesn't have a constituent contact us about difficulties with their job service provider, most of which are staffed by magnificent people, but the privatised system isn't working for the people that need the help.

TAFE is fundamentally important to my community. Frankston TAFE, now part of the Chisholm Institute, is geographically at the heart of Frankston and it's now at the magnificent heart of Frankston, thanks to hundreds of millions of dollars of investment from the state Labor government, with a building and training facilities that are second to none. It's also at the heart of the future of many of the constituents in my electorate, and we're really proud of it. I thank the Deputy Leader of the Opposition and the shadow minister for national reconstruction, who came with me recently to see what a first-class public TAFE and training facility really should look like. We need this government to act now. We can't wait for a Labor government, but I can tell you a federal Labor government would be investing in and supporting public TAFE at the heart of the skills and training system.

TAFE is a public institution at heart. We need a strong and sustainable public network of regionally accessible world-class vocational education and training. We need an active industry policy, which doesn't exist at the moment under this government, that is good for the economy and good for industry, and trains up and supports our people to work in the industries of the future. We have to have education and training providers, with industry and federal and state governments working together for a training system.

I commend to this government recent reviews undertaken in both New South Wales and Victoria by, among others, Jenny Macklin, who was one of the best policy thinkers in this federal parliament before she left and is now one of the best policy thinkers not in this federal parliament in the whole country. Look at those reports and actually consider what a holistic, properly constructed skills and training program looks like, remembering that the Productivity Commission's role and public TAFE have to be at the heart of it.

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