Harry Jenkins (Scullin, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The original question was that the 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.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

After having been so rudely interrupted by question time, and given the soporific content of the previous speech, it is hard to get started again on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006, but I will give it a bash.

Alan Griffin (Bruce, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Veterans' Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

You can do soporific, though.

Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can do soporific—what the member for Bruce says is quite true. I will start in this case not from the very beginning but from the core of what this is about—a bill which just says one thing: ‘We need to bring some money forward in order to kick-start this process because we have not got enough people taking it up and in future we do not want people to know about the maladministration that is happening, so we will just make the changes by regulation and probably the only person who will know then is Alan Ramsay because he is the only one who follows what happens at the regulation level and within the Public Service departments.’ This is a line that has been put into operation in about three other bills recently. A government by regulation is no government at all. It should come under the purview of this parliament, in particular because of the fundamental inadequacies of the entire approach the government has taken.

We have seen 10 years worth of the government walking away from their responsibilities with regard to Australia’s technical colleges. In the end, at almost two minutes to midnight last year, we had the quick run to the judge to say, ‘We’ve come up with this brilliant idea and we will actually have technical colleges. There will be 24 of them’—once we finally get them going, of course, we can now say in relation to this bill—‘and they will be the answer to our problems.’ If you look at the order of magnitude of the problems, even when the colleges are up and running they will provide for about 1,000 students. If you listen to the Australian Industry Group, they say that the demand for skilled people in Australia—and, from a Labor Party point of view, we say they should be Australians who are trained and given the skills to take up these jobs rather than importing people from overseas on four-year TEPs or bringing them in from overseas in order to take on apprenticeships in regional areas—is for 100,000 immediately. What do we get in the government’s proposal? We get 1,000th of what is needed—not 100th and not a 10th but 1,000th.

We have seen this government effectively deny 300,000 young people places at TAFE. We have seen them walk away from the major problem that Australia has—that the fashion with regard to apprenticeships and trade training changed. The major employers such as Telstra and State Rail stopped training people. A lot of industry simply went with that trend. In an attempt to save costs, they put trade training aside as being too difficult, too costly and too intensive. This has been a 30- or 40-year program—apprenticeships have fallen over that time—but the government have been responsible for the past 10 years and their initial approach under Dr Kemp, as the relevant minister, was simply to say, ‘We’ve got this wonderful new program, we’ll come up with New Apprenticeships—a new way of training.’

The old style of apprenticeships has long gone. No more are people trained across the board with a depth of skills who are able to say at the end of their period of training that they are fully qualified tradespeople. It does not happen any more. The crisis is enormous. The average age of tradespeople in the traditional trades in Australia is 54. Ten years from now, if we keep going the way we are, that average age will be 64. Where are the people to replace them? The Prime Minister, in his answer to my question today, which he did not answer relevantly, re-endorsed effectively the position he had taken previously—‘You can import them.’ Do what the government has been doing—plugging holes to fill the gap—and import them, in an extraordinary way. Four-year temporary entry permits used to be for large multinationals to fill a specific hole when they could not get someone with expertise in Australia because the nature of the work was so different, people were not trained to do it and there was a corporate culture that needed to be taken into account. Very small numbers of people came through, not hundreds of thousands of people in the traditional trades.

The back end of this is that, at the end of the four-year TEP, those people then get preferred entry into Australia if they apply under the full migration program. There is a discount on the number of points they need. So people from England, Ireland and other countries are coming in under this program and some of them—60,000 to 70,000 a year or so—are coming on to the end of the normal immigration program. This is not part of the normal skills based program but an add-on. What is the effect on young Australians and why are we in a major skills crisis now? It is because the government has not seen it as its responsibility to do something about this.

Labor has had a good, long, hard look at that situation. We have expressed our ideas in the second reading amendment in front of us. I will reiterate the first three points and then go to some substantial planning as to how we actually fix it, but that is based on having a complete commitment to really doing something about this. The first point we make is:

... the House condemns the Government for:

(1)

creating a skills crisis through during their ten long years in office ...

And I would add the rider: and not doing anything to solve it but in fact making worse by taking the temporary measures that they have. The second and third points are:

(2)

its continued failure to provide the necessary opportunities for Australians to get the training they need to get a decent job and meet the skills needs of the economy;

(3)

reducing the overall percentage of the Federal Budget spent on vocational education and training, and allowing this percentage of spending to further decline over the forward estimate period ...

The member for Batman, in his contribution earlier in the day, gave excellent coverage of these three points. He gave practical examples from his discussions with Australian industry leaders on what they saw as the depth of this problem. He talked about the fact that their industries face an immediate crisis and we need to train people as fast as possible in order to be able to do away with the capacity constraints that industry is facing. We cannot continue to grow at a sufficient level unless the capacity constraints that are there now, because of the lack of skilled people, are met.

The member for Batman properly outlined part of our approach. We need to think about this in a new way. It is no use having a Dodgy Brothers approach to New Apprenticeships—the traineeships which are larger in number than the real apprenticeships that they replaced but which do not give people full and proper training. We need to take account of the fact that the old style of training, the extended period of time that there was, needs to be foreshortened in a number of traditional trades from four years to two or from three years to two. In part this can be done by concentrating the training for young people in the first year and a half of an apprenticeship, all the tech elements, either at school in years 11 and 12, in specific specialist schools that can do it or, alternatively, at a rejuvenated TAFE level. The approach is to concentrate that so that their apprenticeship training in the job can be more useful.

Part of the reason it could be more useful and part of the reason that more people might then stay on and complete it, because we have at least 40 per cent of people not going through with their apprenticeships, is Labor’s $2,000 to $2,500 apprenticeship completion bonus. They would get half of that halfway through and the final amount at the end. The second element to encourage them is $800 per year for a skills account. We would abolish up-front fees and pay the money directly into the skills account to be spent on TAFE fees, textbooks or materials for every traditional trade apprentice. That would do away with that disincentive that is currently there and provide a bonus incentive for people to complete their apprenticeship.

Compressing the amount of time it takes by allowing people to get advanced standing in their apprenticeship would enable them to get paid more money—to get paid at third and fourth year rates. This is another element that is quite critical. Young people going through years 11 and 12 find themselves in a position where it is easier to go out into the broader workforce and earn quick money readily. They do not want to be in an apprenticeship and earning less than their peers. A key problem is the differential, which is part of the reason people do not complete their courses. Our bonus is a way to help narrow that differential.

I am very proud of the fact that in September 2005 Labor, in considering the difficulty that we faced and the deficiencies in front of us, came up with a skills blueprint. I want to note for the House the elements of that blueprint. Our program for getting skills into our schools was to (1) offer young people better choices by teaching trades, technology and science in first-class facilities and rid our schools of dusty and Dickensian workshops, (2) establish a trades-in-school scheme to double the number of school based apprenticeships in areas of skills shortage and provide extra funding per place, (3) establish specialist schools for the senior years of schooling in areas such as trades, technology and science and (4) establish a trades taster program so years 9 and 10 students can experience a range of trade options, which could also lead to pre-apprenticeship programs.

I have taught years 9 and 10. I also taught people who left school early and did their diploma entry 1 and diploma entry 2 at TAFE. I know from my experience that keeping up to 80 per cent or so of the cohort at school at years 11 and 12 and trying to give them a comprehensive education with only bits and pieces of woodwork, metalwork or other trade based approaches—technics programs and so on—or, over time, photography classes and others that would have some advanced standing in trade training and trade skilling simply does not go near addressing the fundamental problem. There has been a long extension of what kids see as irrelevant training in a comprehensive area and a lack of direct, on-the-job experience and a lack of direct physical experience, particularly in trade training.

In 1975 I saw in Holland with my very own eyes a system where they had the courage to split the kids between an academic stream—about 20 per cent of the population—and an alternative stream. There was a choice to change over into the academic stream for those who wanted to go there. From about 14 or so, kids would go through what is effectively a technical high school or a specialist high school which provided not only a full comprehensive education but also complete trade training. At the end of that period of training people would come out as carpenters or electricians. Indeed, the normal impulse was to have a double trade qualification at the end. Speaking to Dutch representatives recently, I found they moved away from that model in the last number of years but are now moving back close to the purity of that original model because they realised that you cannot run a society without people trained in trade skills and without an adequate number of professionals to provide what really is the engine room of the economy. In this regard Labor’s plan lays out the future. I endorse it completely and I endorse the second reading amendment.

Annette Ellis (Canberra, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am pleased to have the opportunity today to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006. The bill will bring forward the funding for the proposed Australian technical colleges from 2008-09 to 2006-07. We are not opposing this bill, because we will support any move by this government to improve the skills base of our nation, but we really need to have a bit of think about just how serious the skills shortage is. The skills shortage crisis, which is what it is, is to be laid I believe fairly and squarely at the feet of the current federal government. They have had 10 years do something about this. They have been warned—there have been very evident signs coming forward along the pathway—and we are now in a position where we have a very dramatic skills shortage.

I am on the Standing Committee on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Affairs which is looking at employment opportunities for our Indigenous people. We have had a lot of discussions in that inquiry with people from the mining industry, the tourism industry and a range of employers around this country. Everywhere we go, whilst we are talking specifically about Indigenous employment, the desperate levels of skills shortage in this country are inevitably brought to our attention. It is an inevitable part of any discussion anywhere when you are talking about employment levels and employment opportunities in Australia today. As I understand it, the government having announced that they would be bringing these technical colleges on stream, we are not going to see any graduates until the year 2010. I understand that is the prediction. It is a fairly slow way of doing something about the skills shortage.

We have major concerns about these technical colleges. When the bill was originally debated in June 2005 we raised concerns about the nature of the colleges. One of the main concerns is the duplication of resources the bill presents. Australia already has technical colleges, so why are we creating more which are based on a completely different system and funded by a different level of government? It becomes quite bureaucratic. Talk about levels of governance—that is exactly what is going to happen as a result of this decision.

The government announced that it would open 25 technical colleges across Australia. We are fairly critical of the government’s narrow scope in its approach to these colleges and its ability to implement its own policy. It is not looking good at this stage. I am not quite sure how long it is going to take for them to start falling into place. For example, 22 successful proposals have been announced but, of these, only 12 funding agreements have been signed, as I understand it. Only four technical colleges are open, with a total enrolment of fewer than 300 students, at Port Macquarie, Gladstone, Eastern Melbourne and the Gold Coast. Three other regions have not yet been announced—and the Howard government is threatening to take the promised technical colleges away from those regions. These include Queanbeyan—which I will come back to in a moment—Dubbo and Lismore-Ballina. It is not a very cohesive way of governing when you just say, ‘Okay, this is what we are going to do and if you don’t meet it we’ll rip it off and take it somewhere else.’ Just on what basis were the decisions made in relation to the establishment and location of these colleges?

As at 30 May this year $185 million had been committed to the Australian technical colleges but only $18 million had been spent. The total budget I believe is $343 million over five years. The Department of Education, Science and Training has refused to provide individual funding information for the colleges. It is all a bit of a mess, I believe very strongly. The Howard government’s Australian technical colleges policy makes the government’s agenda very clear on two main issues: industrial relations and education. All the staff employed by these Australian technical colleges must be offered Australian workplace agreements. That is a directive of the federal government. That is part of the deal.

This leads me to the problems facing the proposed technical college in Queanbeyan. My interest in Queanbeyan is because Queanbeyan, whilst just over the border out of the ACT, is part of my immediate region. I know that in most cases the planning and the co-location of many services, employment opportunities and business growth opportunities are regionally based here—a very good thing that we all applaud, even though sometimes it may be within the ACT or within New South Wales. In September 2004 the government announced it would open a technical college in Queanbeyan. We welcome that into the region if it is a way of improving the skills shortage. Tenders for the service provider closed in May 2005. I believe the government received two proposals for the Queanbeyan technical college, including one involving the New South Wales government. As I understand it, the federal government has rejected that New South Wales government proposal because the New South Wales government refuses to offer staff at that college Australian workplace agreements. It is interesting to look at the media reports surrounding this particular decision. I refer to an article in the Canberra Times of April this year:

... a Queanbeyan technical college is being held up by the NSW Government’s refusal to offer staff Australian Workplace Agreements ...

The article continued:

The minister was believed to have been favouring a bid from a consortium led by the Capital Region Business Enterprise Centre, based in Queanbeyan.

The bid, which included the NSW Department of Education, proposed converting one of Queanbeyan’s two public high schools into a college for Year 11 and 12 students.

But of course that is now all up for grabs because, unless there is an AWA commitment within the proposal, the minister has made it clear that he will withdraw the proposal.

The Queanbeyan mayor is not impressed. I know that the CEO of the Canberra Chamber of Commerce is far from impressed. People within Canberra, who are very aware of the skills shortage, are far from impressed. But the Minister for Vocational and Technical Education, Mr Hardgrave, has continually said that, if they do not meet this criterion, like all other criteria, the college will be scrapped. So much for any proper scientific or analytical consideration of where we need these colleges to be, reflective of skills shortages. If it is decided that this region needs one, then everything should be done to bring it in, if it is in fact going to assist in answering the skills shortage question.

In May this year the federal minister threatened to take away that Queanbeyan technical college unless there is a clear indication of support from somebody else within the region. I believe now that the Commonwealth is out there searching for an alternative provider for that Queanbeyan technical college. I can only assume that the other of the two original proposals was not satisfactory. So it seems that the Commonwealth has now rejected that original one purely on the basis of industrial relations. I cannot think of any other reason. There is no evidence before me to give me another opinion.

Like the rest of Australia, Canberra has a major skills shortage crisis and we need to reinvest in our skills base. Australia needs a more systematic approach to promote trades, science and technology education than I believe is being offered through this technical colleges process. Unlike the Howard government, we would work with the states and territories to implement these changes in secondary schooling for the benefit of all young Australians and not simply pick up our bat and ball, go out of the oval and play in a different field because we just want to do it that way.

Labor’s skills blueprint, released in September 2005, outlines our program for getting skills into our schools. We must offer young people better choices by teaching trades, technology and science in first-class facilities, establish a trades-in-schools scheme to double the number of school based apprenticeships in areas of skills shortage and provide extra funding per place, establish specialist schools for the senior years of schooling in areas such as trades, technology and science, and establish a trades taster program so that years 9 and 10 students can experience a range of trade options, which could also lead to pre-apprenticeship programs. Our priority on this side of the chamber is to train Australians first, to train them now and to very seriously address this crisis level of skills shortage.

As I said earlier on, I have had the privilege of speaking to a range of people not only within my own community but around the country in relation to employment opportunities. Overwhelmingly, from all sectors of the community, when you talk about employment they wring their hands and say, ‘We simply must be doing something quickly and seriously about the skills shortage. It should never have got to the level that it has.’

Whilst we are supporting this Australian technical colleges bill, purely because we have to do something, there are severe deficiencies within this process. As far as my region in Queanbeyan and the ACT is concerned, AWAs should not be coming into it. The establishment of a proper skills based training system and the requirements for that should be the basis upon which those decisions are made, not some ideological bent in relation to industrial relations.

Julia Irwin (Fowler, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Whilst a number of bills related to the establishment of Australian technical colleges have come before the House, this is the first time that I have spoken on them. Can I begin by expressing my amazement at some of the contributions by government members to this debate on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006, and I have listened to a number of them. We have here an initiative which is being talked up as the solution to the skills crisis in Australia, but its implementation has well and truly gone off the rails. In fact, the very reason for this bill is to redistribute funding between the program years by pushing the unspent funds from the early years to later years. There could be no clearer indication of the failure of the program than these delays.

But I do not want to dwell on that aspect of the bill; rather, I want to point out the folly of the program in the first place, which I believe is the main reason for the slow progress. If Australian technical colleges are meant to be the government’s solution to the skills crisis that we are facing in Australia, you have to wonder if the government has got any idea of the problem we are facing. The truth seems to be that the government does realise the extent of the shortages but has a strategy to fill the gaps with skilled migration. Australian technical colleges are really just a ploy to try to convince the electorate that the government is serious about training.

Even if we accept at face value that Australian technical colleges are a genuine effort by this government to encourage young people to undertake trade training, we have to judge its potential for success against other programs which may be more widely available and more cost effective. To begin with, we should put Australian technical colleges into perspective. When fully implemented and with their full capacity of 7,000 students, Australian technical colleges will represent less than one per cent of TAFE students in Australia. We are measuring skilled labour shortages in the hundreds of thousands, but when this program is in full operation it will provide only a few thousand entrants to full trade training. Australian technical colleges are nothing more than a bit of window dressing.

But what makes it worse is that it is set up in competition with state government initiatives, which can result only in more duplication and wasted resources. We have already seen a reluctance on the part of the New South Wales government to participate. Why would they when they have their own major programs for vocational training in schools? To make matters worse, whilst vocational training in schools is one way of addressing our skills crisis, it can play only a minor role in solving that crisis. When it comes to addressing the major factors, this government is doing little or nothing to ensure an adequate supply of skilled workers. The biggest contribution to our skills base is not at the input end. What we are doing is trying to fill the bucket while it has a gaping hole in the bottom.

If all the people with trade qualifications were now working in their trade, we would have a skills surplus, but the sad fact is that, when you look at trade course graduates 10 years after they have come out of their time, you find that more than one-third are no longer working in their trade. In some trades the figure is more than half. How many times have you spoken to a driver or a security guard, or to a police officer, as I have, or to a number of other people and they have said, ‘Actually, I’m a plumber,’ or an electrician or a fitter by trade? But they are no longer working in that trade.

The really sad fact about trades in Australia is that they are just that—a trade. In most cases they do not develop into a career, and as workers get into the later years of their working life only a small fraction still work in their trade. Some, like those in the printing industry, will have seen their trade become redundant. Others such as motor mechanics, bricklayers and roof tilers will have lost the physical strength to continue. The list can go on. Injury will have forced some to leave their trade, and they cannot be blamed for that. While governments cannot do a great deal to assist some of those workers, the lack of retraining programs is a national disgrace.

To come back to the objective of Australian technical colleges in trying to attract young people to enter trades, there are two factors that these colleges do not address. The first of these is the lack of training opportunities for what we might call the ‘traditional’ trades. I know that when I left school many of the young men I knew went into a trade. They were strongly encouraged to have a trade qualification. It was seen by my parents’ generation as a very good thing to do. ‘Get a trade, son,’ was good fatherly advice at the time. Parents did not have to worry as they do today, because they knew then that their child could get a trade.

Trade-training opportunities were readily available. Our railway workshops, electricity distributors, the PMG or what we now know as Telstra—those and many of the bigger private companies had large trade-training facilities. Apprentices often spent their first year on the job in the trade-training workshops of these organisations. They provided an excellent standard of training and ensured that they had the best skills available for their workforce. Unfortunately, other employers who did not invest in training were able to poach these skilled workers with slightly higher pay and, as these large public and private employers began to tighten their belts, they found that trade training did not give direct results for their bottom line, so the programs were severely cut back.

Today we have group apprenticeship schemes and they do a good job in sharing apprentices among employers. By gaining experience in a range of fields, it could be said that these apprentices have better training in some cases. But I hear reports that group schemes are seeking more employers to take on apprentices and that opportunities in some popular trades are limited. While today some employers may say they find it difficult to find apprentices, one thing I always find hard to explain is that, when you look at the census figures, some electorates have much higher rates of people with trade qualifications than others. I know that my electorate of Fowler, in western Sydney, has a rate lower than those of some surrounding electorates, like Prospect, Macarthur and even Werriwa. So when I hear of young people in my electorate who are finding it difficult to get into a trade, I wonder if it is their lack of contacts in those trades that stands in their way rather than a lack of ability.

I have followed with interest the development of pre-apprenticeship schemes such as those in the Illawarra. Almost all those undertaking these pre-apprenticeships are able to get an apprenticeship in their chosen field. I would expect the same to apply to Australian technical college trainees, as it should for those undertaking vocational training in schools. But the distribution of these courses will determine who has access and, as I have already noted, the number in Australian technical colleges is very small compared with the number seeking apprenticeships, so this really becomes the limiting factor.

When I look at a second factor in encouraging the uptake of trade training, I have to question the wisdom of assuming that a decision taken by a 15-year-old will determine his or her lifelong occupation. As I said earlier, an alarming number of trained tradespeople leave their trade even at a very early age, so investing in training for school aged children has to be questioned. As we also know, drop-out rates in trades can be very high and, while rates of pay and other factors may be important, anyone who has experience of teenagers could easily explain why a decision taken at age 15 is not seen in the same light when a person is 17, 18 or 19 years of age. This is where we need to closely question the wisdom of investing quite large amounts of money, as we are doing with Australian technical colleges. We will need to study their effectiveness in leading to students going on to complete a trade and we should compare this level of success with alternatives such as school based vocational training and pre-apprenticeship courses. I say to the government this evening: look after our children. They are Australia’s future.

Debate (on motion by Mr Nairn) adjourned.