James Stevens (Sturt, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on this bill, the Jobs and Skills Australia Bill 2022, which changes the name of the National Skills Commission to Jobs and Skills Australia. What a day it is, and I was here when it happened! It's a story for the grandkids! Anyway, we won't be standing in the way of this cosmetic change that the government is putting through the House right now. But, equally, I want to take the opportunity to make it very clear that we on this side of the House won't be letting window dressing like this be something that the government uses to mask having a genuine approach to the significant challenges that businesses in Australia are facing. Obviously skills are central to that.

This bill, as has been admitted by other speakers, is changing the name of the National Skills Commission to Jobs and Skills Australia. Apparently there's another bill which isn't ready to come before this House which will have some kind of detail around how this new jobs and skills commission will operate. I don't know how it's going to be any different to the National Skills Commission. There have been a lot of these entities through the ages. If this is the rebranding that they needed to do so that they could get through a day of the campaign and say they had a skills policy by announcing the formation of this new entity then so be it. But I will be looking very closely at the other legislation that comes forward and, more importantly, what actually happens when it comes to an agenda of working with the businesses of this country that understand what their skills needs are and the support that they need from government to solve some very serious challenges that they have in their workforce.

I note that the government had a Jobs and Skills Summit last week. I would have thought for this body to have any value it would have been good to have it in place before that summit, if that summit in fact had any genuine purpose. But that didn't happen, so we will wait and see what this agency does, given it wasn't welcome to have any part whatsoever in what apparently was a totemic meeting held in this building last week to solve jobs and skills for the future of our nation. We watch with great interest.

In my home state of South Australia, we have some unique skills challenges that I wish in the best of faith that someone in this new government could have some interest in and play a role in addressing. The defence sector is a very significant one in particular. We are obviously very grateful for the decisions of the previous government which are going to transform the industry capacity of South Australia through the most significant naval shipbuilding programs in this nation's and probably the Southern Hemisphere's history. That is going to create a lot of very highly skilled jobs for people with very significant and unique skill sets.

I will tell you who knows how many people they need and what skills they need to have. It is the businesses that are in the supply chains and the businesses that are going to be building those vessels and contracting all of the requirements for those programs. I very much hope that anything that is established structure-wise has at the heart of it working with the businesses that are creating the jobs and know what skills they need. We have had some bad experiences in South Australia when it comes to Labor governments doing the absolute opposite, particularly in 2015 and 2016 when the industry based RTOs were absolutely decimated by a decision of the Weatherill government, which removed funding from those registered training organisations that were operated by people like the AHA to train the cooks, chefs and other skilled workers they needed in the pubs, restaurants and cafes of South Australia, or the MTA, training people with the motor mechanic skills to work in those businesses. Those RTOs, civil contractors and many more were absolutely decimated because that Labor government said, 'We don't want industry'—who you would think would know a lot about the skills and training requirements they had—'providing that VET training; we're going to centralise it and have a control-and-command approach to it through government decision-making and government funding,' and cut them out. That was an absolute disaster, and of course it destroyed what had been industry taking the lead on their skills requirements and saying: 'We're very happy to actually take responsibility for forming training organisations and understanding and committing to the number of people that we need to train at an industry-wide level. We will provide the employment pathways to them. We'll obviously work with our member organisations to make sure that we're not training people that they don't need. And we'll also forecast, we'll look into the future, because we can talk to our members about how their businesses are growing and changing and what new needs they might have into the future—we'll predict all of that and train for our sector.'

So we can have a national body with a new name—though I was a strong supporter of the National Skills Commission, and I do not understand the rationale for any criticism of that entity or why it needs to be changed, although I understand the realpolitik of the new government having to have a skills policy and that saying they were going to create a new body was a way of saying they had one during the campaign. I note that they also indicated that the staff of the National Skills Commission would just be transferred into this new agency and it wouldn't have any new cost. So, really, how they'll be performing any different function to the National Skills Commission, when it's the same people doing the same jobs that they're doing within the National Skills Commission—if their party platform from the election is to be believed and it has no new cost—will surprise me.

But, nonetheless, I urge the government to prioritise those partnerships with businesses and industry sectors—some of whom weren't welcome last week. Restaurants and caterers were not invited to the Jobs and Skills Summit. If you think there are no jobs and skills challenges in restaurants and catering, you have got no idea whatsoever about one of the very significant sectors that has huge challenges and needs to be listened to and heard. But they weren't welcome last week. That is very peculiar, and it shows to me that last week was not about any genuine discussion about skills and jobs; it was about political theatre. You may have achieved that objective, but I can tell you that if you don't take these challenges seriously and come up with serious solutions to them then this government will be in a lot of strife very quickly.

Although that might have political value for those on this side of the House, we actually do care about the welfare of the businesses of this country and the people that are employed in those businesses. We don't want the government to fail them. But, unfortunately, that attitude—doing things like not inviting restaurants and caterers—is absolutely failing one of the most important sectors in our economy. It's one that really struggled—probably struggled the most, with the tourism sector, of course, more broadly—through the pandemic. So they weren't welcome and their perspective, apparently, is completely irrelevant to a national jobs and skills summit. Well, let's hope that this new entity, which we're rebranding in this bill from the National Skills Commission to Jobs and Skills Australia, can convince the government—whenever they're actually formed with this other piece of legislation that isn't even ready yet to come into this chamber—and change the attitude of the government on things like that.

Certainly, on this side of the House, we want to see industry and business listened to, and we do want to see genuine solutions to those challenges. In my home state of South Australia, we've obviously got some major opportunities if we get this right. For the interests and welfare of my electorate and my home state, I want us to get the necessary skills training requirements right. So I wish this process well, even though I'm very sceptical about it. But, in good faith, we are not standing in the way of the rebranding in this bill. This will be a great episode of Yes, Minister one day. Nonetheless, we are not here to prevent your rebranding. Good luck with the logo and the website, '.gov.au'—all of those things; you can do all of that. But, please, at some point, I hope this government takes seriously the genuine challenges that we've got in skills. On that basis, I commend the bill to the House.

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