Nola Marino (Forrest, Liberal Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Education) Share this | Hansard source

Australia certainly needs top-class, effective training. However, it won't just be the number of enrolments and commencements that are the measure of whether the $1.5 billion of taxpayers' money that the Labor government is spending on this policy is actually being spent wisely. The true test will be whether each one of the students complete these courses, meaning the completion and the qualification rates will be the measure of success for this policy, as will whether the students are genuinely skilled, job ready and able to do the jobs the employers actually require. Equally, in regional areas, a measure of success will be whether the students are training in the areas of particular workforce shortages.

There are already concerns given that the estimates of TAFE completions are showing the failure, or non-completion, rate could be as high as 55 to 60 per cent. For example, in Victoria, just one per cent of those registered for a free certificate IV in plumbing successfully completed their training. Labor speakers talking today need to confirm just how many of Labor's 500,000 fee-free TAFE courses have resulted in a real qualification being completed, leading to a real qualified worker. Taxpayers have a right to know how many cancellations or noncompletions there have been across those enrolments and, equally, how many of these enrolments were not genuinely new places, as opposed to those that were going to be there anyway, without that additional $1.5 billion cost to taxpayers.

The reason these details are so important is that, under Labor, skills are going backwards, so completion and qualification rates are critical. The latest data released by the National Centre for Vocational Education Research shows that Australia has lost over 85,300 apprentices and trainees from the national training pipeline since the Labor government took office—a loss of one in five. This means Labor has squandered almost all the gains made by the coalition government in building up Australia's skills pipeline. It also comes at a time when Labor is bringing in over 1.15 million migrants, which is putting extraordinary pressure on housing, infrastructure, hospitals, schools and health services—and of course we're building only 265,000 new homes. At the same time, we're seeing worsening skills shortages, unaffordable and soaring energy costs, stalling housing constructions and record insolvencies in the building sector itself. No wonder there are 5,300 fewer construction trades worker apprentices in training since Labor took office. Added to this, new-start apprentices and trainees have dropped by 23 per cent, the number of female apprentices and trainees in training has fallen by 25 per cent and the number of female commencements has fallen by 40 per cent.

The harsh reality facing the Australian people, with Labor's shocking economic failure and the additional $315 billion of new spending driving homegrown inflation, is that Australia is building fewer homes and the skills shortage has become far worse. We've lost one in five apprentices and trainees across the country, and Australians cannot find accommodation, housing or rental properties. Australia needs more apprentices and trainees, not fewer, for businesses of all sizes, from small and medium family businesses through to major businesses and industries. Labor promised they would solve the skills shortages. Well, they haven't done so. Unfortunately, it's just another broken promise made to the Australian people, along with the broken promises to lower power prices, to fix the cost-of-living issues and to lower mortgage costs, amongst so many other broken promises.

According to Jobs and Skills Australia, 36 per cent of occupations were assessed as being in shortage in 2023, up from 31 per cent in 2022, and 66 occupations were added to this list in 2023. Effectively, this means over 330 occupations are in shortage in Australia. Clearly, the 1.15 million migrants Labor has opened Australia's doors to have not filled and are not filling these shortages because Labor has failed to target skilled migrants in its open-door migration policy and has failed to support and train Australian apprentices and trainees in the numbers that are needed. To add insult to injury, not only has the new Minister for Skills and Training role been taken out of cabinet but it's clearly not a priority for the Labor government.

See this speech in context