Kirsten Livermore (Capricornia, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It would be true to say that there is an air of the surreal about some of the things we debate in this House. Over my time here I can remember things such as the Work Choices bill, which was all about taking choices away from workers and the fair dismissal bill—it was a beauty—making it easier to sack people. Now we are having a debate about the government’s skills package, which is a package of measures designed to address a skills crisis that, until very recently, the Prime Minister and the government were denying even existed. The skills package was released last week by the Prime Minister in the context of a skills crisis that the Prime Minister denies has been a problem for the country.

The Prime Minister is alone in that opinion, because everyone else has known for quite some time that we are in the midst of a skills shortage or a skills crisis—whatever you want to call it. Labor has known about it. Over a year ago we put out a substantial and comprehensive policy putting forward our solutions to the skills shortage to make sure that Australia has skilled and qualified people in its workforce to take our economy forward, to secure us for the future and to give people the opportunities to get the skills they require to meet their potential and to reach their goals in life, whether that be their career goals or their personal goals. So Labor has been talking about a skills crisis.

The Reserve Bank has been warning that the skills crisis will have impacts on the economy. The OECD has raised it as being a problem. Just recently, on 25 June, BIS Shrapnel put out their economic outlook, which also warned that a chronic shortage of skilled labour is set to act as a permanent constraint on Australia’s growth. And the list goes on. So there have been plenty of warnings to the government about the shortage of skills and how it is threatening our economy, how it is putting pressure on inflation and, correspondingly, how it is putting upward pressure on interest rates. We have seen three interest rate rises since the last election, when the government promised us just the opposite.

Labor has been warning about the skills crisis and we know very well where the skills crisis has come from. It has come from this government’s failure to invest in training and education. OECD figures have shown that Australia is the only developed country in the world that has actually cut spending and public investment in training and education. While the rest of our competitors—the rest of the developed world—have been upping investment in their people, upping investment in training and education to make sure they have highly qualified workers in their economy, Australia has been completely dropping the ball on that and dropping funding as well. Last week the government announced an $837 million package, but when you look at figures for VET funding for the last 10 years you see that it is really just putting back money that the government has denied the VET sector in their 10-year term in office.

You really see the government’s true colours when it comes to skills and training. First of all, they denied that a skills shortage exists. Now they are putting just over $800 million back into fixing a problem that they themselves created by the cuts to VET funding under their watch since 1996. So this is really about fixing a political problem that the government created rather than any serious commitment to the training that Australia needs.

The government of course has had some policies on skills in this period of time. We had, at the last election, the Australian technical colleges. They seem to have completely dropped off the radar. As I was preparing for this speech, I had to ask myself whether any have even been opened yet. Has anyone actually enrolled in one? I think the technical college in Gladstone, not far from my electorate, has one student enrolled. Of course, even if that policy had worked to its full extent, we were not going to see any qualified tradespeople coming out of those colleges until about 2010, so it was hardly ever a serious response to the skills crisis. The other beauty was Minister Hardgrave’s proposal to build TAFEs in Africa as a way of providing skilled workers in Australia. So, really, the government is not serious about this.

The government’s real policy on the skills shortage in Australia has been to open the doors for thousands and thousands of overseas workers on 457 visas, and of course we have seen that used extensively in the meat industry, including in my own electorate. Some 270,000 foreign workers have been introduced into Australia on 457 visas at the same time as we have seen 300,000 Australians turned away from TAFE, thanks to the cuts to VET funding that I spoke about earlier.

In the time that I have left, I actually want to turn to a local matter. There is some very good news in this local story and some not so good news. The good news is that Moranbah State High School was last week named a winner in the Queensland government’s Showcase Awards for Excellence In Schools for this year. These are the state government’s highest accolades for state schools. Moranbah State High School, which is led by Principal James Sloman, won for their program called Different Pathways for Different Futures. It is just a fantastic program that the school has put in place. It is focused on years 11 and 12 and it is all about enabling young people to get to where they want to go. They identify in year 10 where they might want to go career-wise at the end of their schooling and the school then tailors an education program to meet their needs and aspirations. The school’s goal is for every student to leave with a certificate II or an OP of 1 to 15. Last year 82 per cent of students reached that goal.

There are three main parts to the program. There is a pathway for kids with academic goals in mind; there is a pathway with a focus on vocational education outcomes; and there is a pathway for those kids who are at risk of not having their needs met through the traditional schooling system. The academic program offers an alliance with the University of Queensland. There are seven students currently undertaking undergraduate courses, while they are still at school, through the University of Queensland—and teachers at the school volunteer their time to coach and tutor students doing those university courses. The second arm of the program is vocational education, and James Sloman, the principal, tells me that this is where the school has really kicked some goals for kids. The school works very hard to align what they are doing at the school with what industry wants. Of course, when we talk about industry in Moranbah, it is largely the mining sector and associated industries that support the mining sector—heavy engineering and manufacturing businesses that are also set up in Moranbah.

The school works with industry to find out what specific skills industry wants. So it is not about very nebulous general work skills; the school really drills down to find out: what can we give you that you need in your business? A classic example that the principal mentioned to me was that the mining industry often wants people with competency in both metric and imperial measurements. That is something that you are not going to get in the traditional school program, but by working with industry they can really provide industry with students who have the specific skills they want. There is a real focus on school based apprenticeships and traineeships, which of course is a big part of Labor’s policy under our skills blueprint, and one in three senior students now do a school based apprenticeship or traineeship.

The school assigns study coaches to help students through the self-paced modules that are required under their apprenticeships and traineeships, and it also gives backup help with literacy and numeracy. The principal tells me he believes, on the information that he has been given, that the school based apprentices and trainees at Moranbah High School have one of the best completion rates of modules in Queensland because they have that support as they are working through the self-paced learning.

At the end of that, when they graduate from high school, these students are entering the workforce as second- and third-year apprentices. The school is working very closely with companies like Macarthur Coal, Anglo Coal, Rio Tinto and other smaller firms around Moranbah to give these students a real chance at getting a start in their apprenticeships and traineeships. It is the small manufacturers that have been taking it up, and the mining companies are now starting to realise that, if they want the best people, they have to start looking for these students when they are in grade 10 so they can get them started and on their way.

The other group is at-risk students. These are the students who have had high truancy rates or have been excluded from school. The school is offering a certificate I in work readiness for these students and working closely with a local registered training organisation to develop programs. It is also working with the Construction, Forestry, Mining and Energy Union, which has a very strong presence in Moranbah, to get these kids started in truck-driving courses or other work experience programs to make sure these kids see a pathway for themselves through training and education.

Congratulations to the school. I am looking forward to attending their speech night on Tuesday night. That will be my chance—but I also do it here in the Australian parliament—to congratulate the school on winning that very prestigious state-wide award for what they are doing for the students in Moranbah. The school now has a very low dropout rate. The school is very proud of the program that it is delivering and also of the outcomes that these students are achieving. I want to congratulate the staff at the school for their commitment to making that happen.

I now come to the not-so-good part of this story: the fact that the school has been trying for some years now to build a skills centre. It is a partnership between industry, state government and the Commonwealth government. This skills centre has been approved by DEST, but the school has had to go back to the Commonwealth government with an additional application for a greater amount of funding because of the rise in construction costs since their original application. Construction costs right across Australia have been blowing out because of the skills shortage—we come back to that—and nowhere is that more the case than in Central Queensland, where the resources boom is at its strongest.

The school has applied to DEST for additional funding to get this skills centre off the ground—a skills centre that, I might say, has already been approved by the Commonwealth government. I understand that there has been some delay in getting this final tick-off on the additional funding, and I am calling for the minister, Gary Hardgrave, to get onto this. Please, tick off this project: you have a school here that has just won a state-wide award for what it is doing in the area of vocational education pathways for students, with school based apprenticeships and traineeships. It has a program ready to go next year, working with students from right across the central highlands—places like Dysart, Clermont, Middlemount and Glenden, which are all in my electorate as well. It all rests on getting a skills centre built. The project manager is ready to go. The school has done what it needs to do. The state government has done what it needs to do. We are just waiting for the Commonwealth government to tick off on this money. I understand it is with the minister at the moment for that decision to be made, and there is some technical issue about where the delegation authority lies or some technical bureaucratic problem within DEST.

Minister, there is a skills shortage. There is a school that could be opening up fantastic opportunities for the young people of the central highlands and the mining towns. We need the skills centre. Let us get started on this: tick off the program and give the school the certainty it needs to start this project so it can be up and running in 2007. The minister talks about building TAFEs in Africa; all we want is a skills centre in Moranbah. It cannot be that hard.

But if we cannot get action from the minister he will certainly be hearing a lot more from me about it and a lot more from the people of Moranbah. They are very proud of what their school is achieving for their students and they do not want the Commonwealth government, which has presided over a skills shortage for the last 10 years, making the skills shortage in their part of Australia any worse than it already is. In closing, congratulations once again to James Sloman and his staff. I look forward to offering them my sentiments of congratulation when I see them at their speech night on Tuesday.

Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Primary Industries, Resources, Forestry and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I appreciate the cooperation of the House in enabling me to make my full statement this afternoon by moving the adjournment debate out by five minutes or so. I say that because I think this debate on skills is exceptionally important. As the member for Capricornia has indicated, all around Australia, in our capital cities and our major regional cities and towns, we have a major skills crisis. It is about time we accepted that we do have a major skills crisis which is now a barrier to investment in Australia. Our real problem is that once you start losing investment it goes to other countries and it is then harder to attract it back to Australia in the future.

I therefore want to make a few remarks about the Prime Minister’s Skills for the Future package of last week. The Australian Labor Party has been banging on about the issue of skills for some years now. It is not a new issue to us. We have been championing for a long time the requirement for national leadership and action on the issue of skills.

Australia’s skills crisis is widely recognised as the largest problem facing the nation’s future sustainability on the economic front and its growth possibilities. Time and time again, the Reserve Bank of Australia has sung in tune with the nation’s top banks, which have identified the difficulty for business in finding suitable labour as the key constraint on output. It is across the whole economy—in the mining and resource sector, the energy sector and the service sector, for instance in hospitality. It is not confined to one sector of Australian industry or one state or territory or region of Australia. It is a national problem.

It is obvious to me from my shadow ministerial responsibilities that this is a problem that is prevalent in the mining and resource sector. I do not need to remind anyone in these sectors of that. Just look at the wages on offer because of the skills crisis—the wages this sector now has to pay to try to attract and retain people. It is actually adding to the cost of running a business in Australia.

It is also an issue on the tourism radar and it has been there for some time. In tourism and hospitality, it goes to the ability to service growth in the inbound sector, which is under question due to labour shortages. It was only last week that the Australian Tourism Export Council came out and said:

Tours are being cancelled—not for want of tourists but for a lack of drivers and tour guides.

Rooms in hotels and motels are being shut and investment plans are being put off. Hotels are being built but the owners are facing the prospect of being unable to staff them ...

That says it all. We are losing business because we cannot get the workers to actually perform the services required by tourists.

We also have problems in some of our major resource and civil engineering projects in getting the skilled workers to undertake the work, with investment decisions having been made. This is, unfortunately, at a time when industry has been enjoying reasonable prospects. But now we have the prospect of not being able to fulfil our potential capacity, and that is the last thing industries such as the tourism industry—which is struggling, domestically—need at this point in time.

It is a nationwide issue that the government should have fronted up to long ago. I am pleased that, in trying to at least partly confront this problem, the government has chosen to turn to the Labor Party for some policy ideas. I believe it is a welcome U-turn from the Prime Minister—a late convert to the need for skills upgrades—that they have actually decided to do something about this crisis.

But it would be an even more welcome outcome if it were a serious package. It is typical of the Howard government that when there is a problem they shove a few dollars on the table and hope that the problem disappears. You now need a long-term strategy to overcome the skills shortage that exists.

What the government has proposed is a start, but there is a hell of a lot more to be done. That is part of the government’s approach when there is a problem: they spend a few dollars, brush it under the carpet and move on to some other problem, if one arises; or, otherwise, they go back to sleep at the wheel. That lack of government attention goes across a whole range of sectors in Australia at the moment.

It is fair to say that some aspects of the package are comprehensive in their design, but it is going to be hard to implement them in time to overcome the problems in the foreseeable future. At the last election, we had the new techs. Based on enrolments today, we will not get a tradesperson for another 3½ years. The cost per apprentice is $63,000 and we will not get any results for about four years. That is the real cost of the Australian government’s tech schools initiative so far—and there is a skills crisis!

Let us go to some of the issues. The package is obviously designed to sway the minds of voters, not to actually solve the skills problems. The government is trying to look as if it is doing something on the skills front when actually it is not doing anything. The government is not doing the hard yards, getting its hands dirty and trying to work out, for example, how to streamline the apprenticeship system in Australia. Do you do it trade by trade? Do you do it on a competency basis? The government should investigate how to reduce the period of the apprenticeship, like the Victorian government did in the automotive repair industry in Melbourne. If you do your pre-vocational period of three months in years 11 and 12, you go into a shortened apprenticeship of three years with higher rates of pay—higher apprentice wages. The rates for each of those years are the second, third and fourth year rates. That is an encouragement for kids, some of whom live in a poverty-stricken way because of the lower wages historically paid to apprentices, to stay in their apprenticeship and complete it. One of the biggest problems is young people not completing their apprenticeships.

This is a start, but it is disappointing that the government has not done enough. There is $800 million, almost half of which will go into the training voucher, which is the government’s centrepiece. But the money allocated is spread over five years. That is $160 million a year. Not only has government got to do more; business itself has got to do more. All too often in the past, business has regarded training as a cost. I think it is about time they adopted a culture that training is an investment in their future. They should not have closed apprenticeship centres in the major mining towns, as they have done in the last 10 to 15 years. Now they are paying the price because of a lack of attention to detail by both government and business itself.

In announcing the package, the Prime Minister suggested that there is not a crisis. I find that an exaggerated and breathless statement. It is outrageous for the Prime Minister to assert, as he did in this parliament last week, that ‘some level of skills shortage was part of the healthy and dynamic labour market’. I simply say that we did not need to have this skills shortage. If the government had been attending to the detail of running this economy and investing in our future—and investing in our infrastructure and our skills base is what it is all about—we would not be confronting this skills problem at the moment and having to rely on section 457 visas to bring people from overseas whilst we fail to train our own. I am not just talking about our young people. Obviously, there is also the question of adult apprenticeships.

We have $800 million spread over five years in the lead-up to an election. I simply say, in terms of my shadow responsibilities, that I cannot see this producing the outcomes that we need. The package will, I think, be rushed in its implementation, because the government has failed to admit that there is a skills problem.

Let us go to the issue of the voucher system that is due to commence at the beginning of 2007. When you think about the detail of implementing the system, this does not leave much time for those implementing it—and, given the seriousness of the issue at hand, there is no room for error. It is reasonable to ask whether the package can be delivered as promised.

We also have to be careful in developing this package that we avoid some of the fly-by-nighters who always come in when there is government money on the table. All of a sudden there will be growth in the number of training consultants. If there is a voucher, we have to have a serious look at the quality of the training that might be delivered as a result of some of these initiatives. If we are going to spend taxpayers’ hard-earned dollars, we have to make sure that a quality product is delivered. This is not just about throwing a few dollars on the table 18 months from the election. This has to be a serious investment in overcoming our skills problems.

I am seriously worried about the potential quality of some of the providers that will be chasing these vouchers and trying to induce unsuspecting people who are desperate to get some skills to enrol in courses that are not properly competency based and will not make them even more employable and advance their career prospects.

It is appropriate that the government does something, because the skills crisis is of its own making. In 1998 the government abolished the national skills shortage strategy. That strategy and that move coincided with the number of traditional apprentices in training falling to its lowest since 1972—a move that reflected the government’s attitude to education throughout its 10 years in government.

This poor track record was highlighted in a recent OECD report entitled Education at a glance. The report showed that Australia is the only advanced economy in the world that has reduced its public sector investment in education since 1995. The average investment level across the OECD was a 48 per cent increase, yet Australia’s investment was a cut of seven per cent. I simply ask: why is the government leading the nation in the wrong direction with respect to the issue of skills?

I turn to the opportunities for an additional 30,000 mature age trainees. This is a figure, however, that reflects only 10 per cent of the number of students who have been turned away from TAFE under the Howard government because of its cuts. These 300,000 students included some mature age workers as well as young Australians, all of whom want to make a contribution to our nation and improve their life opportunities. The package last week included nothing to help youth access apprenticeships, yet almost two-thirds of Australian apprentices are under the age of 25. There were no financial incentives for them to complete their training or courses. A report released into Australia’s TAFE system found that cost is a major deterrent to some people accessing TAFE courses. It then referred to the drop-out rate of 40 per cent because of those associated issues.

Alternatively, the opposition’s blueprint goes a long way to addressing the skills crisis. It refers to the proper creation of a skills account. It refers to completion payments and trying to assist apprentices—where some employers do not assist—with the cost of TAFE. Traditional trades underpin the Australian economy. Both domestic and international visitors in the tourism industry, for example, depend on a quality service delivered by well-trained people. Basic qualifications have to be the order of the day, as are experience, attitude and a willingness to decasualise industries such as tourism and hospitality to actually bring a greater sense of permanency back to the workforce.

It is about time the government did something serious about reviewing, industry by industry, the periods of apprenticeship training on a competency basis and addressing the problems that some apprentices face trying to live on the low apprenticeship rates that exist in Australia.

The tourism industry, as I have said, is an example of serious skill shortages, especially in small business and regional and rural based operations that are suffering—and those businesses are very important to the Australian community. I refer to a submission by Tourism Alliance Victoria to the House of Representatives Standing Committee on Employment, Workplace Relations and Workforce Participation inquiry into workforce challenges in the Australian tourism sector. It highlighted a case study that focused on a small tourism business in the west Victorian town of Pomonal, near the Grampians. It detailed that the single biggest block to business expansion was staffing—another example of where we are losing business because we do not have skilled workers.

Today, the number of vacancies on Australian Job Search stands at 71,036; the food, hospitality and tourism sector accounted for nearly 13 per cent of those vacancies. A shortage of labour is the last thing the local industry needs, after five years of external shocks such as September 11, Bali, the threat of terrorism and the SARS crisis in Asia.

So the opposition simply say: it is about time the Australian government, led by the Prime Minister, John Howard, actually did more on the trades front. We need a productive Australia. We need a nation that is prepared to invest in education and skills training rather than regarding them as a cost. The budget process for the last decade has actually been very easy. There has been money available for these decisions. You have not had to find the savings. It was a question of choice. Cuts in TAFE expenditure and a failure to do something seriously on the apprenticeship front are now seriously hampering Australia’s economic future.

I say in conclusion that the skills package is a start. It is long overdue, it is not enough and it lacks real commitment to some of the other serious work that is required, such as shortening apprenticeship periods of training, based on a proper accreditation process, to guarantee that sooner rather than later we get the tradespeople in the field. We can therefore secure investment and guarantee Australia’s economic future. I commend to the House the opposition’s blueprint on skills training, because it is a more focused, practical endeavour to do something about the skills crisis. (Time expired)

Debated adjourned.