Michael McCormack (Riverina, National Party, Shadow Minister for International Development and the Pacific) Share this | Hansard source

I would like to compliment and praise Jasmine Cecchini. She is a beauty therapist in Wagga Wagga, and her journey has been deeply rooted in family influence and personal ambition. She set out on this course when she was 19 years young, apprenticing in her mother's salon. This early immersion in the world of beauty therapy provided her with not only valuable hands-on experience but very much a strong foundation in the field.

She won a Medallion for Excellence at the WorldSkills Lyon 2024, in France. Her employer is Circa 1929, located in Fitzmaurice Street in the heart of Wagga Wagga. Her training institute was the Technical and Further Education New South Wales Wagga Wagga. She has shown remarkable dedication to her craft, completing her apprenticeship and, by the age of 21, winning gold at the WorldSkills Australia nationals.

Whilst she has been very busy working and training, she has made certain that she has a good work-life balance. She said—and it's a great quote:

Watching my mum work as hard as she did as a single mum, instilled in me a good work ethic and has had a profound impact on how I approach my career and personal development.

She very much has ambitious goals. She wants to open her own business, she wants to work overseas and she wants to showcase her talent on an even greater international scale. I say to Jasmine: Well done. You have done not only yourself and your family but, indeed, your community proud.

The member for Newcastle brings this WorldSkills Competition 2024 motion to the House, and I commend her for that. I also note her dedication to TAFE. I know she has been on her feet a number of times during her parliamentary career to talk up the value of TAFE, and I share that passion with her, being a former TAFE student with quite a number of certificates from the Wagga Wagga college.

But I heard the member for Gilmore criticise the opposition and our stance towards fee-free TAFE. What is being sold and what is being spruiked is not going to benefit entirely every single person who attempts to go and do a TAFE course. It is, just like the housing bills that this government has put forward, in that regard something of a misnomer.

Only in recent hours have we seen Labor and the Greens cosy up on housing bills. It is so typical—phony indignation. Pretend as though this were some terrible thing that the Greens weren't partnering, and all of a sudden, lo and behold, in the death throes of the parliamentary year, when the government is doing so badly, the Greens political party have come to the party and agreed with Labor on the government's housing reforms—as if they were never going to. Let's face it: they will both swap premises, as they always do, at the next election. This little lover's tiff has just been that: just feigned indignation. It is mock outrate as though it were never going to happen, and we all know that it certainly was.

This comes at a time when, according to corporate watchdog ASIC, there were 2,832 construction industry insolvency appointments for the 2024 financial year until 16 June, an increase of 28 per cent on the 2,213 insolvencies over the previous financial year. The construction industry is doing it tough. We hear Labor talk a big game about building 1.2 million homes. That's not going to happen, not in a month of Sundays. It's just not going to happen. They talk about it; they're not going to produce it. They talk about fee-free TAFE; it's not free. This is so typical of this government, which has a lot to answer for.

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