Andrew Wallace (Fisher, Liberal National Party) Share this | Hansard source

Absolutely correct! If we do that, then good luck trying to get your toilet fixed. Good luck trying to get a house built. Trades give young people an opportunity to learn invaluable skills that will take them anywhere in the world. If you do a trade in Australia, you will never, generally speaking, be without work. You can always find work. With an Australian trade qualification, you will be able to get work anywhere in the world because of the high quality and high esteem that that trade is held in around the world.

It is important, in my view, that we walk the talk in this place. At every opportunity I get I talk about the importance of trades and not necessarily making a career out of going to university. If you want to go to university, that's fine. That's great. We need lawyers, we need doctors; there's no suggestion about that. But we also need plasterers, we need plumbers, we need electricians, we need carpenters, we need hairdressers et cetera.

A couple of years ago, I started what I call my Ready, Set, Go bursary, which provides $1,000 to young people who are in a trade and who want a little bit of help. They want a little bit of help for tools or maybe a bit of help towards buying a ute, whatever it might be. I think of people who the bursary has supported, like Tom Loane and Morgan McCosker, who are both electrical apprentices, and Courtney Byron, who is an apprentice hairdresser. We in this place need to walk the talk, and we need to be supporting our young people into trades.

In relation to our work on skills and training when we were in government, those opposite will tell you all sorts of things about what we did and we didn't do, but these are the facts.

These are the facts, Member for Moreton, so just listen. We invested record funding into vocational education. The result was historically low unemployment and historically high employment participation—particularly for who, Member for Canning? For young people and women. You can't look at the scoreboard and say the maths is wrong.

We also saw a record number of apprentices and trainees. Through our $2 billion JobTrainer program, we supported over 300,000 students through subsidised vocational training. Through our Job-ready Graduates Package, we delivered reforms which make employability in the future economy the priority for higher education funding. Through the JobMaker Hiring Credit scheme, the Boosting Apprenticeship Commencements and the Completing Apprenticeship Commencements program and our wage subsidy program, we were able to support hundreds of thousands of apprentices, trainees and employers to grow our skilled workforce.

I've still got plenty of mates who are in the building industry, and, let me tell you, they loved the subsidies that we introduced for training apprentices. We understood that many in the workforce were working without formal qualifications, some for many years. That's why in 2015 the federal government, our federal government, the coalition government, changed the Standards for Registered Training Organisations to require all nationally accredited providers to offer recognition of prior learning. Essentially, if you can demonstrate that you have the work experience and informal training equivalent to the skills or competencies in the qualification, the RTO will provide you with a pathway to obtaining a formal qualification. We handed the Labor government a world-class vocational skills and training system which had recovered from years of Labor meddling and neglect and which wasn't just growing but powering ahead in a strong job market and national economy.

As my colleagues on this side of the House have outlined time and time again, we want to be a constructive opposition—don't we, Member for Canning? We want to be at constructive opposition. We want to work with government to deliver better outcomes for Australians. We want to deliver better outcomes for Australian families and their businesses. Now, sometimes, we're going to agree with the government, and sometimes we're not. We will hold the government to account all the time; in this spirit of wanting to be a constructive opposition, it is important that we hold the government to account—that we hold them to account for their promises and we hold them to account for their inactions.

Over 100 days have passed since this government took office. Now, 100 days in the broader scheme of things is not a long time, but this government, the Labor government, needs to start putting some runs on the board. They made Jobs and Skills Australia the cornerstone of their election commitments, and yet, to date, we have no idea what this agency will actually do. We have no information about how it will do what it will do, and we have no information about how it will help do whatever it will do. Is this just a rebranding exercise, or is it a complete dismantling of the system which stood us in good stead over the last nine years? These questions are unanswered, the voices unheard and the concerns unaddressed. What we need to be careful of is that they do not stop this sector in its tracks. The National Skills Commission already does the job of researching, reporting, coordinating and leading efforts to inform and improve Australia's skilled workforce and training agenda.

There is no doubt, as I speak to businesses, that all of us would share that this country is having a skills crisis. There is no doubt about that. Predominantly the reason for that would be COVID. COVID has turned our skills training and the way we work upside down, but that is no reason why we should sit back and say, 'Well, that's COVID; so be it.' It is vitally important for our young people, vitally important for our economy that we encourage people back into skilled labour, back into work. Our unemployment rate is so incredibly low at the moment, but we do need to be encouraging those who have taken part in the great resignation. We talk about the great resignation in the US. Well, I think that's also happened here.

I can't let the moment pass without talking about Labor's Jobs and Skills Summit. This summit, the foundation of Labor's pledge to reform the skilled workforce—well, we all know it turned out to be a bit of a fizzer.

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