Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Minister for Industry and Science) Share this | Hansard source

It's a great pleasure not only to speak in this debate but to follow someone I regard highly, Assistant Minister Kearney, who rightly spoke of in particular skilling up people in roles that the community values, not the least of which being nurses, midwives and a lot of people that at our time of need provide us with critical support, and you want to make sure at that point in time you've got people that are skilled up to do so. We certainly believe as a government in the value of that, and I want to thank her for her service, especially in terms of advocating for more skills in this area and more support for our nurses in this country. I think it is important that we do so. And it's not just me; I think average Australians would around the country. We want to see more of that happen. We want to see more people trained up. We recognise the value of TAFE and vocational education in helping not just our economy and not just our country but the people that benefit from that training and the opportunities that it opens up for them.

Obviously I'm speaking in favour of the Free TAFE Bill 2024, because fee-free TAFE places will become a permanent feature in our vocational education and training system. It's a program that has made a huge difference to many people in Western Sydney, and we want to see that change locked in for good. As the son of a welder, I certainly know the value of learning a trade. My dad's skills kept a roof over our heads, food on the table and bills paid. His trade gave our family opportunity, and it gave him the chance to contribute to building the future of his adopted country, a country that welcomed him and allowed him to get to work. He got to work on some pretty big projects in his time. He speaks fondly of his ability to participate in the Snowy Mountains Hydro-Electric Scheme development. A lot of things have changed in Western Sydney since those days, but not the value of learning a trade. Today, having a trade continues to mean well-paid work for mums and dads and sons and daughters across our suburbs, bringing not just economic opportunity but the skills base our country needs to be able to build a really strong future for the rest of the nation.

I'll give you an example of how important that is in my community. Last year, I was invited to break ground on what would be the largest data centre campus in the Southern Hemisphere. A great Australian success story, CDC, is behind the project. It's being built in Marsden Park in the electorate that I'm very proud to represent. The numbers are truly staggering. It will be the size of 27 soccer fields, with state-of-the-art facilities hosting cloud, classical and high-end AI computing. It'll be the envy of the world, the beating heart of the Sydney Business Park that will create spin-off industries and support other businesses across the country. It's a project that will need about 10,000 skilled workers. A lot of them aren't just in IT. To build the thing, you need construction skills. You need sparkies, heating, cooling and ventilation trades, security workers and admin workers to keep something this big running. That's not counting the incredible opportunities of having this facility in our backyard. It will create thousands of more skilled work opportunities, well-paid work for thousands and thousands of families so they can get the best from the west and our unbeatable lifestyle.

Workers in Western Sydney are excited about the opportunities. Businesses in our region are absolutely crying out for skilled workers. It's one of the big things I get raised with me by industry. They want talented workers. This is across the board. It's not just in digital and tech, bearing in mind that we have an ambition as a nation; this government is committed to making sure we reach the target of 1.2 million Australians employed in tech related jobs by 2030. It's good for the country. It's good for businesses. It's good for those workers in particular. We see it in construction. We see it in manufacturing. We see that those areas need people. In construction, for example, it's estimated that we're about 90,000 workers short. We need people to build homes and build commercial premises across this great country of ours. Because of our fee-free TAFE program, there are 31,000 VET students just in the electorate of Chifley. There are more opportunities for families to get ahead and more skills for businesses who want to invest in the long-term future of the country.

A number of claims have been made in the course of this debate. The good thing about our democracy is that you get different sides putting different views forward. From time to time, I think that's very much a good thing, but you hope that we're doing this on the basis of facts and evidence. One of the things that have been an issue for many years is skill shortages. I just want to reflect on the contribution made by the member for Flinders, who referenced her work in this House, under the Howard government, to be able to provide skills packages. If you listened to that contribution, you would think, 'That's a pretty impressive piece of work. There are probably elements of it that people would welcome.'

Bear in mind that, by the point at which the Howard government announced that, there were these things that were referred to as capacity constraints in the economy. The two biggest ones, which had dragged on for years, were infrastructure bottlenecks because the federal coalition government didn't commit to infrastructure investment, and the other massive capacity constraint, which was reflected on by people from the RBA to economists to businesses, was skill shortages. Why? Because you had a federal coalition government under John Howard that was either at war with universities or wouldn't fund TAFE. He would not fund TAFE.

In the contribution by the member for Flinders, who I sat and listened to, she talked about setting up a separate stratum for training in technical colleges, quite distinct from TAFE. They would fund a rival TAFE. They did this quite often. They also set up, in schools, technical trade centres that we then had to support and adopt when we took office in 2007. But, again, it was about creating rival systems to those in the states—a wasteful, ideologically driven approach that didn't address the long-running problems that had been created in the economy and that got worse. The coalition government scrambled to put a package together, and that's what you saw. Those things weren't reflected on by the member for Flinders.

We then had the way-out-there contribution by the member for Petrie, who was in the chamber when we heard from the Prime Minister himself his positive reflections on the contribution of the private training sector.

What we're focusing on is TAFE, because, as most people think, if you're going to make an investment, where do you get the biggest bang for your buck? From our point of view, a publicly funded TAFE system that a lot of Australians are familiar with, supportive of and can get access to is probably the fastest way to do it. This is not an either/or situation. It is about maximising the value of taxpayer dollars by going in and supporting TAFE at the point at which it needs that support. At a time when we need more skills, what we're trying to do through fee-free TAFE places is attract people to take up a TAFE course. We want to see that backed. That is why we support it. Now what we have is a coalition opposing the idea that you would have fee-free TAFE places that would attract and train up the people we need to fill the skills shortage.

What's the alternative to this? It's to use a private system, which even those opposite recognise has challenges. When the coalition was in government, remember, the then minister, Simon Birmingham, had to undertake a massive reform program because that system was full of providers that we recognised were engaged in practices that were luring students in and were not delivering the training that they should, because they were dodgy providers.

That's not the case for all private providers, I emphasise, but even the coalition recognise that it needs to be reformed. This was done, again, when they refused to properly fund TAFE in their last time in office. They refused to back, at the appropriate point in time, skills agreements with the states and territories and starved TAFE of vital dollars. They did it in the Howard government and then they did in the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison governments as well, and they took their sweet time to reform private training, which then created other problems for other students.

Now, we recognise that there are some good private providers around. There absolutely are. What we're trying to do is, as I said, provide bang for the buck in making sure that we have a public TAFE system as central to our system, that we attract people in, train them up as quickly as we can and put them to work in an economy that needs those skills. This is not playing ideological games. It's about being practical, not ideological, as opposed to what the coalition does and as opposed to some of the way-out-there arguments that the member for Petrie put on the public record in his 'contribution' to this debate, just walking past all those problems that existed.

I also note that, while I do have a lot of time for the member for Wentworth, the member for Wentworth's big argument at the end of her contribution was: 'This is something that will happen down the track. Why are we doing this now?' I am left thinking, when we often get criticism in this country that governments don't think ahead enough, at a point where a government is thinking ahead, is giving certainty, is providing funding certainty, we should be putting this in place and we should be flagging a long-term mechanism to provide that support and ensure that people know that this will continue for a long time and that they can go into TAFE and do so. We will not go back to the old days. The member for Petrie said, 'Why don't we have TAFE students pay for their education?' That is what he advocated at the dispatch box. That is exactly what we are trying to avoid with this bill. It is to avoid people paying and to attract them in. That's the big difference.

I've said there is a contest of ideas. The contest of ideas here comes down to the coalition, which says that you will not value education if you don't pay for it. You need to send a price signal. You need to send a price signal, apparently, on health care as well. The Leader of the Opposition many times as health minister said the same thing. But then the same coalition that says we shouldn't be backing free TAFE, we shouldn't be backing free medicine and affordable healthcare, in the next breath can say, 'But we should fund lobster mornay, truffle oil and free lunches for employers.' Something does not gel when you make that argument. The country recognises the value of affordable health care and that they don't avoid getting health care because they can't afford it. The country also gets that we should be training people up at speed so we get those skills into the economy and into businesses that are always saying they want skills. Instead, we have a coalition that wants to play ideological games and stand in the way of those reforms.

If there's anything about the coalition that I may say positively, it's that they're consistent. They never support properly funding education. They never support making sure that people who may not have the means to fund themselves entirely throughout their education get some support to do so. We believe that, if you've got skills, your background and your parents' income should not be the determinant of whether or not you get educated. We want Australians from all corners of the country and all backgrounds to be able to step up and build a better country, and they should be skilled up and backed to do so. We should not have a situation where people feel that only education can be supported for those people that have the means and the wealth to do so. I reckon there are a lot of Australians who would agree with the sentiment that, if you've got the talent, we need to get you to the front and to make sure we put your skills to work. That's what we are trying to do.

We are trying to encourage people to go forward and pursue the skills they need and the talent they require for our economy and our country. That is why we support the Free TAFE Bill 2024. It's good for the country, it's good for the economy, and it's good for everyday Australians who want to get ahead and have an aspiration to do better in their lives. If we can make that happen, then that is a great thing for this nation.

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