Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the opportunity to speak this evening in response to the Prime Ministerial statement to the parliament, Skills for the Future. It is certainly welcome that the Prime Minister has turned his attention to the issue of the skills crisis that has been affecting this country for quite a while now. Indeed, as has been indicated on a number of occasions, particular skills categories have been on the skills shortage list for nine out of the last 10 years. On top of that, ongoing warnings have been provided by the Reserve Bank almost each year for the past five years about the impact that that skills crisis was having on the economy, and in particular the role that it was playing in contributing to the increase in interest rates—indeed, three consecutive increases to date since the election and seven on the run.

It is, no doubt, one of the most important challenges facing the nation and I note that the Prime Minister, as a background to his announcement, outlined that he thought the problem was that the labour market is the strongest it has been in generations and what we were suffering is the sort of problem we want to have because the economy is going so well. The unemployment rate, as it is measured, is so low it is a predictable problem, and in fact it is not really a problem but certainly something the government had finally decided to turn its attention to.

I want to take issue with a few of the presumptions in the backgrounding that the Prime Minister provided in his statement. In particular, it is true that the overall unemployment levels have dropped, but this ignores the fact that there are within those figures categories of people who continue to experience high unemployment. For example, in the Illawarra region, which I represent, there have consistently been general unemployment figures of double the national average rate. Sadly, we have not seen a great improvement in that situation over the time that the Prime Minister has trumpeted the achievements of his government in the economy.

Even more damning and more concerning is the fact that, in the last recorded figures on youth unemployment, youth unemployment in the Illawarra region hit 40 per cent for the first time. That is an unacceptable level of unemployment amongst our young people. It is certainly something that concerns the parents of my constituents, who are concerned about the future for their young people.

It is true that the Prime Minister can point to general averaged-out improvements in unemployment, though even there we could have an argument about the changes that were made to how we measure unemployment and whether work for one hour a fortnight really constitutes employment. But putting that aside, even if we presume that the average has hit that level, the figures ignore the fact that there are significant pockets of people who are not getting the benefits of the good times of the economy. It is incumbent on the government to address that. I profoundly believe that a government experiencing good times as well as bad should not just sit back and say, ‘Well, that’s tremendous. Everyone is doing fine.’ It has the responsibility to identify those who are missing out even in those circumstances and find ways to assist those people to be part of the good economic times.

The statement that the Prime Minister made on Skills for the Future is welcome in that it addresses some of the issues for mature age people in the workforce, who may want to upskill. There is no denying that that is a useful thing to do, but it does not particularly address or target the issues in regional areas that have not experienced the sorts of growth that we might see in states such as Western Australia and Queensland and it certainly does not address the issues faced by many young people who are still locked out of those employment opportunities.

I make that point because it has been very frustrating to me personally—as I know it has been to the Labor Party generally—that the Prime Minister has consistently refused to acknowledge that there was a problem. Having been a TAFE teacher for seven years of my life, before coming into this place, and having had sons in the age group looking for work, it is certainly something that has been consistently at the front of my mind. In March 2005, when there was a debate going on about the skills crisis in the country, the Prime Minister responded to a question asked by the shadow minister for education about the skills crisis. The Prime Minister said:

... I have absolutely no intention of embracing this absurd rhetoric—which is quite false, when you actually look at the increase that has occurred—that there is some kind of skills crisis.

In March 2005, the Prime Minister was saying that it was all rhetoric, that it was absurd, that there was no problem. Was it a one-off brain snap? In March 2005 did he perhaps find himself anticipating an Easter break and perhaps not being on the ball in the game? No. He repeated it again, in September this year. He obviously continued with the view for at least 18 months. He said:

All I ask is that you not mistake boiler-plate rhetoric about a skills crisis ... with anything approaching actual policy insight.

In September this year, only a month ago, we had the Prime Minister saying that we should not mistake rhetoric and concerns on this side of the House with any real policy imperative—that there was not a crisis, that there was not anything that had to be addressed. You can imagine how gobsmacked I was when this non-problem had $800 million thrown at it! That is what we saw from the Prime Minister’s statement to the House, which we are addressing today. According to the Prime Minister’s own definition, that is $800 million to fix a non-existent crisis—probably a first for any government.

So, to me, what that reflected was that the Prime Minister well knew that the reality out there in communities was that people knew there was a skills crisis. So did businesses—indeed, I have had several representations in my local areas from the Australian Industry Group talking about exactly that problem. I look back over several surveys of small businesses, done by the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, about what the key significant issues were for them and what they felt were the key blockages to business expanding, and they have consistently identified, for at least the last four years, that the major issue for them was access to a skilled workforce. Obviously all of those voices, including the voice of the Labor Party, made it clear to the Prime Minister that he could not continue to dismiss the issue as ‘boilerplate rhetoric’, but had to acknowledge that it had real bite in the community and that, in fact, people were seeing the reality of it on the ground and there had to be something done about it.

It is important to address the issue, not only because of the real human stories behind families where there is insufficient work or there are young people who are unable to access work and make a start in a career but also because it is fundamental to our economy. That has been the message of the Reserve Bank consistently—in particular, the impact that it has on productivity growth. We had a pretty amazing record under the Hawke-Keating governments of achieving really significant—and, in fact, world-leading—productivity improvements and we have seen those basically disappear over the last 10 years. We have here a challenge, in the human stories of people in communities that have not been able to access the growth that has happened in the economy. They are saying: ‘We need our young people in jobs. We need our mature age workers who were made redundant through restructuring to be able to access jobs.’

Then we have had organisations like the AiG, the ACCI and the Reserve Bank saying the biggest blockage to our future expansion is the inability to access the skilled staff that we require and to improve productivity through upskilling staff. The frustration that we felt, I have no doubt, they were feeling. You only had to look at the number of times they kept putting reports out as a signal to the government to say: ‘We think this is important. For goodness sake, do something about it. It is not good enough that you have cut the funding through TAFE significantly—in fact, quite dramatically—up until 2000 and, begrudgingly and very gradually, reinstated some of it since 2000. Your brain-snap campaign ideas, such as Australian technical colleges, are too little, too slow and unlikely to really address the problems we are facing.’

So what we had was an accumulation of all those circumstances. The Prime Minister finally had to acknowledge that there was a problem and that he had to do something about it. So he gives us $800 million to fix a crisis that he has been denying for many years.

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Is still denying.

Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Indeed, the shadow minister is quite right—which he is still denying.

In the proposal that the Prime Minister put forward, obviously the most significantly funded item is the provision of vouchers to people over the age of 25 who have not completed a HSC to go and get themselves literacy and numeracy training. I have to say—and on this comment I hope I am wrong, but I doubt I am—if somebody is out there in a job and is over 25, I very much doubt that they are going to be rushing to the government for a voucher to go and do some literacy and numeracy training at TAFE. I think that that is a bit pie in the sky. I think if they were going to provide a voucher they would have been better off providing a voucher that could be utilised for skills which were actually job related.

I was an English teacher and so I think it is really important and a useful thing to do to upskill people in their literacy and numeracy. This is a pragmatic response. I think the take-up on this system is going to be very slow. And we saw bungling with the literacy voucher that this government implemented for school age children—a captive audience; it was not hard to identify who they were or how you had to access them—which dragged out to the point where there were kids who had failed the exam, were entitled to the voucher and did not get it until two years later when they were sitting the next exam.

So I think my cynicism about this particular program can be forgiven because of the track record the government has on these sorts of programs. Nonetheless, I will acknowledge that it is a worth while thing to do. I just think it is an awful lot of money for a not very well thought out process, and I suspect a lot of that money will still be sitting there at the end of the year.

The other thing that the government has done is to look at providing traineeships for mature age workers. That is a good idea. There are people in industries who do a lot of work that gives them skills and, if they had the opportunity to get the actual qualifications to become a full apprentice and then a tradesperson, they would certainly take it up.

The problem I have with this program is that, in an area like mine, the vast bulk of the apprenticeship opportunities actually sit in small businesses. If you are a small business—I am talking five to 10 people—it is highly unlikely that you are going to have the capacity to allow somebody who is working as a full worker for you now to become an apprentice. So who will be able to access these opportunities? Medium to large sized businesses. That is where the apprenticeship opportunities will happen. In my area, many small businesses utilise some programs whereby the group training companies employ the apprentices and they are then placed in small businesses to create those opportunities. The problem with this program is that it does not enable small businesses to effectively access it. I encourage the government to have a look at that, because it is worth while giving mature age people with practical skills they have got on the job the opportunity to upskill.

The biggest gap in the whole thing, in terms of $800 million, is addressing that issue that I raised about an area like mine, where you have 40 per cent youth unemployment. When my son, who is now 23, finished school, for two years there were five boys sitting at my house every day. Four of those boys would have killed for an apprenticeship opportunity. They were desperate for an apprenticeship opportunity. All four of them eventually got one when they turned old enough to have a car and be able to travel to Sydney. That was the reality for them. So they all now do that terrible commute from Wollongong to Sydney, like 20,000 people do.

Since the package was going to be this significant, I would have liked to have seen part of it target those young people, creating opportunities for them and supporting initiatives by people like the Illawarra Business Chamber, who have been targeting our chronic youth unemployment by providing expanded opportunities for young people in apprenticeships. It is a massive hole in this proposal.

Greg Hunt (Flinders, Liberal Party, Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for the Environment and Heritage) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

In speaking in support of the Prime Minister’s Skills for the Future package, I want to start in my own electorate of Flinders. This package comes in the context of work done over the last 10 years which has seen unemployment drop by over four per cent, from a high in the nine per cent bracket to a low in the five per cent bracket. What that has meant in practice is thousands of jobs—over 4,000 jobs and 4,000 families who have had the benefit of work, who have had the dignity of work, who have had the economic outcomes which come from work and who have had the personal satisfaction of working. That is a profound and real outcome for people in the towns of Dromana, Rosebud, Rye, Hastings, Somerville, Koo Wee Rup, Lang Lang, Pearcedale, Cowes and Grantville—real jobs having a real impact on people’s lives. That is the local context and the human context of this package.

The national context is that we have seen over 1.9 million jobs created between 1996 and now. So the story of Flinders is the story which has been told all around Australia, of 1.9 million individuals who have new jobs and new forms of employment. There has also been an increase in the participation rate to the highest level in Australian history. That rate includes those who have jobs and those who are looking for work. You would imagine that there would be a high unemployment rate if more people than ever, a greater percentage of the population than ever, were seeking to be in the labour force. No. We actually have the lowest unemployment level, of 4.8 per cent, in 30 years.

If you want to see what is the real legacy of the last 10 years, it translates into this notion of the highest participation rate in Australian history coupled with an unemployment rate of 4.8 per cent, which is the lowest unemployment rate in 30 years. Those two things together represent more people working not just because we have got a bigger population but as a percentage of the population than at any other time in Australian history. Against that background, the consequence of having more people as a percentage of the population actually employed means that we have the challenge of trying to fill the places of more jobs by chasing fewer spare workers. That is precisely the challenge that every economy seeks to balance. It certainly beats the alternative of having more unemployed workers chasing fewer jobs. In fact, it is a tremendous challenge to have to deal with.

What are the actions that we have taken to date? There are three principal actions. Firstly, we have encouraged an increase in the number of apprentices from 154,000 in training in 1996 to 403,000 in training at present—almost three times the level of people currently passing through the apprenticeship process. Secondly, we make absolutely no apologies for the reforms which are encouraging employers to take on employees and encouraging more people to enter the workforce. They take the form of the workplace relations changes, and 205,000 jobs have been created since those reforms came into place. What that shows is that, given that this is three times greater than the long-term average for that same period, something must be happening.

I make no bones about the fact that there is undoubtedly an effect from the booms in Western Australia and Queensland, but it seems unlikely that this growth in employment just happened to occur at precisely the time that there were changes caused by  the workplace relations legislation. There is a high likelihood of a real correlation. Also, we make no apology for the Welfare to Work reforms to help people to transition back into the workforce. Both of these things have added to the work for apprentices in helping to provide and create the highest participation rate ever in Australian history.

Given all of these things, there is no doubt that we have had challenges in trying to fulfil and achieve the quotas and levels that we want in relation to certain trades. So this package that the Prime Minister puts forward, of $837 million over four years, aims to address four particular needs. Firstly, for people who in their midlife do not have the appropriate level of training or the desired level at school, there is a voucher of up to $3,000 to continue with training. This work skills voucher is a very important invitation and opportunity for all of those who want to increase their skills in whatever area.

Moving onto the second of the initiatives, for mid-career people wishing to transition into the trades, there has been a barrier: the impact of loss of income whilst they go through the early apprenticeship years. For those people seeking to transition from other careers into apprenticeships mid-career, there is a $7,800 Commonwealth subsidy for the first year of that apprenticeship and a $5,200 subsidy for the second year of that apprenticeship. What that should do is help bridge the gap between the wages which they were receiving and the consequent drop if they were to seek to go through the training process. It is an appropriate response, and I think it is a very good one.

The third area is in relation to business skills. For people who are running small businesses, especially those who are working in the trades, there is a $500 voucher to help them in preparing and understanding what is needed to effectively and efficiently run a small business.

The fourth area is in relation to the long-term skilling of engineering. Already there have been significant contributions, but this package announces 500 new university places for engineering available as of next year. I think that that combination of four initiatives is a recognition that we have achieved the highest level of participation in the economy ever, that we have the lowest level of unemployment of 4.8 per cent in the last 30 years and that there are challenges that come from that. As a result—because of the work skills voucher, the encouragement for mid-career apprenticeships, the business skills voucher and the engineering places—I think this sets forward a very important path towards (a) helping with skills and (b) helping to improve the level of participation even further and drop the level of unemployment even lower.

I am delighted to support this package, first and foremost because it will help people in Flinders. It will add to the more than 4,000 families who have received all of the benefits from new employment which they did not have in 1996. Secondly, I support the package because it will help contribute to the life and further economic development of the nation. I am proud to support the package and delighted to see it in the context of all of the changes and the jobs created over the last decade.

Jenny Macklin (Jagajaga, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Leader of the Opposition) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has finally been forced to act on Australia’s raging skills crisis. There is no question that the skills crisis is hurting Australian families and hurting businesses, and at last we have the Prime Minister acting on this crisis. Unfortunately it seems that previous government speakers, like the Prime Minister, do not recognise that this crisis exists, but Australian businesses and Australian families certainly know that it does. We only have to go back over the last 10 years to figure out why it is that we have such a serious skills crisis. We have had a government that has seen 300,000 Australians turned away from TAFE. Unfortunately it seems to be the case that only now that this skills crisis is hurting the Prime Minister politically are we getting some action.

It is also the case that the Prime Minister is acting to desperately catch up with the range of Labor policies which have been announced over the last 18 months—policies that Labor has put forward to make sure that we do get more carpenters, plumbers, electricians, mechanics and so the list goes on—into jobs and working. As many—most importantly, the Governor of the Reserve Bank—have said, this is the No. 1 economic issue facing Australia. Yet in the Prime Minister’s ministerial statement he said that we needed to put ‘the more breathless commentary about a skills crisis into proper perspective’.

Australian families certainly have the skills crisis in proper perspective. They have the perspective of four consecutive interest rate rises at the same time that the Reserve Bank has been issuing warning after warning. We have a government member over there laughing. He is laughing at the fact that Australian families have faced four consecutive interest rate rises since the election and, of course, this government has continued to ignore the warnings it got from the Reserve Bank as far back as 1999. From as far back as 1999, the Reserve Bank has been telling the government that skill shortages are putting upward pressure on interest rates.

Australian businesses, along with Australian families, have also got this skills crisis in perspective. The Prime Minister might not have it in perspective, but business certainly does, because business has been delaying billions of dollars of resource projects because of the lack of skilled workers. Business, like the Reserve Bank, has been telling the government for years that this is a very serious problem holding business back. We need to go back and have a look at why that it is: because of the huge cuts this government imposed a number of years ago on the funding of our TAFEs and our universities.

It seems like it is only the Prime Minister who lacks the perspective to see the impact that the skills crisis is having on Australia. As I said before, the lack of skilled workers is the No. 1 economic issue facing this country. It is dragging down investment, slowing economic growth and holding back productivity. I refer government members to the statement on productivity just last week from the new Governor of the Reserve Bank—it is pushing up inflation and putting upward pressure on interest rates. These are all the serious economic impacts of the skills crisis. This Prime Minister created the skills crisis; it is his responsibility to fix it.

As I said before, the skills crisis started when the government back in 1997 implemented massive budget cuts in our TAFE system and in our universities. In fact, not only did they first cut the funding to our TAFEs and our training system but they then abolished growth funding altogether. So for years our TAFEs were just treading water. Instead of training young apprentices, funding cuts actually sent our TAFEs into a survival scramble.

In 1998, the government actually abolished the National Skills Shortages Strategy. They also slashed university funding—the place where all these very important professionals get trained—for example, engineers. Of course, the result of slashing the funding to universities not only has seen a decline in the number of Australians going to university but also has seen the government foist the funding burden onto Australian students, and now the debt carried by Australian students and graduates is soon to reach $20 billion. That is being carried by our students and graduates because of the extraordinarily short-sighted decisions made by this government.

This appalling track record has most recently been highlighted by the OECD. What they show is that Australia’s public investment in tertiary education, that is, in our TAFEs and universities—the very foundation of our skilled technical and professional workforce—has gone backwards by seven per cent since this government was elected. We have gone backwards. We are the only developed country in the world to have gone backwards; the average across the rest of the developed world is an increase of 48 per cent. So everywhere else in the developed world they are investing in the future of their people, investing in training and investing in higher education. Everyone else is moving forward. Only Australia is going backwards. This year, the Howard government is spending proportionally less of the federal budget on vocational education than last year—less on this most critical area at a time when our national vocational and technical training effort needs a significant boost.

The Australian Industry Group have been out there really pressing the point on the government. They released figures last month showing the extent of the skills crisis. They said two-thirds of our jobs need a vocational education, but only one-third of the working population has a trade or vocational qualification. The Australian Industry Group said that within a decade we will need an extra 270,000 technical workers. The mature age wage subsidy that was announced by the Prime Minister will support 10,000. The measures that are in this statement go nowhere near meeting the demands of industry for skilled workers.

During the speech the Prime Minister boasted of his apprenticeship statistics. One thing he did not mention—not surprisingly, from this Prime Minister—is that today only one-third of the apprentices in training that he boasts about are actually in the traditional trades. You have to discount his figures as only one-third of them are in the traditional trades, compared to two-thirds who were in the trades 10 years ago.

But the most extraordinary omission from the Prime Minister’s statement last week is that there is nothing to help our young people—nothing. There is not one initiative to ensure we get more young people into training, into the trades. It seems as though the Prime Minister either did not know or just completely ignored the fact that two-thirds of Australian apprentices are under the age of 25. There was absolutely nothing in this package to ensure that we encourage more young people into the trades and that we do more at school to encourage them into the trades. And, most importantly, there was absolutely nothing to help them complete their training. Forty per cent of our apprentices drop out of their training before they finish. One of the critical reasons we have such a serious skills crisis is that so many young people—40 per cent of them—are dropping out of their training before they finish their trade. Was there anything in this skills package to address that massive dropout rate? Not one thing. There was no trade completion bonus, which Labor has proposed. There was nothing to address this serious dropout rate.

As the previous Labor spokesperson—the member for Cunningham—indicated, there is nothing to address the very significant levels of teenage unemployment, particularly in some parts of Australia. Her area of Wollongong has one of the most serious levels of teenage unemployment, where it is over 40 per cent, and there is absolutely nothing in this package to help those young people. There is nothing in the package to help lift training standards. One of the big criticisms of current training arrangements is the enormous number of what, in the vernacular, are called ‘tick and flick’ training practices, where we do not ensure that the training our young people are getting is really up to the mark. Once again, there was nothing in this package.

Labor welcome any efforts to help those who do not finish year 12. We certainly believe that education and training should not be a once in a lifetime opportunity, so anything that helps people who have not had the opportunity to finish school is a good thing. We also welcome this change as, hopefully, a recognition by the Prime Minister that you cannot just leave school at 15 and stop learning. You do need literacy and numeracy skills to compete in our modern economy. Year 12, or the equivalent vocational qualification, is fast becoming the new labour market minimum requirement—and I hope this skills package is a recognition from the Prime Minister that he should not be encouraging our young people to leave school at year 10.

We do have some concerns about the workability and scope of the voucher programs that have been put forward because some international evidence certainly shows that existing workers with low-level skills are not likely to have full knowledge of what it is that they need to learn. They are often very reluctant to participate in learning and also have a lot of difficulty finding the time for training outside working hours. So these are some of the practical issues that these mature age workers will face in accessing this voucher.

Another problem with what has been announced is that the training provided by the voucher is available only up to certificate II level. One thing that of course needs to be pointed out is that this level is nowhere near what is sufficient for a trade qualification and therefore will not do anything to address the skills shortage. Nevertheless, it is certainly better than nothing. We are finally getting the government to do something to help these people who have difficulty with their very basic skills, but we will be concerned if we do not see more action from the government to get more people into the trades.

We do welcome the support for apprentices to undertake business training. We actually proposed a similar initiative as part of our skills account policy. We also, not surprisingly, welcome the extension of employer incentives at diploma and advanced diploma level. This was actually contained in the Leader of the Opposition’s skills blueprint announced a whole year ago. Obviously we are glad to see the government pick up these initiatives. It is also a good thing to see the wage subsidy for mature age apprentices. In fact it is interesting to note that this policy designed to help mature age workers is very similar to one that we had as part of Labor’s Working Nation program more than 10 years ago—a program that was, of course, trashed by the government. If they had not trashed all of those initiatives more than 10 years ago, in fact, the skills crisis would not be as bad as it is today.

It is also very important to get these extra places into engineering. I would have to say that one of the problems with engineering is that we have actually had a decline in the number of Australian students commencing an undergraduate engineering degree. I think the government needs to look far more deeply at the problem of the shortage of engineers. Providing additional places is one thing; getting young people in a position to want to do engineering and encouraging them to do engineering is a big issue that the government has yet to address. (Time expired)

Luke Hartsuyker (Cowper, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to have the opportunity to talk on the Prime Minister’s statement on Skills for the Future and to comment on some of the vacuous contributions of the member for Jagajaga. It is interesting to note that the ALP have had an interesting policy on dealing with the shortage of skills—and that was to create mass unemployment, because mass unemployment ensured they never had a skills crisis. Mass unemployment not only meant that people lost their homes, and high interest rates meant they lost their businesses, but it ensured there was no real demand for skilled labour. It is an interesting policy initiative and one that I am going to focus on a little later in my contribution. As I said, I certainly welcome the Prime Minister’s statement. I believe that this package represents a very well-targeted range of assistance for individuals who want to enter or respond to changes in the job market. It will also do much to ease the skills shortages which we are currently experiencing.

Of course the opposition is quick to criticise on the issue of skills shortages, but skills shortages are a challenge—a challenge that comes from success. They are a challenge that grows out of a vigorous, well-managed economy that is growing strongly year-on-year. They have grown out of our well-managed regime, which not only has resulted in lower interest rates, low inflation and elimination of government debt but is also delivering higher wages and better living standards. Unemployment is at 30-year lows. We have created 1.9 million jobs since 1996, and since March we have introduced Work Choices.

The Australian Labor Party said that the sky was going to fall in, that there were going to be no more barbecues and that the world was going to come to an end. But what has happened? We have created 205,000 jobs. What has happened to wages? Have they gone down? No, they have gone up. What has happened to opportunities? They have only continued to increase. So we have seen greater job creation, higher real wages and continuing improvements in the Australian economy. Work Choices has not been the end of the world as was predicted by the soothsayers in the Labor Party. They are probably spending an hour every day wiping the egg off their face. So this issue of skills shortages is really a response to the success that we have achieved in managing the economy, giving people the confidence to go out and grow their businesses and employ more people. The package that the Prime Minister introduced into the House is part of a range of measures to meet that challenge.

Before considering in detail the assistance offered under Skills for the Future, I would like to spend a moment looking at the measures that are currently under way for Australians, particularly young Australians—the types of measures that we have put in place to ensure that people have access to skills training. Let us look at the figures for apprenticeships, which are the foundation of skills provision. We heard the member for Jagajaga whingeing, moaning and groaning, but the figures show that there are some 403,600 apprentices—and that is compared to how many in 1996? Was it 300,000? No, it was not. Was it 200,000? No. In 1996, there were only 154,800 apprentices. In my electorate of Cowper, back in 1996, there were 710 apprenticeships. How many are there now? There are 2,100—three times the number.

More than 90 per cent of those who complete a new apprenticeship find employment within three months. It is a very different employment scenario from that which existed under Labor. Rather than young people being cast on the scrap heap—young people with no opportunities—under this government apprentices are finding a job within three months. That is a fantastic outcome.

One of the other measures that the government introduced was the $800 tool kit initiative. There is also $1,000 in scholarships for apprentices who complete the first and second year of their training in trade skills in areas of need with a small or medium sized business. Disadvantaged job seekers can benefit from access to a program which equips them to start the apprenticeship itself. There are also incentives for employers to take on apprentices with commencement payments which are higher in regional and rural areas and also higher for school based new apprentices. Five hundred new apprenticeship centres have been opened to make it easier for employers to comply with the requirements of taking on an apprentice. I am pleased to say that 300 of those are in regional and rural Australia. More than $10 billion has been committed over four years for vocational and technical education. Between 1997 and 2004, we saw a 125 per cent increase in the number of students in this area of study. Twenty-five Australian technical colleges are being established for the tuition of some 7,200 students in years 11 and 12 in areas of skills shortage.

With measures like these, we have already gone a significant way towards addressing the issue of skill shortages—as I said, a shortage which is born out of the successful economy driving up demand for labour. Our current economic success was built on reform, but we need to continue to reform in order to compete with other thriving economies in the world market. This government has always focused on ways of making our economy more efficient and, in particular, making the labour market more efficient and more effective.

I am greatly encouraged by the decision to set up two pilot programs offering financial incentives for unemployed people to move to areas of labour shortage. Those seeking to move to areas of labour shortage will be assisted to find jobs in Western Australia, Queensland and the Northern Territory, with up to $5,000 in assistance. I am pleased to say that my electorate of Cowper is one of the areas that is going to participate in the pilot program which is looking at getting labour from where it is available to where it is very much needed—working towards improving labour market flexibility and creating opportunities. There has been a very favourable reaction to this initiative in my electorate. I have been approached by quite a number of people who are keen to take up the sorts of opportunities that this program will provide. Innovative measures like these do much to improve our labour market effectiveness, reduce the shortage of labour and provide opportunities.

I now turn to the measures included in the Skills for the Future package. I remind the Main Committee that it involves measures worth $837 million, in addition to the $10 billion in funding that I have already mentioned. Earlier, I mentioned disadvantaged job seekers. Clearly, those who do not have year 12 or equivalent qualifications are disadvantaged in today’s workforce. So this package provides work skill vouchers worth up to $3,000 for tuition in TAFEs or private or community colleges. The tuition can cover the most basic skills of literacy and numeracy and all certificate II courses, and will be available to unskilled workers wanting to acquire the sorts of qualifications which will make them more employable and create more opportunities for them. I think it is a great program.

Understandably, measures to date have tended to concentrate on young people, those currently out of work or those who have never been employed, but this program aims to look at what we can do to upskill some of the mature age workers. In terms of the cost of youth and long-term unemployment to the individuals concerned and to the community, it makes good sense to look at a range of ways in which we can upskill all of our workers to provide a total workforce that has a much higher skill level.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

We tend to overlook those who have already acquired a skill and are well accustomed to the demands of the workplace, particularly later in their working lives. Yet we have a pool of well-motivated, experienced people. The fact that they have successfully held down a job under their own steam should surely not preclude them from assistance, particularly when they have so much to offer. Therefore, I welcome the support for mid-career apprenticeships, which should help those aged over 30 move from their current work into an apprenticeship by providing a subsidy to bridge the gap between apprentice wage levels and what they might have been earning elsewhere. The benefit would be paid at the rate of $150 a week in the first year and $100 a week in the second year as the apprenticeship wage rises.

This practical assistance to those who wish to acquire a trade later in life is something I think we should very much welcome. I know many employers in my community welcome the opportunity of taking on people at an apprenticeship level at a mature age, as well as younger apprentices. There is also the fact that many skilled workers and tradespeople have an opportunity to grow their business or to make the move from being self-employed to being an employer. Again, there is a problem in acquiring the necessary skills in moving from, say, being a plumber working on his own to running a business perhaps employing a number of people, with the responsibility that that entails.

Under the Skills for the Future package, the business skills voucher for apprentices will provide up to $500 a year for apprentices taking an accredited small business skills training course. The package also includes 500 Commonwealth supported engineering places at university from 2008, in addition to the 510 places announced by the Minister for Education, Science and Training in July—a very important measure increasing the number of these high-demand engineering positions. Finally, for those seeking diploma and advanced diploma level qualifications, employers will receive incentive payments of $1,500 for each employee starting a diploma program and a further $2,500 on completion of the course. The current restriction on those who already possess qualifications from attracting incentives will be removed and existing employees will be covered, not just new employees.

This recognises the fact that, in a rapidly changing world, we are likely to need more than one qualification in our working life. The Skills for the Future package provides targeted assistance across a range of skills to get more people into the workforce and to upskill those people who are already in the workforce in light of the changing economic circumstances we have. It covers adult literacy, higher technical qualifications and the improvement in the number of engineers—as the Prime Minister said, ‘from reading to rocket science’. It is a very well-targeted, broad package that will substantially improve the skills outlook in this country.

This package will help people who need to upgrade or modify their qualifications and it will also give people a very basic start on improving their qualifications. It is a great package. I know that it will be welcomed by Express Coaches, in my electorate, which has grown from only six employees in 1985 to 85 employees today. They are keen to grow their business with another 35 workers, but they need to upskill them. This package will be of great assistance to them.

Just before I conclude my remarks, I would like to reflect for a moment on the record of the Leader of the Opposition when he was the federal minister for training between 1991 and 1993. It is interesting to note that we not only had a policy of mass unemployment as a way of controlling skills shortages; under the stewardship of the Leader of the Opposition as minister for training, the number of apprentices actually declined—from 151,000 to 122,700. It is hardly a proud record for a man who claims that he has what it takes to run this country. During his time as the responsible minister, he contributed to the skills shortage by actually presiding over a reduction, not an increase, in the number of apprentices.

I commend this package. I think it is a great package. It is going to greatly enhance the skills base of this nation. It is going to provide opportunities and create a more efficient economy. I commend the package indeed.

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I will just make a few comments about some points the member for Cowper made about the sky falling in, as the opposition has supposedly been saying. I would like to know if the member for Cowper would like to speak to some of the young people in my electorate who are unemployed. With a youth unemployment rate of over 25 per cent in my electorate, I have mums and dads coming into my electorate office every day to ask if I can assist their children to access apprenticeships. I tell them that this government’s only way of dealing with skilling the Australian workforce is to bring in apprentices from countries like India, Indonesia and China and to train them up under apprenticeship visas. I would like the member for Cowper to tell those people how rosy the sky is when kids in my electorate are looking for apprenticeships and cannot find one.

As I said, the only solution this government has is to bring in apprentices from overseas on apprenticeship visas and to train them up here in this country—certainly on lower wages than what an apprentice would get if they were employed here. Of course, one of the conditions of those visas is to sign a contract of employment, an AWA. If you do not sign that employment contract, you do not get the visa. So do you think those people are going to sign the contract? They will all sign the contract, regardless of what the conditions are. That goes to the heart of this government’s policy and the sole purpose of not skilling people. The sole purpose of bringing these apprentices over is to drive wages down. That is the only reason. That is the reason they brought in Work Choices, and that is the reason they are bringing in overseas workers: to drive wages down and to ensure that conditions for the working people here in this country are far lower than they have ever been at any time in this great country of ours—where we once had a proud record and we were very proud of paying a fair day’s pay for a fair day’s work.

It is a very sad day for Australian democracy when we see the results of a whole decade of budget cuts, underinvestment and reliance on a tertiary education system where degrees cost $200,000 and people who pay up front get priority at university. This is what this government have done. They have ignored their responsibility for planning and managing the national workforce, and they have spent 10 years undermining Australia’s education and skills outcomes. The government take 20 minutes of everybody’s time, as they did the other day, to get up and state: ‘We’re going to put in $800 million to help people get a year 12 equivalency certificate. Aren’t we a great nation-building government?’ The government have had 10 whole years, an entire Public Service at their disposal and all the think tanks under the sun, and all they can come up with is a proposal to help middle-aged people in employment to revisit high school.

Five billion dollars has been taken out of universities since the government were elected. And they want to talk to us about higher education and training. There was also $250 million cut from TAFE in the first two budgets of this government. The Howard government have been in power for the last 10 years, and for 10 whole years they have torn down TAFE. TAFE was the skilling school of our nation. The government have not given two hoots about skilling. All of a sudden, they are doing a backflip and showing some sort of concern. But how do the government expect Australian industry to cope when they rip money out of the higher education system, which includes TAFE training for trades and skills? They ripped $250 million from TAFE in their first two budgets, not forgetting the $5 billion they have ripped from universities. How does the government expect Australia to make use of the opportunities we currently enjoy, such as we do, and make preparation for an increasingly dependent population over the decades to come?

Here is a small chronology of the government’s record since it has been in power. I have already mentioned the $250 million that was cut from TAFE in the first two budgets and the $5 billion cut from universities over the last 10 years. The first cuts that I mentioned were in 1996-97. In 1998-2000 there was a Commonwealth funding freeze. In 2001-03 the limited growth funding was restored very slightly, but the states were required to match $460 million over three years. In 2004 there was a rollover of the 2003 funding, with no indexation of the 2003 growth funds. In 2005 the Australian National Training Authority was abolished. This was the authority that had the responsibility for a centralised national training system and it was the advisory body to the government on training. It was a shame that it was abolished. How can this government talk about training when that is its record for the last 10 years? All we have seen is slashing and cutting. How can the Australian public trust this government on skills when it has an abysmal record like that?

The other day the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry were kind enough to slip me, in my electorate, one of their most recent newsletters, in which they identified their members’ expectations and concerns. There was a survey of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry members. Forty-five per cent of those surveyed expected national economic conditions were deteriorating. Sixty-one per cent expected movement in prices—that is, inflation, higher prices. Eighty per cent expected interest rates to rise again somewhere in the very near future. The underlying cause of these perspectives within the community, the reasons for such bleak forecasts regarding costs and of course the cost of money, is the upward pressure created by this government’s obsessiveness with their out-of-date approach to national government.

Formulating and implementing good policy for this country is every government’s duty, regardless of what side of the fence they are on, whether they are a Labor government or a Liberal government. That is the No. 1 duty of any government. We have not seen this. We have not seen good implementation or good policy in the skills area. We have seen neglect for 10 whole years of this government. All we have seen is a denial and nothing more.

The member for Cowper earlier spoke about apprenticeships, and I would like to make some points on apprenticeships as well. The government’s New Apprenticeships scheme has been in operation now for some time. The government count it as one of their greatest successes, but many would argue that it has failed young Australians and failed our workforce requirements. The National Centre for Vocational Education Research report Australian qualifications framework lower-level qualifications: pathways to where for young people? shows that only 33 per cent of people enrolled in a certificate I qualification and 43 per cent of people enrolled in a certificate II qualification complete their courses. Of the few who do complete, over a third of participants said they saw no real job related benefits in the training they received.

This government pays out over $76 million to employers as incentives to take on certificate II trainees, including $18 million for retail courses and $6 million for hospitality. Research shows young people in these courses have been used as cheap labour and have not been given the skills they need for future full-time employment. It may well be that the government has identified a stale smell coming from the New Apprenticeships scheme, as it has reportedly started spending $24 million on giving it a facelift, renaming it Australian Apprenticeships—that is according to an article in the Adelaide Advertiser.

Labour shortages and businesses having to import tradesmen from interstate at top dollar just to keep the companies’ production ticking over is not going to help to keep prices low. Fobbing off opportunity after opportunity for developing our own Australian-made energy industries is not balanced by subsidising a few thousand out-of-date LPG kits. Bringing in wave after wave of overseas workers is in itself not the primary solution to Australia’s workforce problems. I spoke earlier about apprenticeship visas. We also see 457 visas, under which we are bringing in people on lower conditions and less pay. The only objective of this particular policy is to drive down wages. Fear not, that is the only objective of this policy. As soon as we see a downturn in the economy, there will be a definite drop in wages. This is all part of the government’s scheme to ensure that wages will remain at levels lower than what they currently are.

Let us take a look at health for instance, particularly at GPs. Everyone knows that we have national shortages of GPs in hospitals and in the community, but not everyone knows that the government’s own bureaucratic bungling has caused a queue of 1,200 doctors waiting for Medicare provider numbers. That is 1,200 doctors who do not have Medicare provider numbers and cannot start up waiting in a queue. That is 1,200 doctors on the bench itching to get into the game, frustrated by this government, when it is plain to see we are only fielding half a team. In response to this bottleneck, which is probably quite representative of much of Australia’s trade orientated infrastructure, the government again simply diverts its eyes to, in this case, the 457 visas.

The number of doctors recruited from overseas last year included 980 GPs, virtually 1,000 for the year. The overall number has risen in the last 10 years by some 30-plus per cent. Now some 25 per cent of the medical workforce comprises doctors trained overseas. But what does this government do? It has slashed university funding by $5 billion since it has been in. The Australian Medical Association has found goodness-knows-how-many doctors and surgeons brought in from overseas and working in our hospitals without—believe it or not—even having had their competencies checked—and we hear stories every day. Still shortages remain and this government’s failure to adequately plan, invest in and support its own health industry remains evident. It is similarly evident in the industries and professions. It does not stop there by a long shot.

The government’s 20-minute plan—as we saw the other day—for tackling the skills crisis also consists of vouchers to assist one in 10—that is right, only one in 10—of the people it has turned away from TAFE over the last 10 years. We all know that 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE. As I said earlier, TAFE was the skilling school of our nation and the place where people did learn trades, and this is the best that the Howard government can do: turn away 300,000 people from TAFE and then give one in 10 the opportunity for a callback however many years later—a bit of tokenism, I say.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, I wonder if I could intervene under the relevant standing order and ask the member if he would like to answer a question.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Would the member for Hindmarsh accept an intervention?

Steve Georganas (Hindmarsh, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No. The Australian industrial landscape has been changing for decades. Industries like textiles and footwear have all but gone. Many of these industries used to train and take on many apprentices. The national challenge has been to orientate the Australian workforce towards industries with a much brighter future; that has been the idea anyway. But as we have seen old industries close down, has Australia invested enough in the education of the workforce so that people are able to invest themselves in industries and produce goods and services that will take up a greater share of the nation’s GDP as we work our way through this century? The record is clear and the conclusions are obvious. Australia is the only country in the OECD where public investment in tertiary education, universities and TAFEs fell in the last decade by seven per cent. The rest of the OECD countries increased their investment by an average of 48 per cent in the same period.

The record is abysmal. It is a national embarrassment. Worse than that, it is almost as if the government has already decided that our next generation—or at least those from places other than Kings College and similar places—are just as likely to be in the ship-breaking industry, no doubt soon to come to the outskirts of Australia’s major cities. Again, we get back to the reality: 300,000 people turned away from TAFE and only one in 10 getting a call back. Australia is crying out for much more than this, and I hope that next year’s Labor government will deliver much more than this.

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

I have spoken on the question of skills and skilling Australia a number of times in the past 10 years. It has taken a good 10 years for the Prime Minister of Australia to finally make some comments and put a program together in the order of $830 million entitled Skills for the Future. What is not here? Skills for the past 10 years, skilling Australia through a full decade in which the demand for skilled labour and the necessity to train that skilled labour have been evident for at least the last decade.

Why has it been evident? All you have to do is look at two particular indicators. As you would know, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, if you look at the average age of farmers in Australia you can tell that there is a significant problem not just with the age of the community as a whole but with the age of people who are managing and working on farms Australia-wide. Likewise, there is a significant problem in the trade skills area. The average age of skilled tradesmen in Australia is now 54 years of age.

People who work in the trades know in 2006 what they knew in 1996—that is, that the group of people coming behind them is narrow and thin. They know that, as they age, there is that band of people who trained in a period when there was still a very strong, full apprenticeship system—not a combined system where traineeships took the place of full apprenticeships and where concentration on the traditional trades was downgraded for quicker, cheaper traineeships that the government has lauded for the past 10 years. But they also understood then, as they understand now, that the great training institutions of the past—not just the technical and further education colleges of Australia but the institutions that train people internally—used our technical and further education system to bolster, improve and extend that training. We are dealing here with the modern Telstra in particular, and we are also dealing with entities such as State Rail. What we have seen for more than 10 years now—in fact in Telstra’s case and certainly in State Rail’s case I suppose it is more in the order of 15 to 20 years—is that there has been a complete walking away from their traditional place as the key trainers for Australia.

I know that whilst we were in government—and, indeed, prior to that—one of the key reasons for what effectively has been four, almost five, decades of declining apprenticeship numbers across Australia was that those who were the engine room of providing those trained people pulled out of the game. One of the reasons they did that was that they thought that they were expending a lot of money in training people and it was not really good that a lot of those people were pinched by outside companies. The private companies would come and take the fully trained Telstra employees—or Telecom employees as they were then, or PMG employees as they were previously—take advantage of all of the work and the skilling that had been put into those people, and offer them higher money to come and use those skills outside. Some took it; some did not. Some remained loyal to the institution that had helped train them.

If you look at the period of the late 1960s through to the early 1970s, you see that much of our training was in fact bonded training. There was bonded training at Telstra. That training occurred at the Telstra facility at Redfern. I know about it because my elder brother, Kerry, did his training there. He went to De La Salle Ashfield as part of the old system, did fourth year at De La Salle Ashfield and instead of going on to the leaving certificate went into a full apprenticeship with the original PMG, which transformed into Telecom. What was available to him was an extremely high-class, totally dedicated system of training that turned out a fully trained telecommunications technician, someone who could have later chosen to go on and take that through to an engineer level. He chose not to but he spent most of his working life productively in that organisation. Over a period of time he saw others take jobs outside and take their training elsewhere in the community.

If you look at it not from the point of view of the Post-master General, Telecom or Telstra but from the point of view of the community as a whole, these great engines of training and skilling for the future of Australia provided skilled people for the whole community at virtually no cost to the private employers. They grabbed those people who were trained here. Similarly, State Rail provided fundamental training across a broad range of skills for tens of thousands of people. They did that in my electorate at the Chullora railway yards for boilermakers—for Paul Keating’s father who worked as a boilermaker; he helped train other people as boilermakers—and for Jimmy Doherty, his mate who worked with him up there. Those people passed on their skills in significant trades to the next generation. They did that in Blaxland in the Chullora railway yards.

But with the change in philosophy, Telstra decided that it wanted to keep more money unto itself and State Rail decided to get with the action that was in not only the rail area but also a range of other state utilities such as the electricity commission and so on. Instead of maintaining their equipment in the way they used to, instead of reinvesting by training new people for the future, they effectively pulled out of the game. That means that those skilled people are not available in large numbers to those enterprises and they have to catch as catch can. They have done that now for a couple of decades by finding people who were trained by someone else, and that has largely fallen directly on the technical and further education system, which depends for its operation on the states. But that system fundamentally depends on support from the Commonwealth government—the money provided to the states—in order to run effectively.

Prior to us losing government in 1996, I think it would have been in 1994 or 1995, I went through the Bankstown Technical and Further Education premises with the then federal member for Blaxland, who had actually trained in the electrical section at Bankstown. In going through with him, what became apparent was something very strong and very real. Here was someone who had trained in a practical trade and then gone on to do the first part of his work in the electrical industry, as Laurie Brereton, the previous member for Kingsford Smith, who was a fully trained electrician, did. Kids who left school seven years before me did not go through to uni; they went out, sought trades and went into an area that was traditionally a working class area.

What Paul Keating understood and what he wanted to do in government was to rebuild the technical and further education sector. That job has still not been done, a good decade since then—and more. Why not, even though it is staring them absolutely in the face? We get to 10 years on, 12 October 2006, with the Prime Minister finally in panic and crisis mode because the problem is so evident that it is staring everyone in Australia in the face. What do we get? We get $837 million thrown at the problem. Who is it thrown to? Guess what? It is thrown to people 25 years and over who might need to retrain or it is thrown to people who come within a particular set of parameters—those people on disability support pensions, those people on income support in some other way or those people on carer pensions. It is those people who have been given training assistance in the past in order to get themselves into the workforce.

When we were in government we saw full well how much derision there was from the current government when it came to our training efforts to try to give people a chance to get through the period of recession that we had. That fantastic program, Working Nation, reignited this country and reignited its skills base. There was very little for people when Labor came into government in 1983, coming out of a recession. I have been waiting 10 long years for this Prime Minister to say:

The contrast with previous episodes of commodity boom-related labour market tightness is very stark. For example, in the mid-1970s demand pressures in some sectors led to a surge in wages and inflation across the whole economy.

His memory must be deficient—we know it has been deficient at other times—because that wage pressure was not just in the mid-1970s. Phil Lynch was Treasurer in the mid-1970s. When did the wage pressure really come on? It came on in the late-1970s—1979, 1980, 1981—under the Fraser government, with John Howard as Treasurer.

That wages pressure came out of a resources boom that never happened—a resources boom touted by that government. They said that there was going to be $29 billion worth of investment in that resources boom, and not one single person in the country saw that become evident. But what did happen? Because that resources boom was pushed and touted so heavily by that government, the strongest unions in the country, the metal workers, went out for 20 and 30 per cent increases.

What has conditioned this Prime Minister in his responses ever since then? Wage push inflation and cost push inflation—the two keys when he was Treasurer. What dominates him now—dominates him to this very day, dominates the whole structure of his approach in industrial relations and dominates his view of the Australian workforce—is that you have to have a Thailandisation of the work conditions for Australians and that the fundamental problem in Australia is the cost of labour. Get real! It is not 1979, 1980 or1981 and there are not the conditions under which he operated unsuccessfully as Treasurer. We have a situation where there is a deficit of skills Australia-wide because the reinvestment into Australia’s people has not been put there by the federal government of Australia. They have not pushed the agenda. They have not forced this, even though the evidence was there and stark.

Why have we gone into crisis mode? There must be a skills crisis, if the member for Bennelong is going to come out with a major package—scant as it is. The package is $837 million over five full years. What is in the package for young people under 25 needing training? Not a zack out of this package is directed towards them. What do we have in this package to completely reshape our education system in terms of driving skills? What we have got is 25 technical education colleges. How many are actually operating now? I am not sure. I think there might be one.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Four.

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

Four all up? So four out of 25 are operating. That is not a really good score—but, if you are going to start from the ground up, I suppose you can say that four out of 25 is a start. We know that a whole series of them has problems. Why? One of the reasons is the demand that Australian workplace agreements be the only agreements in place in those technical colleges. Even if you take the total number of people who go through a technical college, it is a drop in the bucket in terms of the need that Australia has for skilling its workforce.

Ten years ago we were in a position where, with determination, effort and a sensible approach to this, we could have built Australia’s trade and skill capacity and skilled our tradespeople, where we could have not only provided for our own needs in Australia—and filled the gap that is there and evident, where 54 or 55 is the average age of trained and professional tradespeople in Australia—but also exported those skills to Asia. The great opportunity that was lost then was the capacity to build Australian companies, based on skilled Australian tradesmen, and to export those skills into the Asian market.

Instead of that, what have we got? I was down at the Landmark in Barton—where group after group seemed to be involved in construction of that building—and the penny dropped for me in terms of what was happening and the fact that there was something rotten with 457 visas when, at quarter to five in the afternoon, a troop of Chinese plasterers, plastered head to foot with dust, came out of there. They had no work boots and no safety shirts or safety helmets—none of the sorts of things that other people had to have. Everybody else had knocked off at 3.30 pm or quarter to four, and I thought: ‘Here is an entire tranche of people brought in because what should have been done for young Australian people’—the people who needed to be trained as skilled work people—‘has not been done.’ All this government has done until now is substitute foreign workers for Australians. We should train Australians. (Time expired)

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Skills development is one of the key drivers of an economy. It not only boosts opportunity for the individuals concerned but also boosts productivity. It is a win-win outcome. I have said before in this place that education is the great enabler of a society and skills development is the means by which we become smarter, more innovative and more adaptive and compete at the higher wage end of the job opportunity scale. It is a means by which we become more productive and provide more diverse and rewarding opportunities for our people, not just young people. It is true that there are individual benefits that come from skills development, but there is also a national benefit. That is why it is always important in these debates to remind people that education and skills development is a public good. (Quorum formed) So investing in our capacity to advance education and skills is one of the essential investments a government must make—not just that it can make but that it must make—but it is an investment that this government has failed to make.

Labor have been arguing for a decade that this government is letting the country down and letting its individuals down by failing to invest properly in skills development. Belatedly, not only has the government acknowledged the problem but it has understood it has had to act; hence, this injection of $837 million over five years to address the problem. It is an investment made too late and still too narrow in its focus.

This is a skills crisis that we have been warning of for years and, particularly in the context of the resources boom and the capacity constraints, what that failure to invest in skills has produced. We have heard the government rabbit on about infrastructure bottlenecks, but only now has it admitted the problem of the skills shortage. Over the years under this government, we have seen a crisis resulting from the underfunding of our universities and TAFE sectors, where the government has shifted heavily the cost of funding these sectors to the individual and the states—a government vacating the field and expecting others to pick up the cost. In 10 years, 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE—300,000 Australians turned away from acquiring skills that would have benefited them and the nation.

It is interesting—and the member for Blaxland made reference to this—that, whilst this is an important but belated statement, Labor are aware of the government’s commitment in the lead-up to the last election to establish the Australian technical colleges. It was a program that was deliberately designed to circumvent the states’ TAFE programs—a program that the government had underinvested in—but I think it is pretty instructive to look at what has been achieved.

The government promised two years ago that it would establish 25 colleges. Only four of them have been established to date—I think there might have been an additional one established just recently which would take it to five; let us give them the benefit of the doubt—with just 320 students. Is this a serious response to the skills crisis? That is the fundamental question that I think has to be posed. No wonder we have still got the problem that has resulted in this sort of statement.

So we have again been proven right, just as in the last term the government belatedly realised it had to do something with another one of those important public good areas—health—and reinvest to save our Medicare system because Labor had identified the problem and posed costed alternatives to address it. At the end of the last parliamentary term we went to the election proposing an initiative, fully costed and funded, which would have seen an additional 20,000 places in our TAFEs and our universities. Just imagine the opportunities that that would have provided—the opportunities not just for individuals but for the nation.

My point in saying that is that it is easy for oppositions to just be critical of the government but Labor have had a consistent track record of putting forward constructive alternatives to address this problem. When we were in office—the 13 years that we were in office—we saw a real commitment to lifting the skills and educational ability of our people. We increased skills funding by 55 per cent in real terms. We increased TAFE funding by 56 per cent in real terms and we increased university funding by 60 per cent in real terms. This government comes nowhere near that sort of commitment.

We recognised the importance of addressing the problem from a national perspective and established the Australian National Training Authority. We developed the Working Nation program, which I had the privilege to not only develop but implement. It is a tragedy that it was not able to continue, because it was making huge headway. One of the mechanisms under the Working Nation program to complement the jobs compact and the subsidy arrangements in terms of getting long-term unemployed back into work was Netforce. This mechanism recognised the importance of driving skills development not just in the traditional trades but also in the new economy jobs, jobs not traditionally known as trades but jobs that nevertheless needed skills development for which there was no accredited training. It was Labor that established that mechanism. I think it is very interesting when the government gets up and talks about its record on unemployment. We should not forget that when the Prime Minister was Treasurer in the Fraser government that was the record unemployment that was created in this economy. It is also true that under Working Nation—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would like to ask the honourable member a question under the standing orders, if he wishes to accept it.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Does the member for Hotham wish to accept the question?

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, of course.

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I wonder if the member for Hotham could tell us what year it was under the Keating government that there were one million unemployed.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I can certainly tell the member for Mackellar that the number of unemployed exceeded one million under the Fraser government, and that was one million unemployed in a lesser workforce so there was a higher proportion of unemployed under the government that John Howard was Treasurer in. That is what I can tell her. What I can also tell her is that we do not hide from the fact there was an unemployment problem under us, but we were prepared to do something about it. We were prepared to invest in getting people back into work—but not just in menial jobs; we were prepared to link them to effective accredited training.

I said before that under Working Nation I established the traineeship program and Netforce. It is very interesting to note that in Labor’s last year in office, in 1996, traditional apprentices—and I got these figures out of the library today—numbered in excess of 126,000. That was the figure just for traditional apprenticeships. They did not reach that figure again under this government until 2004. Almost eight years later, this government had stagnated. Despite the fact that there had been increasing prosperity and increasing economic growth, this government dumbed down the training system and did not produce one extra traditional apprenticeship training place. The government talks about the numbers, close to 400,000—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop interjecting

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order!

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Deputy Speaker, just calm her down. She has asked a question, which was—

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I think I can do my job without any help, thank you.

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would appreciate that, because I think these figures are important to remind people of. What the government did was to scrap the measure—

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop interjecting

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Please, I am not answering your question; I am making my contribution. What the government did was to scrap—

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Was the member for Mackellar wishing to ask a question?

Mrs Bronwyn Bishop (Mackellar, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, I was wishing to ask a question.

Ian Causley (Page, Deputy-Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Will the member for Hotham accept it?

Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

No. What the government did was roll the traditional apprenticeships into our traineeship system. I introduced the trainee system in 1995. In 1995, there were only 12,000 in the trainee system. Within two years, that had quadrupled to 48,000. The government benefited from the system that I put in place. It was a good system. They retained it, even though they scrapped Netforce, and the numbers that they now claim credit for are the direct result of the boom in traineeships, not traditional trades. The same figures from the library show that, in the latest year recorded, traditional trades accounted for only 148,000 out of a total of close to 400,000, but 60 per cent of what they call new apprenticeships in fact are our traineeships. So let us have none of this nonsense about their set of figures.

I will just make this point in terms of comparisons, because it is also pretty revealing from these statistics. In 1990, under the Labor government, when Kim Beazley, I think, may have been employment minister, traditional trades were at their peak: 161,000, a figure that this government has never been able to achieve in its term despite a resources boom. So there you have it: a Labor government that had a commitment to skills development and employment growth, showing what can happen when you start to invest in the skill development of a nation.

We hear of this government in terms of the need to address skills shortages. Nowhere is it a greater problem or issue than in the regions. You would know it, Mr Deputy Speaker Causley, from your electorate—the inability of regions to go forward because this government has failed to invest in the skills development of its people. I again remind people of what Labor did when it was in office. When the skills shortage problem faced us back in the Working Nation days, I set up the area consultative committees under the Working Nation program to ensure that local training programs matched local industry needs, taking the supply with the demand. The area consultative committees were resourced to undertake skills audits to identify the skills and deficiencies within particular regions. We involved the local chambers of commerce and industry in identifying their skills needs. We encouraged local bodies to establish what the demand for their labour was. I remember coming up to your own electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker, and working with the area consultative committee to address its needs. That network of area consultative committees, which still exists today but is not resourced in the same way as we did it, was responsible for placing 300,000 jobs in six months—and then we lost office.

The point I am making is that local empowerment works when you use government as a facilitator and to resource the capacity to address the skills needs of a particular region. We want to go back to developing and tapping that sort of mechanism because we have shown that it works. But it will not work unless a government is prepared to make the investment in the drivers of economic growth, the investment in the skills and the innovation of the nation. That is what Labor has shown a preparedness to do. It is what we keep putting forward the policies to do, and it is what this government eventually is forced, kicking and screaming, to embrace.

We say: yes, we welcome this money, but more needs to be done in terms of not just giving people the opportunity but empowering regions to identify their needs to develop the training programs that suit their particular needs, to get back to doing what we demonstrated they were capable of delivering on—a government prepared to work with communities, not dud them and disinvest in the means by which people obtain their skills and the nation its productivity growth. (Time expired)

Jill Hall (Shortland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I welcome the Prime Minister’s Skills for the Future statement. In doing so, I have to say I am very disappointed that it took so long for the government even to acknowledge that we have such a chronic skills shortage here in Australia. The promises and commitments that the Prime Minister made when he made his statement are a start, but they are nowhere near enough.

Before I get to the actual substance of my speech, I would like to pick up on one thing that the member for Mackellar spoke about. It is in relation to the programs that have been put in place to address unemployment. I go back to the early eighties, when unemployment under the Fraser government peaked and it sought to introduce a program to address that unemployment. The program that they introduced was a program called wage pause. Wage pause necessitated all people employed by the Commonwealth having their wages frozen, and the difference between what they would have received and what they were actually paid was used in job creation programs. When the government lost power in 1983 and the Hawke government came to power, there was CEP and the other programs that have already been spoken about. Unemployment was not just a child of the Hawke era or the Keating era. Unemployment had been simmering for a very long time. Its seeds were to be found in the time of the Fraser government.

Turning to the matter that we have before us today, I would like to state, as have previous speakers before me, that Australia is facing a chronic skills shortage. The Howard government’s solution has been to import workers from overseas, and we have been the only OECD country to reduce investment in universities and TAFE—and I will be concentrating quite a bit on TAFE. Australia’s investment has fallen by eight per cent since 1995 whilst that of OECD countries has increased by 38 per cent.

I think it is an absolute disgrace that 16 per cent of young Australians aged between 15 and 19 are looking for work—and it is higher in areas like the area that I represent in this parliament. The area that I represent has traditionally supported the trades. When young people left school, they aspired to be tradespeople. I think the member for Blaxland touched on the fact that businesses and industry no longer employ people in traditional apprenticeships. The tradespeople that we have still working in industry were skilled in the seventies and eighties. I think the change in the way businesses operate and the change in the way governments and government departments employ and make a commitment to training apprentices have also impacted, the simple fact being that we do not have enough tradespeople.

BHP in Newcastle used to employ a massive number of apprentices each year. Its demise has also seen the end of those apprenticeships. Whilst young people coming through the schools in the Hunter aspire to become tradespeople, opportunities for them to undertake trade training are very limited. There are limited opportunities for them to access training through TAFE colleges and limited opportunities to access training with employers.

One of the good things that has happened in recent times has been the expansion of the group training scheme. In a letter I sent out to my constituents recently, I highlighted the stories of a number of young people in my electorate who had chosen to train as apprentices through a group training scheme with Delta Electricity. Delta Electricity previously employed a massive number of apprentices. Now they take only a few through the group training scheme. That is one area, removed from government to some extent, that has caused problems with our skills shortage.

But I am afraid that the Howard government cannot escape the blame for where we are today. We on this side of the parliament have raised issues time and time again with respect to industry, the traditional trades, the doctor shortage, the nurse shortage and the shortage of allied health professionals that exists in all of our electorates to some extent. The government have, up until very recently, ignored the fact that there were problems.

Even when you recognise that a problem exists, there is always a lag time. The government have adopted the cheap approach of bringing people in from overseas, and I would have to say that that was very much a stopgap approach. What they should have been doing was investing in young Australians and also in a group that I think is an untapped resource within Australia—mature workers. I think that if we had programs, particularly in the area of technology, that were structured around targeting and upskilling older and more mature workers, it would be a great benefit to our nation. I have heard Professor Saunders, from the right-wing think tank, say in this parliament that mature age blue-collar workers would never work again. I object to that. I think that if you give them the proper training, if you give them the skills they need to work in industry today, they will be a worthwhile asset in our workforce.

Earlier this week, teachers from TAFE came to visit me, and I am sure that they visited a number of members in this parliament. They highlighted to me how vocational education had suffered under the Howard government. There were the funding cuts in 1996 and 1997, which reduced the funding base for the 1998 ANTA agreements. That really had an impact and that was the first slash into the TAFE system. I could see how that was having an impact within my local area. From 1998 to 2000, there was the Commonwealth funding freeze, growth through efficiency and deregulation of the training market. I think that the quality trainer of our young people is TAFE. In our TAFE colleges we have experienced people in trades and highly educated, professional people who teach courses in our TAFE colleges. I think that the fact that this government has absolutely ripped money out of our TAFE colleges throughout Australia is unforgivable. What it has done is rip apart the infrastructure that provides the basis for quality training for all our young people.

Once you deregulate to the extent where a number of the new apprenticeship courses that are not in the traditional trades, that are very soft courses, are taken up and counted as part of the training and the skilling of the nation, that is a real distortion of fact. I share with the House an example of one young person in one of those new apprenticeship schemes who came to see me. He was employed to do floor sanding. He did part of the certificate III course—when his employer would actually allow him to leave his employer’s home, which was where the young new apprentice worked. The jobs that the person did while he was doing this new apprenticeship scheme were cleaning his employer’s car, sweeping the floors and tidying up around his employer’s home. He went to TAFE. He did part of the certificate III course and, once the employer received the payment, he sacked the young new apprentice.

His father was able to negotiate a real apprenticeship for him in the area of plumbing, and he had his trial period. The new employer was very happy with him but, when he went to sign him up, he found that he could obtain no benefits, simply because the apprentice had done this mickey mouse certificate III course that had led nowhere, where he had been exploited and where he had learnt nothing. There he had an opportunity to do a real apprenticeship where he would be setting himself up for the future, and he could not do it because he had done this mickey mouse course. They are the kinds of apprenticeships that the Howard government talks about when they talk about how they are training all these young Australians. I would argue very strongly that the training that they are providing is second class.

Between 2001 and 2003 there has been limited growth funding restored to TAFE colleges. In 2004 there was a rollover from 2003. When ANTA was abolished in 2005, I believe that really impacted on the nation’s ability to assess what skills it needs for the future and to determine the direction and the needs in the area of training. In TAFE it has led to larger classes and a reduction in courses. I know that it is very difficult for young people to do pre-apprenticeship schemes. There is definitely concern about the quality of some of the VET courses and it has been very detrimental to young Australians. It makes me quite upset when I hear that something like 40 per cent of the people who start the new apprenticeship schemes do not even complete their training.

Labor’s skills blueprint, which I am sure most members of this House have looked at and appreciate the benefit of, addresses this issue and looks at ways to prevent this dropout that occurs with the new apprenticeship schemes. We want to give traditional apprentices $2,000 on completion—a $2,000 trade completion bonus. In addition, we believe that we should not be bringing 2,700 skilled workers in from overseas. We should not be bringing apprentices in from overseas; we should be training Australians for those positions. We should certainly be creating opportunities for all those young people in my area and in other areas throughout the country who would desperately love to train as a tradesperson and would desperately love to obtain an apprenticeship.

We need as a nation to really address this issue properly—not in a half-baked way, like the Prime Minister did. We need to recognise the issue and make a real investment in the training of our young people and a real investment in upskilling our mature workers who would be only too willing to obtain the skills that are needed—skills that have been identified by industry as lacking in our economy. Once we have done that, we will take our economy into the 21st century and we will be able to compete much more effectively in the global market. The Prime Minister should look at the Labor Party’s blueprint and adopt the recommendations and the programs that are set out in it.

Debate (on motion by Mrs Bronwyn Bishop) adjourned.