Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that this bill be now read a second time. To this the Deputy Leader of the Opposition has moved as an amendment that all words after ‘That’ be omitted with a view to substituting other words. The question now is that the words proposed to be omitted stand part of the question.

Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great pleasure to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006. I had long calls during the last election from employers in my area that with the labour shortages that we are currently experiencing—we have the lowest unemployment rate in Australia in 30 years—employers are finding it hard to get employees, let alone skilled employees. We really need to step up our efforts in this direction and to get our unemployed skilled up to meet the needs of the directions of future Australian industries.

In my area the rock eisteddfods are incredibly popular, and I know that at any school you go to they have so many talented youngsters, but somehow the sciences, the trades and the technical professions need to capture that same amount of interest and enthusiasm and we need to direct young Australians into those areas, where the jobs are, rather than into entertainment. It is not that entertainment is not a great career; we just do not need more singers but need more tradespeople.

The amendment moved by the opposition really underestimates the effect of this bill and goes on with a lot of political point scoring which adds no value to the face of the bill. At the end of the day, the opposition will be voting for this. They realise that it is a good bill and that it needs to be supported in the face of state Labor governments such as the New South Wales Labor government’s ideological opposition to school based New Apprenticeships. It refuses to enhance, direct or incentivise its educational trainers, who have some outstanding curriculums to offer, to be a part of the bids that came forward to this government.

The states just cannot get across the industrial relations aspects of the bids, where we required these technical colleges to get the very best of trainers from industry. If you have to pay people higher wages on an AWA to give them what they are worth, then that is what you must do. If you find that a teacher is not performing, that they are not bringing students up to speed in a reasonable amount of time, then you have to have the flexibility to dispense with that teacher’s services and take on someone who will get those students up to speed. That flies totally in the face of the awards and the lock-down of the TAFE industrial system, and there is significant opposition within the New South Wales government to TAFE’s involvement. Every time it came to the crunch in areas like Lismore-Ballina, Queanbeyan and Dubbo, and even in my local area of Penrith—certainly in the Campbelltown area, where TAFE was a part of the bid—it was just so hard to get them over the last line of contracting the teachers with those types of technical skills who would work in the technical colleges.

In the end, the Catholic Education Office in Parramatta—and I am delighted to see the member for Parramatta here—was successful in attaining the Sydney technical college, and they will roll out a number of places. I think it is about 150-odd places across Sydney, particularly in Western Sydney. They have chosen the Blacktown area to establish their campus. It is a fairly central location. I figure that you could have at least two or three other technical colleges in Western Sydney. We have a large trades area—a large family tradition of trades—and a lot of young people interested in trades but who are lacking the opportunity.

The New South Wales government have not grasped the school based apprenticeships by the horns. They have not done much with TAFE incentives for employers. They make it very difficult for employers to take on apprentices. They have not taken on policies such as weighting government contracts so that employers with high numbers of apprentices have an advantage over employers with no apprentices in successfully winning government tenders. That is a very basic policy the New South Wales government could adopt to really drive apprenticeship take-up amongst employers.

They could back it up with school based apprenticeships, where kids start after year 10 to gain recognisable certificate level III skills in their trade during their school time and they can use their holidays and spare time working in the industry to gain on-the-job training so that by the time they leave in year 12 they have one or two years of their apprenticeship under their belt. Then the second- or third-year wage of an apprenticeship is not such a disadvantage compared to the pay of some of their friends who are possibly on welfare or in jobs which seem to pay, after expenses, a bit more than the poor old first-year apprentice gets. So there are a number of things that the New South Wales state government could have done.

As it was, a lot of the New South Wales ATCs went the way of the private sector, such as to the Catholic Education Office. There were good bids from my area, and there is a particular one I am still pursuing because I really think Penrith is a fantastic area to have a technical college in. We have a very strong interest in the trades, we have a significant number of young people and this is really where a lot of our young people want to head. They can get great paying jobs and make a significant contribution to their future financial security and have a very prosperous old age. My bid was backed by the Hunter—

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Hunter Valley Training Co.

Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right, the Hunter Valley Training Co., which is in the electorate of my good friend the member for Paterson, who has a very good relationship with Milton. We both know Milton from that company, but Milton also has an extension of that company in Penrith, called Skillswest. Skillswest has premises where they can undertake mechanics and automotive training, carpentry and bricklaying. Those are a number of the skills that are listed to be offered by these technical colleges. It offered a model in which the children from the public schools could be involved.

I am pretty sure the technical college proposed by the Catholic Education Office in Parramatta will probably be filled just by the Catholic systemic school students in Western Sydney. They would find sufficient kids to do that, and that basically means that everyone in a public school and everyone in a non-Catholic school in Western Sydney is going to miss out. If the New South Wales government had backed the bid of the Hunter Valley Training Co. through Skillswest and if we had been able to get that bid up, we would have seen another 150 places offered to children at the public and non-Catholic schools in Western Sydney, like Nepean High School. I think that would have been a great outcome for the level of money being invested in skills.

Why do kids like the rock eisteddfod rather than trades? I go around music labs in our schools, and they are dynamic. I remember music when I was at school. There was a dilapidated old piano that was invariably out of tune and there were a bunch of recorders. It was not really exciting. For me sport was far more interesting. The member for Parramatta will acknowledge that my singing last night was not the greatest. I probably should have taken music more assiduously at school! But sport was my thing. I was not that interested in music. It did not have a lot of appeal. Science, on the other hand, was fascinating. You had on the wall amazing pictures of the anatomy, the bone structure and the muscle cell structures. You had bunsen burners and some whizzbang experiments that exploded, blew up smoke and turned things different colours. They were, in hindsight, quite dangerous and have since been eliminated from the schools based curriculum. We have seen a flip today. Today music in the schools is vibrant. There are electronic keyboards and there are iPods. You can create your own electronic music with just a computer program. You can learn keyboards. Music is exciting and interesting. It is what I call the discovery channel level of learning.

Science, on the other hand, has not moved on. In fact, I think it has been made less exciting by the elimination of a lot of the interesting stuff. The labs really have not improved. The paint has faded and the labs have got greyer, and kids are not that interested in the technical side of things. That is a real shame. A lot of kids like hands-on learning. Woodwork, metalwork and some other VET courses are offered. But these VET courses only go to level 2. When that child leaves school at the end of grade 12, they must attend TAFE and redo all of that metalwork, all of that carpentry and all of everything else they learned because it is not recognised in going towards a TAFE qualification or trade based skill levels, for which you can earn a wage accordingly.

There is clearly a need for more investment in skills. It really was not coming from the state governments. It really should have been. It should be happening in years 11 and 12. We should be capturing those students in year 10. They are very good students and they are very bright, but they are more hands-on, outdoorsy type kids. They do not want to be tied to books in a classroom. It is not them. Their parents are plumbers and electricians—they are tradies—and they know the family industry fairly well. They have helped out on weekends. If you can capture that interest in years 11 and 12, you can capture a willing and able market. If they wait until the end of year 12 before they move out into the labour market, the wages are a huge disincentive. There are barriers in front of young people who do not have a driver’s licence and are trying to commute by public transport in Western Sydney. Most of the trades work that is done right across Sydney is by tradespeople from Western Sydney. Quite frequently tradesmen in my area go as far as Cronulla and the North Shore for jobs, and the young kids have to get to where the work is. The public transport system means they are getting up at 3.30 or four o’clock in the morning. It becomes arduous. They look at the other kids who have left school and ask, ‘Why am I doing this?’

These technical colleges go a long way to capturing the interest of our children early, to maintaining involvement and to getting them halfway through a trade. As you leave year 12, there will only be two years to go to finish and at least get the trade under their belt. I think the parent is in more of an advantageous position to pressure a young person when they can say: ‘Look, it’s two years. Just finish it. Get your trade, get your diploma, get that under your belt and then you can go and do what you want to do.’ That is better than saying, ‘It’s four years.’ You are not going to convince even the most enthusiastic young person that four years is not an incredibly long time.

I will keep pushing for an Australian technical college in my area. We have got around a lot of the roadblocks that were put in the way by the New South Wales state government. It could be an extension of the Hunter Valley Training Co.’s operation in the Hunter, which is due to open next year. It is full steam ahead and it will be one of the truly outstanding ATCs of the 25 listed. These colleges will cover regions such as Port Macquarie, where the St Joseph’s Vocational College is moving forward with its successful bid; eastern Melbourne, where the Ringwood Secondary College is moving ahead with its successful bid; Gladstone; the Gold Coast; Illawarra; Bairnsdale and Sale, with the Gippsland technical college; Bendigo, which will have the central Victorian college; Geelong, with G-Force Recruitment; Townsville, where the Townsville Chamber of Commerce won the bid; and Adelaide, where the Archdiocese of Adelaide and the Northern Adelaide Industry Group won the Adelaide north bid and where the Port Adelaide Training and Development Centre won the Adelaide south bid. There are 400,000 people in Adelaide and they got two technical colleges. I think that strongly indicates that there should be two for Western Sydney, which has two million people. We have a very strong trades base and a lot of industry to service in New South Wales and greater Sydney.

In Darwin the ATC will be run by the Territory Construction Association. In north Brisbane, Commerce Queensland and Redcliffe City Council made the successful bid. The Diocese of Maitland-Newcastle and the Hunter Valley Training Co. are doing the one in the Hunter, as I have already said. The Tasmanian consortium is doing one for Northern Tasmania. Stirling Skills Training Inc. is doing one for Perth south. I have already mentioned that the Parramatta Catholic Education Office is doing the ATC for Western Sydney. In South Australia, Whyalla and Port Augusta are being serviced by the Catholic Diocese of Port Pirie and the Upper Spencer Gulf Industry and Regional Development Group. At Sunshine the Sunshine Secondary College made the winning bid. In Gosford the Central Coast chamber of manufactures are moving ahead. In Warrnambool, BTEC and the South West Institute of TAFE have made a bid. We are looking at that. I do not know that that has been announced yet. There are a few others that are still to be announced—in the Pilbara, Dubbo, Lismore-Ballina and Queanbeyan—because of issues with the education department to do with recognition of qualifications and industrial disputes about AWAs et cetera. That is quite an extraordinary aspect of the state government.

Our Investing in Our Schools program is a great program that looks at delivering funds for improvements to facilities in schools. For years I have been saying to our government: ‘You keep on saying that more and more money is going to schools’—which is true; we have increased and increased funding to schools in our 10 years of government—‘but I am not seeing it on the ground. Nepean High School in my electorate does not see that money. If all those increases per capita had gone directly to the students at Nepean High, the school should have seen significant increases in its operational budget, but it has not.’

The Investing in Our Schools program is great. The funds go straight to the schools and bypasses the New South Wales state government. But—wouldn’t you know it?—the state government gets an administration fee. We found out yesterday that the state government has been creaming—and in some states, it is up to 16 per cent—off the Investing in Our Schools program. How hard can we try? We are trying to get money to the coalface, where it needs to be spent and, as a federal government, we must go through the states one way or another. Somehow, when we finally found a way to circumvent these guys, they still have their sticky fingers in the till and are pulling out some money. I think that was one of the major problems with the ATCs—they could not get their sticky fingers on that money. They did not like the schools based apprenticeships, because it seemed to knock out their sticky fingers a bit. It almost seems as though we have to pay them off and say: ‘Here’s your 16 per cent up front. Can you let the rest go?’

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The education mafia.

Jackie Kelly (Lindsay, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

That is right. ‘Can we get the rest of this straight to the schools where it is needed?’ My people come to me and say: ‘I can’t see the money. You say you are putting in all this money.’ I can show you budget after budget over 10 years where we have invested in schools. The amounts have gone up and the allocations have increased but, somehow on the way through the states, the money just gets gobbled up in administration costs in these monolithic state education departments. I do not know what they produce, but they seem to cream off this administration fee, which gets bigger and bigger and the finances fail to make it to the grassroots level where they need to be.

You can see this in the child-care sector as well. For 10 years, the New South Wales state government, in particular, have totally rejected their primary schools. They have done nothing in this area and I reckon they will do nothing in this area until the next state election. They have said they would, simply because the state opposition in New South Wales came out with an excellent primary schools proposal for more investment in preschooling. But, again, you see the federal government coming in with child-care subsidies, and they just walk away from it. Instead of increasing their expenditure so that, overall, we get a benefit, it just seems that the more money we put in the more ways they find of taking their money out, and the end result is that we end up carrying the can for things.

I would not like to see this happen with the technical colleges. I would like to see the technical colleges boosted and be the source of overall additional funding to address our skills based shortages. I would almost like to bet you—if that is at all appropriate, Mr Deputy Speaker—that somehow the state governments will withdraw their funding from the VET programs and withdraw their funding from some aspect of our schooling so that the overall funding for skills in our schools will decrease. It is one of the classic, shameless exercises of governments under fire when they do not have their economies right and are failing financially.

I commend this bill to the House. It will go a long way to addressing Australia’s skills shortages at a time of the lowest unemployment in 30 years.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Before I say what I was going to say on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006, I would like to comment briefly on some of the remarks made by members opposite. Firstly, I want to say how tired I am, and every member on this side is—and probably every person in Australia is—of hearing speaker after speaker on the government side get up and blame the states for something. Nearly every speaker does it; it is so boring. The reality in this country—

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

But it’s true.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is certainly true that you do it.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It’s true that they’re failing in their duties.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They are democratically elected governments. We are a unique democracy in this country. The people of this country like to have one side of politics in the states and the other side in the federal arena. Nearly every federal government you can remember has lived with that; it is your job to work together. You have been here for 10 years. If I were in business—and I was—and went to my boss month after month saying, ‘I can’t get along with that other person; we can’t work together. I know all our infrastructure is falling apart, but it’s not my fault; we just can’t work together,’ and 10 years later I was still saying it, I would not be there. Get your act together; it is your job. The state governments are democratically elected, so work with them and stop whingeing about the fact that you cannot. It is so boring and every single person out there will agree with me.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Tell your mates in Macquarie Street to pick up their game.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You tell them. You are the government; you talk to them. You are failing. If you cannot handle it, get out and let someone else do it. It is your job to work with them. You tell them; do not ask me to do it. I am the opposition; you are the government. Take responsibility for your own actions and your own failures to work with the states. It is so boring and so tired, and everybody out there thinks it is. They are bored with the cost shifting and blame shifting that goes on between you and the state governments. Grow up and do your job. You would not survive a day in business if you took that attitude.

The second point I would like to make is how bizarre it is that I hear people talking about solving the skills crisis as though it is not a crisis—that the centrepiece of this government’s policy in solving a crisis which is current and has been around for 10 years is a program that will take 10 years to roll out. This program, six years after it was announced, will deliver at the very most 100 skilled people around the country. I am listening to speaker after speaker get up and praise themselves for doing something to solve one of the greatest problems Australia is facing at the moment, but it will take at least 10 years to roll out. What kind of centrepiece policy is that? How bizarre is it that you are all so relaxed about the fact that this country faces a chronic skills shortage but it will take you 10 years to produce any kind of result at all—100 skilled people will be delivered around the country in six years? It is estimated that in 2010 we will face a crisis of a shortage of at least 100,000 skilled people. This is the centrepiece policy? The relaxation on the government side of this House is astonishing. After all, it is not their fault; it is the state government’s fault! We have heard that day after day. There is nothing this government can do, because the state governments are standing in their way. It is just astonishing.

Nevertheless, we on this side of the House will be supporting the bill. It was part of the election platform. The government actually went to the people on this one. I cannot say the same for the industrial relations changes, obviously, but it did go to the people on this one. It was part of its campaign. In spite of the fact that we believe it is too little, far too late and that there has been extraordinary bungling of its administration, we will be supporting it.

The reason for our support of this legislation is that the issue of education and training is one of the biggest and most important issues facing this country and affecting our future growth and prosperity. Education, training, skills, knowledge, craft, competence and quality are all capacities that underpin growth not just for the nation and the economy but also for the people that the economy serves. Bills, such as this, that relate to our capacity to train people as they enter the workforce and as they retrain are all about how this country moves forward in the global environment. As new major economic powers emerge, as the massive labour forces of China and India take their place in the international market—massive numbers at relatively low pay rates and conditions and initially unskilled—we have to ask how this nation is to respond. As those massive labour forces change in nature, with their governments engaging in aggressive education programs—which they are already doing—and as the populations in those countries move up the food chain internationally, we have to ask how Australia is to respond.

Since the government has been in power for 10 years, we should probably be asking also how it has responded. We have been aware of the outside world for quite some time and we have been aware of the changes taking place in those huge developing countries for many years. I remember back in 1992, before I joined the Labor Party and at least 12 years before I entered politics, speaking at a forum about the growth of China and its impact on our workforce in the long term. I spoke of how, by 2020, people would need to reskill up to three times in their lives—many people are probably facing that need already—and said that creativity and skill would be the major drivers for growth in this country. That was back in 1992. So, if a person outside of politics who was not even a member of a political party was talking about it in 1992—and there were an awful lot of books, papers and magazine and newspaper articles about it back then—there is no excuse whatsoever for the Howard government to have ignored it and not responded.

How has the government responded? Has it tried to move us up the food chain, or has it tried to move us down? That seems a silly question, because this is Australia, the land of the fair go and the land of opportunity. It is really quite unimaginable that we would have any government trying to move any person down the food chain let alone large sectors of the population—certainly not pushing some people into a race to the bottom of the food chain, as seen with the new industrial relations system. I do acknowledge that the government is not trying to move the whole country down the food chain, just some of us—not all of us, but some of us.

When it comes to education, we really should look at this government’s record and we should look at it very hard. When it comes to education and training, our record is embarrassing at best and shocking at worst. Most notorious is the fact that we are the only country in the OECD, the only country in the developed world, that is reducing its expenditure on post-secondary education generally. Our expenditure has been falling. We are the only country in the OECD, the only country in the developed world, where that is the case. What is going on here, with this great country that is enjoying a most prosperous period? We hear every day in question time how wonderful things are, how everyone is doing so well and how prosperous we are; we have never seen such good times. What the hell is going on that, in the best of times, we are reducing our expenditure on education, against trends in the rest of the world and against massive trends in the developing world, particularly China and India, which will overtake us in terms of education in no time at all?

We should look also at our general level of skills and the measure of the number of people in the workforce that have a grade 12 equivalent qualification. Australia is really underperforming in that area. In countries like the United States and Canada and the major countries of Europe, 80 per cent or more of people between the ages of 25 and 64 have year 12 equivalent or better. In Australia, it is not 80 per cent; it is 67 per cent. This great prosperous nation that sees itself moving forward confidently into the future is leaving 33 per cent of our working population between the ages of 25 and 64 largely on the scrap heap. Maybe 10 to 20 years ago not finishing grade 12 was not such an issue, but it sure is an issue now. Unskilled jobs just are not there any more. They are moving offshore. They are heading off to those massive unskilled cheap labour forces overseas. In this day and age in Australia, if you do not have a good education or some training, you are out in the cold. Thirty-three per cent of our workforce between the ages of 25 and 64 do not have year 12 equivalent.

We have heard lately from the government lots of talk about the economy, particularly in relation to the new industrial relations laws. We heard a remarkable statement from the Prime Minister recently that ultimately the success or failure of the new Work Choices will be judged on what is good for the economy as a whole. That is one of the first times I have heard the Prime Minister suggest that perhaps it will not be good for people as individuals or even for people as a whole but that certainly it will be good for the economy.

But good for the economy must include good for all of us. Where possible, we should work unbelievably hard that it is also good for each of us—what is good in the long term for all of us and for each of us and what is needed in the short term for all of us and for each of us. That is government—not just good for the economy and good for the flow of money and the figures, but good for all of us and, if it is at all possible after incredible hard work, good for each of us. That is government. Politics, on the other hand, is about what is good for me in the short term and what is good for me in the long term. The worst side of politics is that it is also what is bad for the other side in the short term and in the long term. In the government’s approach to the skills crisis, we have very much a case of the latter.

One has to assume that the reason the government is choosing to set up a parallel system rather than work through the system that is already there—the TAFE system and the high school system—is that it really does not want to cooperate with the states because it gets too much political advantage by doing as much damage as it can to the states. By working with the states, it would no longer be able to play that political card and put politics first. Actually working with the states would be about government, not about politics—putting government first, putting people first, not its own political interests.

Playing with the nation for the government’s own political purposes and the lives of people in order to inflict damage on its opponents does, unfortunately, have collateral damage, and that is people—young Australians; young people seeking to enter the workforce; people who have found themselves sidelined because their skills are no longer relevant; people trying to retrain; and women who have been out of the workforce raising their children, women who did not have skills in the first place but who are desperately trying to find a way back into the workforce and are looking for the training opportunities to do so.

My electorate of Parramatta does not have a TAFE college, but it is surrounded by four struggling, underresourced institutions that are so overdue for real respect and renewal that I find it unimaginable that we are talking about setting up a parallel system when we have such a fabulously effective and well regarded system that is struggling and is well overdue for renewal. The TAFE institutions are incredibly important, because those unskilled jobs just do not exist anymore in the way they used to. They were originally incredibly important for the trades, but now they are also important for the services sector—for hairdressers and nurses. People from all sorts of professions now do their training at TAFE. There are also high schools in my electorate that want to provide flexibility for their students to mix high school with trade qualifications and even one that desperately wants to specialise in order to attract more students.

We often hear this government whingeing about duplication—usually whingeing about how badly the state does it and how they would love to be better if only they did not have those nasty states getting in their way and stopping them from doing a good job—yet now we see them setting up a parallel system at great taxpayers’ expense. They do not dislike duplication; they actually love duplication because it allows them to bag the states at every opportunity, to blame somebody else, to be the opposition if they possibly can and to deflect attention from their own failures and their own choices. Let us be very clear about it: the government is very good at claiming that this or that is a state responsibility—and I do know about the Constitution—but, in practice in this country, both state and federal governments are involved in education, health and social services, and it is their duty to work together to get the best result.

We will be supporting the bill because, in the long run, it will provide some quite important opportunities for a relatively small number of people. In my electorate, the Parramatta Catholic Education Office has been awarded one of the tenders. It will be training up to 200 people within a few years. This will provide extremely important opportunities for those couple of hundred people, and it will be extremely important for the Catholic Education Office, which does such an extraordinary job in my electorate. I wish the Parramatta Catholic Education Office well in developing its project and getting it up and running. It is an extraordinary organisation, and I know that it will do an incredible job in providing those opportunities for up to 200 skilled people. Of course we do need many more skilled people than that in Western Sydney, which that technical college will service, and we need many more than that in my electorate of Parramatta alone.

Let us look at this program in a little more detail. There will be 25 technical colleges which will not produce their first qualified tradesperson until 2010, at the earliest. The Australian Industry Group estimates that, by then, we will need at least 100,000 skilled workers, but by that stage the technical colleges that are up and running will only be able to provide 100. They will be 199,900 short in 2010 but 100 better off.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, 99,900.

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, you are right—99,900, still a very large—

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Baldwin interjecting

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No, my maths are very good, because training a person actually takes longer than a year. Think about it.

Bob Baldwin (Paterson, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Industry, Tourism and Resources) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Baldwin interjecting

Julie Owens (Parramatta, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

There are 100 people enrolled now. Training trades and skilled people does not take six months; most apprenticeships are actually three or four years long. You work it out. If there are 100 people enrolled now, there is a time that they take to finish a course. My maths are fine. Your maths are not very good if you do not realise that you are at least 99,000 short.

This is very much a political solution. As I said, our need to deal with this skills crisis is urgent. We really have to act now. But one of the worst aspects of this program is the bungling in the administration of the program. There are currently fewer than 100 students across Australia that are enrolled in the four technical colleges that are currently operating in East Melbourne, Gladstone, the Gold Coast in Queensland and Port Macquarie. Another will open soon in northern Tasmania.

The Minister for Vocational and Technical Education has recently threatened to scrap the colleges in Dubbo, Queanbeyan and Lismore-Ballina, and the successful consortium in Darwin have also been threatened with the loss of their $17 million in funding. So, in spite of the urgency and in spite of this being a program announced in 2004, we still have a long way to go in seeing those 25 technical colleges actually roll out.

In contrast, a Beazley Labor government will care about education. We care about it passionately on this side of the House. We believe in the need to build an education system that teaches young Australians how to work, and we believe in the need to have it now. Train Australians now. The urgency is now. The urgency has been around for 10 years—we are 10 years too late—but even now is better than in another 10 years. We really cannot wait.

When you make young people wait—when people who turn 17 cannot get the opportunity; they turn 18, and they cannot get the opportunity; they turn 19, and they cannot get the opportunity—you profoundly impact on their whole lives. Lives do not wait for governments to act. They really do not. Particularly young people’s lives do not wait. Every year you delay, every year you get it wrong and every year you make it hard impacts on the rest of that person’s life. Every year their career is held back, their confidence falls. Their CV does not look as good as it should early enough. Every single year they cannot invest in their future. Every single year they are not paying superannuation. Lives do not wait for governments to act. This is urgent. Train Australians now. Get on with it.

Bruce Scott (Maranoa, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! This sitting is suspended. The chair will be resumed at 8 pm or at the ringing of the bells.

Debate (on motion by Mr Nairn) adjourned.