Sam Rae (Hawke, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the Jobs and Skills Australia Amendment Bill 2023. In late 2022 the Albanese government established Jobs and Skills Australia, a statutory body with the task of advising government on matters relating to employment, training, workforce pressures and the jobs of the future. For too long, we've had a skills crisis in this country. We've got the second-highest labour supply shortage across all OECD countries, and that's simply not good enough. Across the 20 most in-demand occupations, seven are facing workforce shortages, primarily driven by a lack of people holding the necessary skills to perform the role. More and more we're relying on vocational training for the jobs of the future, while fewer students are opting to pursue those pathways. Employers are struggling to fill positions, with 65 per cent of employers looking for staff and reporting recruitment difficulty in December 2022. This is worse in the construction sector, which reported a shocking 80 per cent recruitment difficulty. Rates of job advertisements are increasing, and yet it's more challenging than ever to find the right person for the right job.

This skills crisis was born out of the inaction and incompetence of those opposite. For 10 long years, they failed to act when the problem was right under their noses all along. They didn't do anything to alleviate the skills crisis in this country. They were too busy with the internal machinations of their own party room. They were too preoccupied with keeping their own jobs to stop and pay attention to what was happening to Australians' jobs. This mess was created by them, and, as is always the case, it takes a good Labor government to clean it up.

Despite all of this we're already starting to make inroads, with the Recruitment Experiences and Outlook Survey published earlier this year showing that the rate of reported recruiting difficulty is already 11 per cent lower than the record high of 75 per cent in July 2022. Sector-specific workforce planning will be the bread and butter of Jobs and Skills Australia, helping us to dig our way out of this Liberal skills crisis. We wasted no time in holding the Jobs and Skills Summit last year, bringing together unions, business, academia and the broader community to put forward initiatives to help build a bigger, better trained and more productive workforce. The summit looked at mechanisms to boost wages, drive productivity, grow our economy and deliver more opportunities for those who have been traditionally disadvantaged in our workplaces. Types of disadvantage can take many forms, but it is indisputable that women, people aged over 55, people living with a disability, young people, unpaid carers and First Nations Australians are among the most unfairly impacted when it comes to the jobs market. We're changing that.

In bringing together some of the brightest minds in the country for this summit, we were saying to the Australian people that we hear you and we're working nonstop to deliver for you. Last year, the member for Lalor and I hosted the Outer Western Melbourne Jobs and Skills Summit to hear directly from locals across our region about the shared vision for a more prosperous future for local families. We discussed the need for more access to vocational and tertiary pathways for local kids, bringing more local jobs to our communities and so much more. The valuable insights gathered at the Outer Western Melbourne Jobs and Skills Summit were fed straight back to the government here in Canberra, and to the Jobs and Skills Summit. In Hawke, we're home to a thriving, diverse and rapidly growing electorate. The centre of the electorate is an area covered by Melton City Council and is expanding exponentially. Each week we welcome over 57 families, and there are over 60 babies born. Melton is on track to have a larger population than Canberra by 2050. Our people hail from all over the world, and we all chose to call our towns and suburbs home because of the wonderful opportunities that we have access to. It's a great place to raise a family.

But too many are doing it tough. We have a local workforce that is willing to fill the gaps and ready to grow our local economy through commercial investment in warehousing, construction, transport, health care and so much more—the opportunities are endless. We're soon going to welcome some large projects on our doorstep, and my community stands at the ready to play their role in making sure that that work gets done. But our community, particularly the more regional western fringes, as well as the peri-urban centres of Melton and Sunbury, are facing extreme skills shortages across key workforce areas, most notably in our health workforce. GP clinics are struggling for lack of staff. We need to find collaborative ways to deal with this issue. I'm hearing this from locals constantly. It's an issue I have a laser-like focus on, and I will continue to raise it in every possible forum. Last night's announcement by the Treasurer of the tripling of the bulk-billing incentive is a huge step towards better health care for our community.

Like the people in my electorate, I've held a range of jobs that have all shaped me in different ways. When I first left school, I was a labourer in a factory. I've worked in child care, I've washed dishes and I've answered the phone at a call centre. These formative experiences showed me the value of a hard day's work. This is what has driven me to come to this place to stand up for Australian jobs and Australian workers. Indeed, families in my electorate hold the shared ambition of making the lives of their kids and grandkids better, giving them a good education and providing them with more opportunities than ever before. This government shares their motivation to reach for a better future. That's what this bill is all about.

We're getting on with the job of making Jobs and Skills Australia a match-fit organisation ready to face the challenges Australians encounter every day. This bill will ensure that Jobs and Skills Australia has an economy-wide perspective, focusing on the core themes that will define the coming decades in terms of our future workforce—vocational training, in-demand jobs of the future, making sure migration is meeting our skills needs and boosting our higher education sector. Through this bill we're delivering on a key election commitment—to establish Jobs and Skills Australia to provide impartial advice on workforce trends as well as to work hand-in-hand with business, the states and territories, unions, education providers and regional stakeholders to better understand and coordinate a national approach to these issues.

To start to deal with the issues we're facing, this bill proposes some key functions for Jobs and Skills Australia to take on, including: identification of labour market imbalances; an analysis of the role played by the demand and supply of skills; building an evidence base of the impact of various workplace arrangements, including insecure work, on economic and social outcomes; analysing workforce and skills needs to support decision-making in relation to Australia's migration program and regional, rural and remote Australia; undertaking studies, including opportunities to improve employment, VET and higher education outcomes for cohorts of individuals that have historically experienced labour market disadvantage and exclusion, such as women, people over 55, people with disability, youth, unpaid carers and First Nations Australians; and to contribute to industry consultation forums, moving forward. These functions, when implemented, will enable Jobs and Skills Australia to undertake its full range of its core business and governance arrangements that it is designed to fulfil.

Enshrined in this bill is a requirement for a statutory review of the functioning of Jobs and Skills Australia within 24 months. It's important we undertake this review to ensure it is operating in the way it is set out to. We are embedding a commitment to tripartite governance, with a new commissioner supported by deputy commissioners and a tripartite ministerial advisory board. The government, alongside Jobs and Skills Australia, will hear directly from the tripartite partners about the issues facing specific industries, to inform the best possible decision-making. These insights will be invaluable as we work to fix skill shortages across our country.

The commissioner will be appointed in a long-term, permanent capacity through a merit based selection process, to make sure we find the best person to lead this organisation. Further to this, the ministerial advisory board will consist of independent experts with lived experience and the skills required to get this important job done. They will hail from backgrounds in tertiary education, industrial relations and union experience, including people with a regional and rural focus and individuals representing those in the priority focus groups, to make sure we have the full picture, with honest and frank advice being delivered to a government who will be listening.

When Jobs and Skills Australia was formed under interim arrangements late last year, it didn't wait to start the hard work it had been tasked with. It has already commenced a clean energy capacity study as well as a national audit on adult foundational skills. These pieces of work will be essential in enhancing the government's understanding of the critical capacity shortfalls in these areas, providing data driven outcomes that can be acted upon. The enhanced functions introduced in this bill mean that they'll be able to analyse workforce needs, building an evidence base to measure the impact of workplace agreements and the trends that need to be planned for now to ensure we make the most of emerging fields into the future. This bill fits into a broader narrative—a broader piece of work—that this government is undertaking to promote jobs and skills in our country.

In the October budget we committed $6.3 billion for VET in the 2022-23 financial year. Through this we funded 180,000 fee-free TAFE and vocational places in 2023, setting us up for generations to come. Over the next five years we'll grow this to 480,000 fee-free TAFE spots. We're establishing a TAFE Technology Fund to modernise our institutions and facilities. Not only that, we're providing $2.3 billion to the states and territories to help them run their skills and training system in the 2022-23 financial year. This government is working towards a new five-year national skills agreement with the states and territories, aligning with the vision and guiding principles set by the skills ministers and agreed to at National Cabinet.

Without wasting a moment since coming to government, we also passed the Fair Work Legislation Amendment (Secure Jobs, Better Pay) Bill 2022 late last year. After a decade of deliberate wage suppression as a design feature imposed by an out-of-touch government, we're finally seeing pay rises for Australian workers—long overdue pay rises that are sorely needed in today's economic climate. We proudly backed in a 5.2 per cent wage rise for minimum wage workers—something that the Fair Work Commission delivered last year and a measure that those opposite fought tooth and nail against. It doesn't stop there. We're achieving fairer wages by modernising our workplace relations system and improving the bargaining system, delivering better productivity and flexibility for employers, as well as improving pay and conditions for Australian workers.

To counter these achievements, in the dying days of the Morrison government, they were too busy appointing their Liberal mates to lush government paid positions. While those opposite are more concerned with jobs for their mates, we're embracing jobs for Australian workers. We're saying that, if you're an employer in Australia, we want to make it easier for you to find the right people. We want to make it easier for working families across our communities to make a living, to live comfortably and to create a better life for their kids and grandkids.

I commend Minister O'Connor for his dedicated work in bringing this bill to this place. I look forward to working closely with him well into the future as we address the skills and training needs of my electorate and my community in Hawke. We've got a great opportunity to enhance the offering for locals across our shared geography, and I'm excited to see what the future holds. The measures being implemented by this government have already started to make it easier for employers. We saw that in March when around 27 per cent of surveyed employers expected to increase their staffing levels within the coming three months. There's been a strong increase in full-time employment and strong improvements to unemployment rates. The skills gap in this country remains a pressing issue—one that we're well on the way to addressing and one that we have an indomitable focus on. While the work being done is conducted with a long-term vision in mind, we're seeing short-term benefits right now in our jobs market—a credit to those who are leading the way.

This bill will legislate significant changes to Jobs and Skills Australia that will improve the lives of working Australians and better enable the Albanese Labor government to continue to deliver for the men and women that rely on Labor governments across our country.

See this speech in context