Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am delighted to speak in support of the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 because this is another element showing the success of the Australian government’s Australian technical colleges program, a program which was promised during the last election campaign. This program not only has met the expectations created in that promise but has now exceeded those expectations in every possible way. Originally there were to be 24 colleges, with $343 million allocated over four years. That was the figure promised during that election campaign. With this legislation we will see further funding of almost $75 million. This will mean an expansion of the original program. The government found, through the community consultation process which it undertook in the early part of this parliamentary term, that the ambitions of local communities around Australia to have an Australian technical college were very strong indeed.

The Australian Labor Party have fought this tooth and nail in every possible way. Labor members come in here, one after another, and say, ‘We are quite in favour of any additional funding to education,’ but it is an iron fist inside a velvet glove. The Labor Party, through the state governments, through education unions around this country and even in members’ utterances in this place, have shown complete contempt for local communities around this nation.

Twenty-four original localities were identified, 25 colleges were eventually announced and a further three were announced in the budget, to expand the program to a total of 27 regions around this country. This means that, while the Australian Labor Party may do all they can to try to prevent this program from occurring, communities right across the nation are very much in favour of the idea of working with the Australian government in this way.

The thing the Labor Party does not get about the Australian technical colleges program is that it is all about trust. It is all about (1) a very clear statement from the Australian government that additional resources are available and (2) local communities being trusted to spend the money in a way that works for them.

There is a big, glaring misunderstanding that is inspired by Labor’s first point of duty, which is to whatever the union movement demands, not to the local communities that Labor members are meant to serve and that they are elected to serve. It is not always understood that the people in local communities around the country that support Labor candidates do not end up with a local member: all they end up with in this place is a delegate from the union movement. It is a great pity that so many communities do not get the kind of service that they should from their local members. Why is it that local members have come into this chamber and argued against a program which provides additional resources to fund the educational opportunities of year 11 and 12 students? Why is it that Labor members, one after another, get up and demand that the moneys simply go to state governments, in spite of the fact that people did not trust state governments to deliver, particularly on core services such as education, police and hospitals?

A third of the money that goes from the Australian government to state governments in education resources gets lost in the bureaucracy of those state governments. They will spend it on card-carrying members of the Labor Party who are in the bureaucracy, ahead of resourcing the area it should go to—that is, the teacher-student equation. I see students in the gallery here today. I am not sure what school they are from, but the key thing that they need to know is that this side—the Liberal-National parties side of this chamber—believe that the No. 1 priority when it comes to education spending is the relationship between professional educators or teachers and their students.

What the government has done during this term is find a number of new ways to resource people directly, to cut the very expensive middleman out of the equation. By funding directly local community consortia through the Australian technical colleges program, we are able to see more people engaged in school based apprenticeships and employment opportunities, earning while they learn. We see less money spent on paying big dollars to bureaucrats and education head officers, all of whom have to have a membership card from the Labor Party to be able to advance into those positions. I have yet to be proved wrong on that claim on the many occasions that I have made it. We have prioritised ahead of anything else the advancement of local students and their opportunities to do so.

What the Australian technical colleges program has done is re-establish the status of the nation-building skills at the heart of the important trades that are being targeted by this agenda. We have reversed the decline which the Australian Labor Party presided over. There were just 30,000 people in training when we came to office; there are now 400,000. The so-called ‘workers party’ forgot about the workers and about promoting the opportunity for young people to go into trades. They talked the trades down and, instead, promoted non-productive elements in society ahead of the trades. They forgot that, if you do not have people with electrical, plumbing, carpentry and motor mechanics skills, nothing in Australia can work. This side, however, have understood clearly that the challenge for Australia’s workforce base is to make sure that it is competent and capable and that there is prestige attached to the core skills which underpin the way in which our society operates.

We are the ones who stood for the workers. We are the ones who promoted the value of the trades and have made sure that tradespeople and other people in the workforce have been able to enjoy a pay rise in the order of 20 per cent over the last decade. With those opposite, it was at minus two per cent—they went backwards.

The Australian technical colleges bill fits into a broader picture of the way in which Australia operates today versus the way it did when Labor were last in office. It also provides real proof of the way in which we are gearing up for the long-term, sustainable good of Australia and championing the way young people should be rewarded for the abilities they get. We are also about saying to the business community, ‘The best investment you can make in your business is in your people.’ That is not simply an investment in the trade skills to get them started in the business but also an investment in retraining them. The Australian technical colleges program very deliberately says this to the business community, who have bemoaned for years their absolute dissatisfaction with the way institutional trade training through the TAFEs has turned out apprentices who have a piece of paper but who do not necessarily have the real-world skills that they need. We have challenged the business community to put up or shut up, to get involved. That is why there is a very clear difference in the way that the Australian technical colleges program operates. It demands that a real employer chair the board of the community consortium and that the board be dominated by a simple majority of employers. What is absolutely vital is that the business community knows that there is a difference in the way this system operates, compared to others.

This system is also a fast track to the real outcomes of real trade apprenticeships because it means that young people can start a trade apprenticeship while they are actually at school, in years 11 and 12. The school based apprenticeship program was something that was announced a decade ago when David Kemp was the minister responsible. It was only the state of Queensland that grabbed hold of this in the early days, when former Senator Santoro was the Queensland minister for trade training, and Bob Quinn, the former Queensland Liberal Party leader, was the Queensland education minister. Those two gentlemen grabbed hold of school based apprenticeships and introduced them into Queensland; the Queensland government of today have kept them going. The point I make is that trade training while kids are doing years 11 and 12 studies is a very regular part of the Queensland school experience these days. It has also become a very regular part of the Victorian school experience.

Yet another way in which the Labor Party have fought the Australian technical colleges program tooth and nail is demonstrated by the way state governments have reacted. The union control of the New South Wales education system is legendary. Nothing works in New South Wales unless the New South Wales Teachers Federation say it is allowed to work. From their point of view, the Australian technical colleges program has to be defeated, and they are still doing all they can to defeat it in that state. It is a great pity that the biggest economy in the country offered no school based apprenticeships until this year. It was dragged kicking and screaming to this very sensible program, a program which has not caused the sky to fall in either in Queensland or in Victoria. The New South Wales government has this year finally begun to offer school based apprenticeships.

In New South Wales, when the technical colleges program was announced, it was a no-go zone, yet there were eight colleges announced there. The fact that local communities wanted to take on the New South Wales government meant that it was met with a response of complete resistance to the cause. ‘Who cares what local communities think?’ say Labor. They say: ‘We want complete, centralised control and union domination of the spending of money. We’ll decide who wins and who fails. As far as we’re concerned, anything that offers a sense of trust and direct connection between the Commonwealth and local communities can’t be supported.’ That has been the approach of Labor.

The Victorian government is a partner on the board of three of the six Australian technical colleges there. The Victorian government had a completely different attitude. We welcome the fact that the Victorian government did not stand in the way of the Australian technical colleges program. I believe that, in each case, the colleges are going very well and will continue to go from strength to strength.

The arrogance of the Queensland Labor government is breathtakingly obvious. We have introduced sanctions on countries like Fiji for far less than the discretions we have seen in the way in which the Queensland government has been operating in recent days. The idea of denying democracy and threatening to imprison anybody who wants to embark on the democratic path of checking with the people about local government amalgamations is absolutely breathtaking. With technical colleges, the Queensland government also said, ‘We’re not going to stand in your way, but don’t expect any cooperation.’ They robbed state government students of the chance to attend an Australian technical college. The Queensland government’s attitude was, ‘Our way or the highway.’ The arrogance of then education minister, Anna Bligh, now Deputy Premier or Premier-in-waiting, was breathtaking—matched only by that of the current incumbent, Rod Welford.

South Australia had no idea what to do. To the credit of the South Australian government, they did cooperate when the Commonwealth bailed them out over the Adelaide South technical college proposal to purchase a former high school site—and the work of the member for Kingston made a difference.

In the case of Western Australia, the then education minister, Ljiljanna Ravlich, was so bad that she had to be embarrassingly shuffled off to some other place. The Western Australian government refused to do anything. It has possibly the worst TAFE training system in Australia, yet the Western Australian government chose to do nothing but try and prevent the Australian technical colleges program. Tasmania became an active partner in the program, as did the Northern Territory.

I detail all of this based on my own personal, intimate knowledge about the early days, the formative months, the formative years, of the Australian technical colleges program. It is important to put on the record the inconsistency at best and the downright belligerence of the Australian Labor Party in doing all they could to stop this program. The alternative could have been a far stronger environment for the Australian technical colleges program. All we needed was the states to simply say, ‘We’ll trust local communities; we’ll let local communities make a decision.’ Instead, a central politburo style of education planning that says, ‘If we didn’t come up with the idea it can’t be any good’ seemed to prevail.

Even the Department of Education, Science and Training did not well understand what the Australian technical colleges program was all about in the early days. I suspect that some of the early technical colleges announcements were not as well founded as they are today. There was a sense of working with people, based on the surface statements of people like those in the South Coast of New South Wales and Wollongong consortium, which was beset with people from the education union, the TAFE union, who were doing all they could to prevent that particular technical college from growing in the way the community would have liked it to do. DEST advised the then minister on the best course to follow, and DEST’s advice was ambitious at the very least. The point is that education officials these days have a far clearer understanding than they did early on. In their defence, even though my criticism will probably have hurt them, it was brave new world stuff we were embarking upon.

A direct relationship between the Commonwealth and local communities is something we need to foster—a direct relationship built around a sense of trust. Furnishing resources to meet an ambition of a local community to give kids in those areas an opportunity is something that is worth while. What I find extraordinary is that member after member opposite will get up and say, ‘No, just give the money to the states.’ To do that would be to maintain a system that we already know has failed—a system that, in the case of six of the eight jurisdictions in this country, does not want to give people an opportunity to start a real certificate III plus apprenticeship in the trades.

It is only Queensland and Victoria that have their hearts in it. Western Australia, South Australia, Tasmania and New South Wales were dragged kicking and screaming to the table when it came to school based apprenticeships. How on earth are you going to give kids the power today to make the decisions for their tomorrow? How are you going to give them the right signals unless you engage with them early? The pressure now is not to keep kids in a holding pattern just so that their bottoms are on seats in nice neat rows in schools around this country and so that the education officials at head offices in all the different states and the Education Union officials in their little lofty ideals of centralised control are well satisfied that all is good in the kingdom of God. Why on earth they are not allowing kids their full range of opportunities as a given is beyond this particular member of parliament. Why is it that the circumstance and convenience of bureaucracy is more important than opportunities for young people?

The Australian technical colleges program is about saying to young people who have the ambition and the skills that, if they can meet and work with the employers who also have the ambition to grow their business by investing in people, that will produce great fruit. It will be about saying to young people at the age of 15: ‘If you have the mental capacity, the physical capacity and the ambition to learn a trade, society is going to back you. Society will not only back you but nurture you and pay you to earn while you learn, to start your apprenticeship while you are at school, to finish your years 11 and 12 academic studies and, at the same time, complete the early parts of your trade training requirements. It means that, by the time you have finished year 12, you have not only money in the bank, if you have saved it and you have been sensible, but also a credential that allows you to go on to further study at university if that is what you choose. It means you have work experience in the real world with an employer who wants to nurture you on to further trade training and it means that you can complete your overall trade competencies in a faster way than the system currently demands of you.’ It is wrong that our children are being used as some sort of fodder to maintain an education system that does not want to really educate them but just wants to keep the funds flowing through to employ people—bureaucracy—and at the end of it we might even pay our teachers some of the money they are worth.

I am very much in favour of the additional resources that are voted in this bill today. Apart from everything else, one of the three new Australian technical colleges will be on the south side of Brisbane. I am optimistic that the announcement will be made that the Education City consortia based on Springfield—and the construction training centre at Salisbury—will be a very positive thing for young people in my area. They are very used to doing school based apprenticeships through the various great state and non-government schools in my area, but the opportunity will also come their way for them to earn while they learn through a school based apprenticeship at the Australian Technical College Brisbane South. The money voted in this bill will make all of that possible. On that basis, I greatly commend this bill to the House.

Kim Wilkie (Swan, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007. This bill amends the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Act 2005 to provide funding for three additional Australian technical colleges announced in the 2007-08 budget to be located in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney. I say to the honourable member for Moreton, who has taken off out of the chamber as we speak, that his mindless drivel on the TAFEs in Western Australia is absolutely incorrect. We have some incredible facilities, some of them located in Swan, which I will talk about during my contribution.

Many of us here today will recall the coalition’s campaign launch in the last election in Brisbane when the Prime Minister announced what he described as the centrepiece of the coalition’s response to the skills crisis. In fact, on that day, 26 September 2004, the Prime Minister said that this centrepiece would revolutionise vocational education training throughout Australia. This centrepiece was the establishment of the Australian technical colleges, or ATCs. Ever since that day, the Australian technical colleges have stood as a testament to the way this government develops bad policy for political purposes, no matter what the cost or how stupid the idea.

While I welcome the additional expenditure in the critical area of vocational education and training, I do not believe that the establishment of the Australian technical colleges was a sensible choice for responding to the national skills crisis that now threatens the viability of our economy. Had the money that has been wasted on this initiative been allocated to existing TAFEs, the system would have worked much better and many young people would have already received the training that they need, which could have alleviated the current skills crisis.

The Australian technical colleges are simply a quick political fix to a policy problem of this government’s own making. I say a ‘political fix’ because from the very beginning the Australian technical colleges initiative has been a farce and it has done precious little to address Australia’s growing crisis in skilled labour—and those who sit opposite know it. In this government’s new model of uncooperative and antagonistic federalism, this policy accords well with those wishing to marginalise the power of the states. But, out there in the real world of critical skills shortages, where employers simply cannot find the trained workers they so desperately need, this policy has been nothing short of a failure. According to the government’s own figures, over the next five years Australia has a projected shortfall of more than 200,000 skilled workers. But the Australian technical colleges are expected to produce only 10,000 graduates by 2010. That is little more than a drop in the ocean.

The growing shortage of skilled workers in Australia undoubtedly represents one of the greatest policy failures of the Howard government’s 11 years in office. As members know, the Reserve Bank has repeatedly warned that the skills crisis that has developed under this government is a major constraint on economic growth and is causing inflationary pressure; therefore, pushing up interest rates. This government’s failure to invest in skills is part of the reason that interest rates are being forced up. This is being done by the mob that says it is keeping interest rates at a record low level. This government is creating the environment that is driving up interest rates.

Like me, most people would have presumed that this government would implement practical measures to end this crippling shortage of skilled workers. But, no, rather than choosing the common-sense option and allocating additional funds to increase the size and scope of existing vocational infrastructure, this government chose to bypass the TAFE sector—run by those nasty little state governments!—and to establish its own colleges, 90 per cent of which just happen to be in coalition or marginal seats.

I have an idea that tomorrow, when the government makes the announcement about where the colleges will be established in Perth, lo and behold, there will be a college in the northern suburbs with two campuses, and I am pretty sure that one of them will be in the electorate of Cowan—which the coalition thinks it might have a chance of picking up—and the other will be in the electorate of Hasluck, where it knows its member is under pressure. I also believe that it will duplicate a service provided by Midland TAFE by establishing a facility there. That is a total waste of money and political pork-barrelling. If the government were genuinely interested in addressing our chronic skills shortage, the funds that have been allocated to these colleges would have been spent on existing vocational education programs and more Australians could have already been beneficiaries of new training and work opportunities.

TAFE is the major provider of vocational education and training in Australia. With more than 1.2 million students and accounting for 85 per cent of all training, the TAFE system is Australia’s provider of choice in vocational training. In my electorate of Swan, for example, we have the aptly named Swan TAFE, which has campuses at Bentley and Carlisle that provide excellent courses in hospitality, baking, refrigeration, business studies, engineering, occupational health and safety, health sciences, nursing, vet nursing and animal studies. Swan TAFE also has campuses in Balga, Thornleigh and Midland. These campuses have excellent reputations for the high standard of training that they provide and the outcomes they have achieved. Far from what the member for Moreton has been drivelling on about, these TAFEs provide excellent services to the people of Western Australia.

However, rather than strengthening our existing system of vocational training, in conforming to its motto of never letting bad policy outcomes stand in the way of its narrow ideological agenda, the Howard government chose to undermine it. Over the past decade the Howard government has slashed investment in vocational education and training. By decreasing Commonwealth allocations for vocational education by 13 per cent between 1997 and 2000, and increasing it by a paltry one per cent from 2000 to 2004, this government has failed grossly to provide the necessary funding to redress our growing skills shortages. In terms of revenue expenditure, vocational education in Australia has fallen behind other education sectors in both aggregate terms and on a per student basis, despite it being the area that bears the greatest responsibility for the vocational training of our workforce. The result has been a public system starved of cash. Students and staff suffer with reduced course durations, increased use of casual staff and fewer course offerings.

Due to this government’s utter neglect of vocational education and training, each year more than 34,000 applicants are turned away from TAFE because there simply are not enough places. However, while the TAFE system has suffered from numerable cutbacks under this government, more than $500 million has been allocated to the establishment of the Australian technical colleges. Talk about robbing Peter to pay Paul. For a government that likes to talk up the benefits of eradicating duplication and waste between the state and federal levels of government, that is a strange policy decision indeed. Creating an entirely separate layer of schooling funded and administered directly by the Commonwealth simply does not make public policy administration or financial sense.

The member for Moreton talked about all the state bureaucrats who would get the additional money if it were allocated, and said that the government could not do that. But it has created its own system with its own level of bureaucracy. How stupid is that? It has duplicated the existing system. In fact, little about the Australia technical colleges stacks up in terms of practicality. In effect, the Australian technical colleges are Commonwealth run secondary schools, but the Commonwealth has no history or expertise in establishing or running stand-alone secondary schools.

Instead of going through the established channels of the TAFE system, this government has embarked upon a costly and unnecessary project that will duplicate the vocational education and training infrastructure that exists elsewhere in the country. The inherent inefficiency of this system is plain to see. The cost to taxpayers of the 21 technical colleges that have been established—including capital set-up costs—averages out at nearly $175,000 per student. For that amount of money the government might as well have loaded the students onto a couple of jumbos and flown them to Harvard to learn their plumbing and carpentry skills. It is an absolute waste. One can only imagine what kind of facilities our TAFE system would have if each of its 1.2 million students were allocated anywhere near the level of per student funding that the government’s technical colleges receive.

Even with that level of funding, the ATCs are still struggling to find students. While only two met their target enrolments for 2007, some are operating at less than half their capacity. The Australian Technical College East Melbourne fell short of its enrolment target of 180 by a staggering 94 places. Some of these colleges must be getting used to operating under their full capacity by now. As I am sure many members recall, the Australian technical colleges got off to something of a slow and rather embarrassing start. For example, for some time the Australian Technical College Gladstone had only one student enrolled. I am sure that student would have received a very good education. Despite placements in apprenticeships being one of the primary features of the technical colleges, many have struggled to find placements for students.

Most damning of all, however, is that these colleges, which were specifically set up to provide skills and training to our young people, are having to outsource much of their work back to the TAFE system or other registered training organisations. In Victoria alone, five out of the six colleges built have had to outsource their training functions to TAFE—the very same system that has seen its funding slashed by this government over the past 11 years and the very same TAFEs which the federal government said were inefficient and which it used as justification for the establishment of the Australian technical colleges. What a debacle! Put simply, Australian technical colleges have been an expensive and unnecessary waste of Australian taxpayers’ money and they will do little to help end the growing shortages of skills in this nation. They have caused needless duplication between the state and federal layers of government and have failed to offer anything more than a token bandaid solution to the nation’s growing skills crisis. Yet, according to the Minister for Vocational and Further Education, the colleges are ‘going gangbusters’ and ‘working their socks off’. Once again, a Howard government minister either is seriously misleading the public about the abysmal state of one of the government’s policies, or simply has no idea of what he is talking about. I suspect it is probably a little bit of both.

The truth of the matter is that an independent expert report by the Australian National Audit Office has heavily criticised the Howard government’s Australian technical colleges, finding that insufficient attention has been paid to state and territory governments—we know that; they are trying to blame them for everything, so they are not going to work with them. It found that tenders for nearly half of the colleges were awarded based on only one or two applications, that enrolments had been overestimated, that initial tender applications were weak and inadequate and that there was little choice among Australian technical college applicants. The report confirmed that the Howard government’s Australian technical colleges were nothing more than a cynical political response to a critical policy challenge.

Unlike the government, Labor has a real plan to address the chronic skills shortages in this country. If Australia is to create a high-skilled workforce and an economically secure future, we need nothing short of a revolution in vocational training and education. In order to attract and train the estimated 200,000 skilled tradespeople needed over the next five years, Australia needs a truly national approach, not a ridiculous symbolic commitment for only a small number of students. Committed to working in partnership with the states—no matter which party holds office in those states—Labor has a cooperative approach to addressing the nation’s growing skills crisis that aims for outcomes and not the narrow ideological interests pursued by this government. We will work with the states and territories to ensure effective training policies and to ensure that funds are allocated to those learning institutions that are capable of delivering the best educational and training outcomes.

According to the Chairman of the Productivity Commission, Gary Banks, one of the best opportunities for improving productivity rates in Australia lies in ‘raising the performance and accessibility of our education and training systems’. Not only is a higher level of investment in education necessary for higher productivity growth but making sure that investment in education is used efficiently and effectively is necessary as well. Australia must therefore focus its resources on the areas of maximum impact, such as TAFEs and on-the-job training places and trade places. The first step, however, is to increase the emphasis and quality of vocational training opportunities in our secondary schools.

To this end, Labor has announced a 10-year, $2.5 billion trades training centres plan targeted at the 1.2 million students in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 in all of Australia’s 2,650 secondary schools. Designed to create a stimulating educational and training environment that prepares young people for vocational occupations and encourages them to remain in school by making studying in trades more attractive to students and more relevant to industry, Labor’s trades training centres plan is a practical and effective means for encouraging a greater number of students to pursue skilled, vocational career paths.

In my home state of Western Australia—the state that is responsible for much of the nation’s current prosperity—Labor will spend $284 million to build state-of-the-art training centres, ensuring that our booming economy is not stalled by a lack of qualified workers. In addition, Labor will also devote $84 million as part of its trades training centres plan to ensure that students involved in trades training receive at least one day a week of on-the-job training for 20 weeks a year.

As well as improving vocational and trades training in secondary schools, Labor also plans to introduce a Job Ready Certificate for all vocational education and training. Obtained through on-the-job training placements, the Job Ready Certificate will assess the job readiness of secondary school students engaged in trades and other areas of vocational education and training, providing employers with a tangible reference, including whether students are capable and ready to work. Presently, there is no such requirement for education and training providers to formally issue a statement of employability skills, despite the fact that there have been repeated calls from industry groups for their introduction.

These initiatives will enable a Labor government to address Australia’s skills shortage in a meaningful and effective way, unlike the failed technical colleges program of this tired and out-of-touch government. While Labor will not close down any of this government’s expensive and inefficient technical colleges, we will work out the best way of folding their management back into the state based educational system. The states have had a longstanding responsibility in this area, and simply trying to arrogantly bypass them, as this government has done, will only result in more bad policy outcomes.

In closing: Labor is not opposing—and I am not opposing—the appropriation of funds for the three additional technical colleges provided for in this bill. Nor will we seek to close any of the existing colleges upon assuming office. We will, however, consistently remind the government of its utter failure to address the growing skills crisis and its appalling neglect of vocational training and infrastructure over the past 11 years. The longer that this government clings to the belief that a few technical colleges can end the skills crisis or make up for its 11 years of neglect in vocational education and training, the greater the damage this government will do to the prospects of our children and our economy. Only a federal Labor government can fix this disaster brought upon our country by the mismanagement of education and training by this lot opposite.

Ken Ticehurst (Dobell, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We have heard it all. Technical trade schools used to be around when I was going to school. We had Granville Technical College. We had lots of technical colleges all across Sydney. Who closed them down? State Labor governments. And now they come back, saying that they are going to reintroduce them. Why are they going to reintroduce them? Because we have had the Australian technical colleges. The Australian technical colleges are already an outstanding success throughout Australia. The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 aims to further ensure their continued success into the future.

This bill will increase the total funding for the ATCs initiative from $456 million to $530 million over the period of 2005 to 2011, to support the establishment and operation of a further three Australian technical colleges announced in the recent budget. This brings the total number of colleges to 28, spread over 45 campuses in areas of Australia with high numbers of young people and areas experiencing skill shortages. Of these 28 technical colleges, currently 21 are operating, with four more colleges to commence in 2008.

The three new colleges which are part of this bill will open no later than 2009. The level of funding available to support the establishment of these colleges will ensure that they are resourced to provide high levels of support to both students and employers who engage students as school based apprentices. The three new ATCs will be established in greater Penrith, northern Perth and southern Brisbane and are in addition to the current 25 colleges, one of which will be located in the Dobell electorate, which was only recently announced by the Minister for Vocational and Further Education, me and the member for Robertson. Just last week, $16 million of funding was assigned to this particular project, and students will be enrolling next year. This announcement is great news for the people of the Central Coast and puts the region at the forefront of the delivery of vocational and technical education for students in years 11 and 12. The technical college on the Central Coast is one of the 25 across Australia and it is being established where skills needs are high and we have a high youth population and a strong industry base. These are the parameters that define where the colleges go. These colleges will cater for local years 11 and 12, and students who wish to obtain their year 12 certificate can start an apprenticeship whilst still at school.

Eighteen hundred students across Australia are already benefiting from being able to do year 11 and obtain their year 12 school certificate. Eight thousand four hundred students are expected to be attending these colleges once they are fully operational in 2009. These students will finish their two years at the ATCs having completed a high school education and having already undertaken two years of training in their vocational career of choice. The courses are developed with industry input to ensure that the training offered will be relevant to local needs.

Last week, the member for Perth accused the Howard government of deliberately neglecting TAFE and instead funding a duplicate vocational training system. However, we heard the member for Swan say they will keep them. If we look at the member for Perth’s speech, he said that the Howard government is attacking states and territories in an area that has traditionally been their responsibility. Of course education has been their responsibility, but where they fail we have to come in and prop them up, as we do in so many other areas across this country.

Australian technical colleges are designed to adapt quickly to address regional needs directly through the input of local industry. There also seems to be deliberate confusion on the part of the New South Wales government. It claims that Australian technical colleges are competitors with TAFE. This is not the case. The ATCs are for year 11 and 12 students to complete their secondary education at the same time as starting an apprenticeship, joining the workforce and earning some money. TAFE on the other hand provides more for postsecondary students or more advanced certificates and diplomas. That was the case for me. I started my working life as an apprentice electrical fitter. I did the electrical engineering certificate at Granville tech for three nights and one afternoon a week for about four years and then went on to do postcertificate engineering subjects as well. The approach taken by the ATCs is to make sure that when kids come out of school they can move into a trade course. If they want to go on and do further TAFE training at an engineering level, they can do that. Then they could progress through to university.

In fact, at the Ourimbah campus those facilities are available for students to do that. The Central Coast manufacturers are the local consortia providing the technical college. They are the people who know what is needed by local industry. Many of the technical colleges have partnered with TAFE to assist with the provision of technical training, and that is a logical step. TAFEs have been around for many years in Gosford and Wyong and they have experienced teachers. I recently visited a TAFE and told the teachers they need to look at the ATCs as being a primer for TAFE. They tell me that students have to have remedial numeracy and literacy teaching. They have to teach them to read and write and do arithmetic before they can even do a trade course. The ATCs will put an end to that. Parents and grandparents on the Central Coast are pleased that their children will soon have greater choice, another option, to complete their high school education. The Central Coast ATC will operate as a business. They will be operating for 48 weeks of the year, just like a business. It is not the school based idea, where they have semesters and heaps of holidays; they will start off in a business environment.

As well, the colleges provide a dedicated focus on technical training while ensuring students get the literacy and numeracy skills of a year 12 certificate. Labor likes to talk about encouraging students to complete year 12. When it comes to the crunch, it is nothing but empty rhetoric. We see so many kids coming out of high school with numeracy and literacy issues. It is time for Labor to put students’ interests first and stop their practice of the last 30 years in talking down the trades. We need to reach a point where a high-quality technical education is as valued as a university degree.

Even though all of the states have closed down dedicated technical schools, we are pleased that most have subsequently decided to follow the Howard government lead and reintroduce technical schools and colleges. They are set up to cater especially for students who have strong technical and creative talents, and they are a huge success due to the quality of the facilities and teaching staff and the very close guidance and involvement of industry. This is the model for the ATCs that is working very well. They have also restored links with industry and restored pride and prestige in technical training so that a high-quality technical education is as prized as a university degree. The unique set-up of the ATCs gives local students the chance to undertake trade training and academic subjects and is also a fantastic opportunity for our region. It is also a great opportunity for local employers in the region to work with education providers to establish a college that responds directly to the needs of local industry.

Students at the Central Coast college will be offered trade training in engineering, construction, electro-technology, automotive and commercial cookery. When students at this technical college finish year 12 they will be one-third of the way through an apprenticeship, they will have completed the year 12 certificate, they will have worked on state-of-the-art equipment and they will have had two years of real experience in the workplace, earning as they learn. Many local students will benefit from this ATC over the next three years. The new technical school will follow the success of the 21 colleges already operating around Australia.

The recent signing of the funding agreement for the Central Coast is an excellent demonstration of the partnership between industry, educators and training providers to ensure that young people in the Central Coast region are given training relevant to local needs. The establishment of the college has been warmly welcomed by local communities, businesses and industry and this is reflected in the industry representation on the governing board.

The establishment of the college has been fully supported locally, as seen through association members, including Albany International, Kitchens of Sarah Lee, ADC Krone, Gibbens Industries, Masterfoods, Adhesive Research, Gosfern, Thermit and Pacific Labels. These industries are further supported by the involvement of Australian Business Ltd, the Master Builders Association, the NRMA, the Gosford District Chamber of Commerce and Industry and others in the area. They have all either taken part on the interim board or lent their valuable support to achieve this fantastic result.

It is a shame, however, that the New South Wales state Labor government have once again demonstrated their complete disregard and ignorance towards meeting the needs of the Central Coast and local residents. We have had so much opposition in the past few years to establishing this technical college. The state education minister, John Della Bosca, referred to it as a ‘failed experiment’. However, they were going to be involved in providing the educational component for the Central Coast ATC. Of course, that was in the run-up to the last election in March. Then they decided in Macquarie Street to overrule the memorandum of understanding that was provided by the Central Coast department of education. The week before the March election they decided they would set up technical colleges at Wyong and Gosford. What has happened since? Very little. What are they going to do? Not much at all. They had an information session a week or so ago. They are now talking about providing technical training for only two areas of interest in the area. Mrs Della Bosca, who is Belinda Neal of course, is running as the federal candidate for Robertson. She was parachuted in, like the other two Central Coast union heavyweights that are running for election to the federal parliament. She was saying that the Howard government had failed to establish the college. But had she asked her husband she would have been informed that the stalling of the Central Coast ATC was purely the business of the state government and their total intransigence. Just before the recent election they had their spoke in the wheel and we have not seen much else from them.

It is quite disappointing that the New South Wales state government is too busy playing political games to recognise the importance of this fantastic educational opportunity in giving the young people of my electorate the choice to study at an ATC and get a head start in their working lives. Instead, it means that local young people on the Central Coast are being denied an opportunity to study a trade, while people in other parts of New South Wales are allowed to make a choice. In fact, the early ATCs in New South Wales were established using the Catholic education component. As the member for Moreton said earlier, New South Wales and Western Australian fought the introduction of these ATCs all the way. However, there was a decent response and good cooperation in Victoria—and also in Queensland, I believe. It is also disappointing for the local businesses that are working as a team to establish a college that will respond directly to industry needs led by the hardworking Central Coast Manufacturers Association. They will be pleased that after all these years it will finally start.

The abolition of technical colleges by the states has meant that over the past few decades our young people have lacked training skills and pathways. The price we have paid is the current severe skilled trade shortages we are experiencing in many of our key industries. As a community we made a big mistake, turning our back on technical education, as we closed dedicated technical high schools and treated vocational training as a second-class career. This was all done under state Labor governments. General high schools in Australia provide an excellent general education, but they have a strong academic focus. It is important that students with strong technical or trade skills are given the opportunity to develop these special talents, while also being given the opportunity to obtain their year 12 certificate. In 2004 the Howard government introduced the ATC program in response to the greatest mistake made in education over the last 30 years. These 28 Australian technical colleges are designed to elevate the status of technical education and provide dedicated technical and vocational training for students with these wonderful talents.

Despite the legislation only passing parliament in 2005, the initiative has gone from idea to reality in a remarkably short space of time, with 21 ATCs currently operating at 33 campuses—all operating within 18 months of the legislation being approved. A number of states, including Victoria, New South Wales, South Australia, Tasmania and the ACT have followed the lead of the Howard government and have established similar facilities. It is estimated that by 2009, with the combined commitments of the states and the Howard government, there will be around 70 technical schools around Australia with enrolments of between 25,000 and 35,000 young Australians. This will make a serious contribution to the skilled workforce that Australia will need for the future.

Let us look at Labor’s problem with the ATCs. The system that operates at these schools is much like that of private schools. The teachers will be on AWAs—that dreaded process that the Labor Party hate. They want to destroy them. The principals will have choice in employing teachers. Teachers will be paid on performance. And, of course, they will not need the union bosses; they will not need the union intransigence to cause the problems that we see in schools. Members opposite have spoken about the duplication of schools.

Recently, on the Central Coast, the New South Wales minister for education, John Della Bosca, threatened public school principals when they wanted to attend a meeting in my office with the federal Minister for Education, Science and Training, Julie Bishop. Initially, we were going to hold a forum of teachers, from across the 55 schools on the Central Coast, at a public school. The night before, we got a message to say, ‘No, you can’t hold a forum in a public school,’ so we moved it to my office. The next morning, my staff rang around and invited the teachers to attend a meeting in my office. By midday, while we were touring the area with the minister, teachers were ringing in and apologising, saying that they had been leaned on by John Della Bosca. They were threatened, so they could not come to my office and meet with the federal minister for education.

This is the Labor approach of typical union bullying—threatening teachers so that they could not come and meet with the federal education minister. And this is the bloke who then wants to say, ‘The ATCs are a failed experiment.’ Of course, before the state election, they decided: ‘Technical colleges look like they’re going to be popular, so we’d better bring them back on. We’d better say that we’re going to have a technical college in Wyong and Gosford.’ It is typical of the rhetoric we hear from the other side.

It is just like the broadband proposal, with the whole deal involving bringing back the union heavyweights. They want to have broadband run partly by government and partly by private enterprise. Why? Because, as is the case with a lot of the utility businesses, they can demand that these employees be union members. We see it right across the country, with union heavyweights coming in. They have even displaced some members on the other side. The member for Blaxland, who knows a bit about communications, got the chop so that another union boss could be brought in. In my area, there is a blow-in from Victoria. They could not find enough seats down there; they had flicked too many of the sitting members, so Greg Combet is coming up north, to the seat adjoining my electorate. They could not find a seat for him in Victoria, so they deny Labor members on the Central Coast the opportunity to select their candidate, and they get told who the candidate is going to be.

This is the sort of thing we can expect from Labor. We can see why they are vehemently opposed to these ATCs—because they do not meet the aims of the union bosses. That is the issue with them. We hear all of this claptrap about skills shortages. Those shortages were created under state Labor governments. It started when they closed down technical colleges. This discouraged businesses from employing apprentices. In the time that I did my trade, there were a number of companies who used to be the leaders in taking on apprentices. They made it so much more difficult for employers to do that that this government decided to use employers in the setting up of technical schools, so that in each region they can decide what trades need to be supported. In Dobell, the Central Coast manufacturers are the group that will be running the ATC in that area. I will give them every encouragement to continue what they are doing. I am very pleased to support this bill.

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 provides additional funding for three more Australian technical colleges in line with measures the government announced in the 2007 budget. This bill commits an extra $74.7 million over the next four years to build three additional Australian technical colleges that will cater for approximately 900 students.

Tackling Australia’s worsening skills crisis and investing in quality education and training for young Australians is about securing Australia’s future prosperity and ensuring that young people in this country have the best opportunities when it comes to building their own future and choosing their own individual career paths. Making sure that we get the policy right in these areas should be one of our highest priorities in this place, and that is why I am keen to speak in the debate on this bill.

I also want to pick up some of the comments that the member for Dobell made. Skills shortages and the need to provide young people with an opportunity in this area are very important. I take the matter very seriously; I know my colleagues on this side of the House take it very seriously. It is a myth that government members like to perpetuate in this place that the Australian Labor Party talks down trades and has a very low opinion of young people who choose a profession in the trades. That is absolute nonsense and it is untrue. We on this side of the House are supportive of all the choices that young people make. If they choose to pursue a career in the trades, we will provide whatever support we can to ensure that they get the best-quality opportunities to pursue such a career.

By the government’s own reckoning, Australia faces a shortage of 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years. The fact that this shortfall of 200,000 skilled workers exists shows the extent of the Howard government’s failure when it comes to investing in vocational education and training in this country. Skilling up the Australian workforce is absolutely crucial if we want to see Australia continue to grow and prosper, and if we want to make sure that Australia is ready to meet the many challenges that inevitably lie ahead in today’s very fast changing world. This figure of 200,000 skilled workers also highlights the mammoth task ahead of us in reversing Australia’s skills shortage.

Today we are debating the merits of the Howard government’s proposed solution to Australia’s skills crisis. This solution comes in the form of Australian technical colleges—an initiative that the Howard government first introduced during the 2004 federal election. Since then, the government has portrayed Australian technical colleges as if cumulatively they were the golden goose, destined to solve all our problems when it comes to Australia’s worsening skills crisis. Indeed, we again heard this very same message from the federal Treasurer during this year’s federal budget. The key question here is whether Australian technical colleges will actually solve Australia’s skills crisis.

Revisiting that figure of 200,000 additional skilled workers needed in Australia over the next five years, the government estimates that Australian technical colleges will produce no more than 10,000 new graduates by 2010. Ten thousand new graduates by 2010 is a far cry from the 200,000 skilled workers Australia is in desperate need of now. By any stretch of the imagination, this does not even come close to solving Australia’s skills crisis, and I doubt that it will be seen as a real solution to Australia’s skills crisis by those living in my electorate of Calwell. So much for the goose laying the golden egg; rather, Australian technical colleges are more about providing the Howard government with leverage to pretend that they are addressing Australia’s skills crisis than they are about solving the problems we face.

The Howard government’s hope is that somehow we will all forget this shortfall of 190,000 skilled workers in Australia if they incessantly talk up their Australian technical colleges every time someone utters the words ‘skills crisis’. Given the seriousness of the crisis that Australia now faces, I doubt very much whether this is going to happen, for this is a skills crisis that not only affects the future competitiveness of Australia; it also robs young Australians of work opportunities, because the government have neglected to invest in their education and training.

The government not only lacks a solution to Australia’s worsening skills crisis; it is largely responsible for creating it in the first place. TAFE colleges have long been one of the key providers of vocational education and training in Australia, and they have long played a central role in skilling up Australia’s future workforce. But the Howard government in its wisdom—or lack of wisdom—has decided to slash federal government funding to TAFE in Australia.

Since 1997 Commonwealth funding for TAFE has decreased by approximately 26 per cent and the amount of government funding per student has also fallen dramatically. As a direct consequence, TAFE colleges have been forced to turn away over 325,000 potential students—that is, 325,000 potential skilled workers. It is estimated that in one year up to 40,000 Australians who apply for TAFE will miss out on a place in vocational education and training or VET, in part due to government funding cuts.

So is it any wonder that Australia faces a skills crisis of the magnitude we see today, given the current record of this government? The Howard government’s underfunding of education in Australia is not just peculiar to TAFE. Rather, its policy of neglecting education is something that you will find across the board. This is a government that has shown little interest in and little regard for the needs and interests of young Australians when it comes to education and the opportunities it provides. That is why government spending on education has fallen by seven per cent under the Howard government, at the same time that it has increased by 48 per cent in other developed countries over the last decade. Similarly, that is also why higher education spending per student has gone up on average by six per cent in these same countries, while in Australia it has fallen by six per cent. Under John Howard’s watch, Australia has tumbled to last place among developed countries when it comes to investing in preschool education. These figures speak for themselves. They highlight a decade of neglect, a decade of complacency and a decade of contempt when it comes to the education of our children. Australia’s current skills crisis is but one of the effects of this legacy.

Australian technical colleges are an attempt to find a quick political fix for what amounts to a massive policy failure on the government’s part. The member for Dobell, who let the cat out of the bag when making reference to the Australian technical colleges, said that they were very popular and tried to imply that the New South Wales government was quick to jump on that bandwagon. In saying that they are popular, he has admitted that the government is looking for short-term, popular fixes to a long-term problem that requires serious thoughtfulness and serious commitment from the government to address the issues. It is a popular fix, as admitted by the member for Dobell.

Australian technical colleges are an attempt, as I said, to find a quick political fix for the government’s massive policy failure and short-term vision in addressing the current skills crisis. For the Howard government, decreasing the amount of Commonwealth funding allocated to TAFE colleges and establishing Australian technical colleges have always been about bypassing Australia’s state and territory governments in an area that has traditionally been their responsibility. Instead of cooperating with state and territory governments and investing in TAFE, the Howard government chose to go it alone by establishing Australian technical colleges. Of course, the political payback in this is that it allows the Howard government to blame state and territory governments for the very problems that it has created and, at the same time, to masquerade as the can-do saviour of education in Australia. The Howard government is the master of the quick fix on all issues; education is no exception. It is a scenario that we see played out once again today in many areas—in particular, in the area of health.

The government’s decision to ignore TAFE colleges, to bypass state and territory governments and to go it alone with its Australian technical colleges has not exactly been without its problems, of course. Originally, the government announced that 24 Australian technical colleges would be established that could, together, accommodate up to 7,200 students from years 7 to 12. In July 2005 the Howard government added an extra college to its itinerary, to be built in Adelaide, bringing the total number of planned Australian technical colleges to 25. This bill provides funding for three additional colleges, bringing to 28 the number of technical colleges the government has promised to build. The $74.7 million set aside in this bill brings the total cost of establishing these 28 technical colleges to some $548 million. But, after three years and more than half a billion dollars in funding, only 21 colleges have opened and to date they have produced not one graduate.

Just two out of the operating 21 colleges have met their enrolment targets. Collectively, there have only been 1,800 enrolments registered for Australian technical colleges. Only one-third of these colleges are legally registered to provide training, with many outsourcing the bulk of their training to TAFEs or registered training organisations. Of the six Australian technical colleges operating in Victoria, where my electorate of Calwell is located, five colleges have outsourced their training to TAFE. The average cost per student is $175,000. Not all colleges have opened, not all colleges are legally registered to provide training, not one graduate has been produced and there have been only 1,800 enrolments so far. That hardly sounds like a well thought out and well-executed plan to solve Australia’s chronic skills shortage.

Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport, Roads and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

By their standards—

Maria Vamvakinou (Calwell, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

By their standards: with the quick fix, the populist way—that is how they address problems in this country. They move in, they throw some money at them and they hope for the best. They hope that people forget after the next election that they made those commitments and those promises. When you look at the amount of money being spent on Australian technical colleges against the number of Australian students who will benefit from them, the TAFE VET system wins hands down.

If the Australian public lack confidence in the sincerity and in the ability of the Howard government to fix Australia’s skills crisis, they can hardly be blamed. Combating Australia’s skills crisis requires a government that both understands the seriousness of the problem and is committed to getting the problem fixed once and for all. It should be obvious to this government that investing in quality education and training for young Australians and combating Australia’s chronic skills shortages go hand in hand. What should also be obvious is that good policies are ones that actually get results. Pretending to fix Australia’s skills crisis is no substitute for real solutions regardless of how easily the words ‘Australian technical colleges’ may roll off our respective tongues. Labor is committed to investing in Australia’s education system so that all young Australians can have the best possible start to life. That commitment saturates every page of Labor’s education revolution policy platform.

Labor is serious about fixing Australia’s skills crisis. That is why Labor has already announced its $2.5 billion trades training centres in schools plan. This plan will provide every secondary school in Australia with between $500,000 and $1.5 million to build or upgrade trades training centres for their students. This is for every school in Australia, not just areas located in marginal seats, and that includes the kids in my electorate of Calwell, who would not see an Australian technical college within cooee of the next 100 years as far as this government is concerned. This plan provides opportunities for all schools in Australia. This initiative will not only provide local high school students in my electorate, as I said, with a much broader skills base at school; it will also provide them with real career options when it comes to trades and apprenticeships.

Labor’s trades training centres policy focuses on the long-term future of our children’s education, and provides a long-term solution designed to address Australia’s skills crisis and to reverse the damage done by 11 years of neglect under the Howard government. With census figures showing year 12 retention rates having stagnated over the last 11 years, investing in vocational education and training in high schools will encourage students to stay in school longer.

As the report Australian social trends released by the Australian Bureau of Statistics some time ago shows, completing year 12 and contemplating some form of postsecondary education has become increasingly important in today’s changing job market. According to the ABS report, the unemployment rate for students who fail to complete year 12 is over three times higher than for those with a tertiary qualification. Keeping Australian kids interested in school and helping them to complete year 12 is therefore crucial. Improving vocational education and trades training is certainly one way of doing this.

Labor also plans to introduce a job ready certificate for school students undertaking vocational education and training at school. Labor’s trades training centres in schools plan includes one day a week of on-the-job training for 20 weeks per year for VET students. The job ready certificate will be linked to a student’s training placement. This certificate will assess the job readiness of VET students and will help potential employers when it comes to assessing the level of skills and on-the-job training school leavers possess.

Addressing Australia’s worsening skills crisis is crucial in securing Australia’s future prosperity. Australia needs a government that is forward thinking and able to plan for Australia’s future. More than anything else, it needs a government that is able to produce sound policies that look to the next six years, not just the next six weeks. Providing quality education and training for young Australians and addressing Australia’s skills crisis go hand in hand.

By promoting vocational education and training in Australian high schools, Labor’s $2.5 billion trades training centres in schools plan makes a real and significant dent in Australia’s skills crisis. It broadens the range of options and opportunities made available to Australian high school students. Whilst I fully support additional funding to promote and expand vocational education and training programs in Australia, it is obvious that Australian technical colleges are much less a real solution to Australia’s worsening skills crisis and much more a quick political fix for what has been a massive policy failure on the Howard government’s part.

Stuart Henry (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is with a great deal of pleasure that I rise to speak in support of the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007, especially as it relates to one of my great passions: developing the opportunities for training, skills development and careers for young Australians through structured, relevant and flexible technical training in schools and training institutions, be they industry centres or TAFE colleges, with appropriate industry involvement and structured workplace learning.

It has certainly been interesting to listen to the diatribe from the member for Calwell and her comments about the Howard government’s failure in skilling up the workforce. The reality is, and the statistics demonstrate, that the Howard government has done much more for apprenticeship training and skills development in this country than any previous government. It demonstrates that we have a very strong growing and expanding economy that provides significant opportunities for new businesses, employment growth and development.

We see that in the unemployment figures that we have in this country, which are at a 30-year low. That very much undermines the argument that has been put by Labor and the member for Calwell with respect to the issue of skills shortages and the reasons for them. It is not about neglect; it is actually about the growth in the economy, unlike when, with the last Labor government, we had the recession we had to have. We had $96 billion worth of debt—

Martin Ferguson (Batman, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Transport, Roads and Tourism) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Mr Martin Ferguson interjecting

Stuart Henry (Hasluck, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

and one million people unemployed while you were president of the ACTU and the member for Throsby beside you was vice president and assistant secretary. That is an indication of how much support there was for people in the workplace and working families—one million people unemployed, $96 billion worth of debt, over 300,000 long-term unemployed and 34.5 per cent youth unemployment—over the period of the Labor government. It was very much a case of not really understanding where they were or where they were going.

That is certainly the case with the Labor Party’s policy with respect to including vocational training in 2,650 schools across Australia. They are throwing money at vocational training without any structure, purpose or proper process for ensuring that there are properly skilled, adequate and qualified industry trainers to be able to address the real skill needs in this country, unlike the Howard government with the development of specialised Australian technical colleges. Certainly, I am a long-term advocate for apprenticeship training, trade training, post-trade training, training for new careers, no matter what your age, and upskilling to ensure the current skill sets are relevant to industry needs.

I do have some knowledge and understanding of these challenges, having spent some time involved with industry training. I was responsible for the development of MPA Skills, one of the first industry training centres in Australia, which now boasts three training campuses in Western Australia. I was also involved in group training at both an operational level, placing apprentices with employers for both short- and long-term training opportunities, and as a director of Group Training Australia.

In this year’s budget the Howard government announced increased funding for the establishment of three more Australian technical colleges to be located in the Penrith area of Western Sydney, in Brisbane’s southern suburbs and in north Perth, including the City of Swan. It is no secret that I am totally committed to the next Australian technical college in Western Australia being built at the Midland railway workshops in the northern part of my electorate of Hasluck. I have been strongly advocating Midland to the government and to successive ministers as the most suitable and logical site for the next technical college, particularly in light of the criteria established for the selection of these particular regions. The criteria are that the region must have a high youth population, a strong industry base and local skills shortages in skilled occupations. Midland is the major centre of Perth’s rapidly expanding north-eastern corridor. My efforts to secure Midland as a site for an Australian technical college have been extensive and unrelenting. Along with the Swan Chamber of Commerce, the City of Swan, the North-Eastern Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and the Eastern Metropolitan Regional Council, I have been working hard to ensure the objective of having an Australian technical college in Midland is realised.

In all, 11 major organisations covering local government, local business, local industry and local education are supporting Midland as the best site. The catchment area of the proposed college takes in the metropolitan municipalities of Bassendean, Mundaring, Kalamunda, Bayswater, Belmont and Swan. This accounts for some 13.3 per cent of the metropolitan population of Perth. In addition to this catchment are the surrounding areas that use Midland as a regional centre. They are the shires of Toodyay, Northam, York, Chittering, Beverly, Gingin, Victoria Plains, Goomalling, Cunderdin and the town of Northam. Combining both the metropolitan and country areas gives a total catchment of 15.7 per cent of the Western Australian population.

As an outer area that has experienced rapid urbanisation, the population growth is estimated at nearly three per cent per annum. I have written directly to some 14,000 homes in the northern part of my electorate seeking their support for the Australia technical college at the Midland railway workshops. There has been a huge response by mail, email and phone, and people have been coming by the electorate office to pledge their support for this initiative.

The Perth airport and the Kewdale and Forrestfield marshalling yards involve all facets of the transport sector, with companies in the area involved in heavy industry, including the construction and resources sector. The northern and central part of Hasluck is the point where all key transport nodes meet, including air, road and rail, servicing a rapidly developing industrial hub, which is the home of businesses such as WesTrac Pty Ltd, the Caterpillar Training Institute, Midland Brick Company, Boral Ltd, Hanson Australian Construction Materials, Toll Ipec Pty Ltd, GEMCO Rail, South Spur Rail Services, Hoffman Engineering Company, BlueScope Steel Ltd, BGC and many others.

Many local construction, engineering, resource and transport companies have pledged to support young people in school based apprenticeships at the Australian technical college in Midland—if established—guaran-teeing the success of such an initiative. Local education and training bodies see the Midland technical college as the ideal venue for providing school based apprenticeships and traineeships. The Perth eastern region, and Midland in particular, has a culture of trade training and will adapt very quickly to embrace the development of the new culture of school based apprenticeships, which builds on the old apprenticeship training system.

The region has a 100-year history of trade based training, which in the past was very much underpinned by the Midland railway workshops, with literally thousands of Perth tradespeople having completed their training at this site in the past. However, with the closure of the railway workshops some years ago, the trade focus for the area has fallen away, in spite of significant industry growth in the surrounding area. The eastern metropolitan region has a higher proportion of young people aged under 20 than the Western Australian and Perth populations. These young people, as with similar age brackets across the state, are twice as likely as the general population to experience unemployment. Young people in the region are also less likely to participate in education, with only 20.3 per cent continuing with some form of education, compared to the state average of 23.7 per cent.

I have led delegations to the relevant federal ministers and I would like to thank them for their time and for giving the case for Midland due and proper consideration. There is already a very successful Australian technical college operating in Western Australia—the Perth South ATC. It is spread across two campuses—one at Maddington and the other at Armadale in the electorate of Canning, which is held by my colleague Don Randall. The Maddington campus trains students for the automotive trades, while the Armadale campus trains students in the building and construction industries. This and other Australian technical colleges across Australia are already an outstanding success due to the quality of the facilities, the industry-qualified training staff and the very close guidance and involvement of industry and local employers in the areas of specialisation that these colleges focus on. It is not quite the quick fix the member for Calwell wanted us to believe. These specialised training areas are going to provide very positive outcomes for students being trained in those areas. They will have an excellent opportunity to complete their apprenticeship training at TAFE colleges because Australian technical colleges work in partnership with the TAFE system and the industry training system that we currently have.

The commitment made by the Howard government at the 2004 election to fund and develop 24 Australian technical colleges is already a strong reality, with some 20 colleges up and running at 33 campuses across Australia. Nationwide, a significant number of students are benefiting from being able to complete high school—getting their year 11 and year 12 certificate—and starting a school based apprenticeship at the same time. It is expected that over 8,400 students will be attending these colleges each year once they are fully operational across Australia in 2009. That means these students will finish their two years at the Australian technical college having completed their high school education and already being two years into their chosen trade or vocational training.

Given that most colleges have only started up in the last 12 months, the claim by Labor that they have not produced any qualified people yet is somewhat spurious—to say the least—because it does take two years to complete high school. Of course, the apprenticeship is part of that training process in those two years as well. With a school based apprenticeship they can come out and articulate into trade training delivered through TAFE or through an industry based training centre to complete their qualification. This gives them an important head start for their careers. From there they can continue their on-the-job training with their existing employer. This initiative will very much streamline the apprenticeship training system by reducing the time required for trade training once the students have left school. It will meet employer need for job-ready young people who need only a short time to complete their trade training following their schooling.

One of the keys to the success of these colleges is the close involvement of local industry and employers who know what skills they need and when they need them. The other is to have trainers with technical skills that industry wants and needs. Again, I think this is a dramatic difference between what the Howard government is doing with vocational training and what the Labor Party wants to do by introducing vocational training in schools. Labor has made no commitment and there is no industry involvement in that process. I have seen schools where state Labor governments have tried to introduce vocational training in the past. School teachers have told me that they could train kids to certificate III level in vocational training. I have asked what industry involvement there has been and the answer is none. How do they know what competencies industry needs without industry involvement? There is exactly the same problem with what Labor has proposed.

Australian technical colleges are an effective and simple solution to increasing the skills of school leavers and meeting the skill needs of employers in traditional and other trade areas. Local industry knows what to look for in technical skills, and local students get the benefit of that knowledge. Three decades ago, this nation wrongly turned its back on the old style technical high schools—I think that was a Labor initiative—closing them down and dumping students with good technical skills and real potential in the trades into schools interested only in an academic outcomes. There was a big push to send everyone to university. We have seen that that did not work. This suited about 30 per cent of school leavers; the other 70 per cent were left on their own, with some gaining an apprenticeship or traineeship and others tragically becoming the long-term unemployed of the Labor governments of the 1980s and early 1990s. I quoted earlier the youth unemployment rate of 34.5 per cent back in those years. This cost Australia a lost generation of tradesmen, and we are paying the price now at a time when we can least afford it, particularly in the states of Western Australia and Queensland. It was Labor policy that promoted university education above all else—at the expense of trade training. It was under a Labor government that we saw apprenticeship numbers decline from 151,000 in 1991 to 122,600 by 1993. It was under Labor that we saw teenage unemployment at a record high of 34.5 per cent, because there were no opportunities for either education or employment. In the early nineties the opportunity of finding an apprenticeship was as rare as hen’s teeth.

Australian technical colleges are being established to cater for those students who possess strong technical and creative talents and want to have a go at a trade. This reinforces for them that they are as highly valued for their special talents as someone with academic talents. Indeed, learning by doing, developing manual technical skills by actually learning through a hands-on approach, is something that the majority of us do easily. The critics of this great initiative to establish Australian technical colleges accused the government of duplicating the TAFE system. Quite clearly these colleges do not duplicate TAFE colleges; they are high schools designed to deliver years 11 and 12 according to the high school curriculum, to deliver high quality vocational and technical training relevant to the needs of industry and employers, and to create fast-track career opportunities for these young students keen to take up a trade when they leave school. TAFE delivers vocational and trade training at a post-secondary level to students who have completed their schooling. Indeed, it could be said that in some cases TAFE has lost its way and dropped the ball on trade training in trying to be all things to all people.

However, it should be noted that the Howard government has provided a record level of funding—$12 billion since 1996—to state and territory governments for TAFE and vocational education. State and territory governments have failed miserably in their responsibilities to their communities and industry by failing to deliver the skill needs that Australian industry so desperately needs. In Western Australia it is now a requirement that all students stay at school until year 12. This was an edict of a state Labor government, but they failed to provide the sort of learning environment that these vital, dynamic and energetic young people need. I do not think it would be going too far to say that the Western Australian government has made a real mess of education in my state. Labor have turned education into an absolute disaster area. I read recently that, because of a shortage of teachers, it was proposed that class sizes be increased to 75 students. There is much confusion amongst teachers and parents about the on-again, off-again OBE—outcomes based education. Teachers are still battling to make sense of a chaotic system, with morale so poor that they are leaving the profession in droves.

It is only since the advent of Australian technical colleges that high schools have started to focus on and provide effective and structured vocational training delivered by trainers with industry skills and knowledge. This has come about through state governments following the lead of the Howard government and working towards their own models of technical schools and colleges. It is worth putting on the record federal Labor’s blind opposition to these colleges, which we heard from the member for Calwell earlier. So much for the ALP being the so-called champions of the Australian worker—they would seek to deny the very measures that give talented and bright young Australians the opportunity to begin a career in a trade in industry sectors crying out for such trainees. Over the weekend, I had the opportunity to review a discussion paper called ‘It’s Crunch Time: raising youth engagement and attainment’, which was published by the Australian Industry Group and the Dusseldorp Skills Forum. It is a very interesting report. It states:

We can no longer afford significant levels of disengagement among Australian youth.

The 34.5 per cent youth unemployment of the early 1990s can never be repeated. The report further states:

There should be simple, clear but compelling objectives driving federal and state policy. These are that, subject to their ability, every young person:

• will attain Year 12, or, over time, a vocational equivalent at AQF Certificate III level
• will be engaged in full-time work or learning, or a combination of these
• will be provided with the resources, and facilitated with relationships and integrated pathways needed to achieve these outcomes.

Australian technical colleges go a long way towards achieving this sort of integrated pathway.

There is much in the report that I agree with. The challenge, of course, will be to ensure that state and federal governments are on the same page, that political expediency and point scoring are left behind, and that the real needs of Australian youth are focused on, including educational and training pathways, the quality of workplace and institutional learning, training opportunities, career advice and guidance, transitions from schools to vocational tertiary learning and training centres and to workplaces.

The Realising Our Potential initiatives in this year’s budget recognise that the university and vocational education training sectors are becoming increasingly interlinked. I strongly support the proposal for a new trade diploma, which will provide an excellent transitional opportunity from trade qualifications to university qualifications. There should be no reason why a qualified licensed plumber, for example, cannot apply to a university to obtain a mechanical engineering qualification. By breaking down these barriers we will provide Australians with a greater choice and opportunity to enhance their careers and working lives. Taking a trade as a career pathway should not be a barrier to university but, rather, another pathway.

Clearly, the Australian government has made some significant progress and developed a leadership role in all of these areas, but there is more to be done. Australian technical colleges are a model for transitional arrangements from school learning to industry learning and training to workplace learning and skill application. In addition, they start to really facilitate industry and employer involvement in education at an earlier stage. In my view, over time, this will improve the understanding for more quality on-the-job training. (Time expired)

Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Once again we are in this place with a bill before us that seeks to extend the funding directed towards the government’s problematic Australian technical colleges program. I say ‘once again’ because we have been down this path before of having to extend the funds directed to this government’s system of technical colleges. While Labor will not be opposing the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007, we have moved a second reading amendment which contains an extensive and damning critique of the Howard government’s handling of vocational education and training over the past 11 years.

Those familiar with the south-west of Sydney—the Macarthur region, where I come from, which takes in the seat of Werriwa—would understand the importance that parents place on having access to employment opportunities for their kids and, in particular, the abilities and opportunities for their kids to pursue trades. Two of our kids are tradespeople—I am very fortunate; one is an electrician and one is a carpenter—so I know what parents think of their children having the opportunity to undertake trade based education. The concerns I had for my own kids about apprenticeships and apprenticeship training and vocational education are precisely the concerns I know people in the south-west of Sydney have when they look at training opportunities for their kids and, further down the track, career opportunities in chosen trades. Parents always want better opportunities for their children than they themselves had. That is why the Prime Minister’s unfair dismissal laws—Work Choices in particular—have resonated to the extent that they have within communities. That is certainly so in my community in south-western Sydney, and I know from the industrial relations task force what resonates in various electorates throughout this country. People are concerned about the impact that these laws are likely to have on their children and their children’s opportunities. Before an objection is taken on me straying from this bill, it is fair to say that my views on Work Choices are well known, so I will not proceed with that any further.

In order for parents to be comfortable in the knowledge that their children will have greater and better opportunities to pursue their dreams than they did, most parents realise that at the base is the importance of having a good and fundamentally sound education. While universities and academic pursuits are very important to many, they will not be suitable for all, and that is why the issue of vocational education, trade based education, takes on even greater importance. The importance of trade training is why Labor has announced a range of policies to address skills shortages and trade training into the future. I will outline some of those policies later.

It is timely that I make this contribution in the debate today as it was only Monday last that I received a response to one of two questions that I placed on the Notice Paper to the Minister for Vocational and Further Education about the proposed Western Sydney technical college. The first related to the number of students from various parts of the greater Campbelltown and Liverpool areas that were enrolled in the original Australian Technical College Western Sydney. The second was about the basis of the selection of Penrith as the location of the second Western Sydney technical college, which is what this bill seeks to provide funds for. To date, I have not received a response to the first question—although I suspect I already know the answer. I have received a response to the second question. The response, as is the case with most answers from this government, it is fair to say, I found less than revealing and certainly less than satisfying.

Disappointingly, it came as no surprise to me when it was announced in the budget in May this year that the Western Sydney technical college would be located in the electorate of Lindsay, based in Penrith. It came as no surprise because Lindsay fits the majority of the criteria for the technical colleges and their locations—that is, it is a marginal coalition seat. The fact about the Australian technical colleges that does not appear on the advertisements that are now starting to flood our televisions, for the consumption of all Australians, is that 90 per cent of the colleges are to be located in either a coalition seat or a marginal seat. I suppose it is a no-brainer with Lindsay, which, being a coalition held marginal seat, has a tick in both boxes. When asked about the reasons for locating the technical college in Lindsay, the minister was not so bold as to admit that it was a coalition held marginal seat and that that is the reason it got the nod. The minister said this: 

The area of Greater Penrith was selected for a second Sydney Australian Technical College as it is a region that has demonstrated significant skills needs, a high youth population and a significant industry base.

At face value, that seems a quite reasonable response and basis on which to make a decision on where to locate an educational facility. But I got to wondering: how does that stack up when compared to other areas in Western Sydney? Accordingly, I thought it appropriate that we compare Lindsay’s credentials to those of other areas of Sydney, such as south-west Sydney, to be sure that this was not just an issue of pork-barrelling, that the government did not seek to achieve a political advantage by spending multiple millions of dollars of taxpayers’ money in another marginal seat.

When we consider the skill needs of a region, I do not believe that Lindsay has any greater demands than other parts of Western Sydney. At the moment, we find ourselves in an economic position which has resulted from a skills shortage. As a result, those with skills and experience are generally able to find work in their chosen field. The skills shortage was certainly affected by the government’s decision some time ago to cut funding to TAFE colleges and vocational education. I will come back to that.

The government’s figures estimate the skills shortage to be in the order of 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years, indicating that we have a significant need to train young people to develop their skills so that they can be deployed in the labour market. In other words, we need to take steps now to ensure that there will not be further constraints in the economy as a result of the exacerbation of the existing skills shortage.

Different skills pressures will arise in different labour markets as a result of differences in local economies. Given the skills shortage and the relative ease with which skilled workers can find employment, I sought to look at the respective skills shortages that had occurred in south-west Sydney. Despite the government crowing about 30-year lows in unemployment, you need not travel too far around the south-west of Sydney to know that the government is trying to dupe people with a reference to aggregate statistics and averages which are, quite frankly, far removed from local realities.

Unemployment in the south-west of Sydney is high; there is absolutely no denying that. It is too high, in everyone’s view. But the Howard government has done little to address that problem. In March this year the unemployment rate in the electorate of Werriwa was 8.2 per cent, in Macarthur it was 6.1 per cent, in Fowler it was 8.5 per cent, in Prospect it was 7.7 per cent and in Chifley it was 8.4 per cent. No doubt we would all agree that these rates are high; at the very least, they are well above the national average. By comparison, the unemployment rate for the electorate of Lindsay in March this year was 4.8 per cent. That is not equal to the national unemployment figure, but it is certainly much closer to it. So, on the approximate measure of the need for skills being one rationale for the selection of Lindsay as a suitable place for one of these colleges, Lindsay does not stack up.

I turn to another criterion which the minister listed—that is, the youth population of the electorate. To compare the credentials of Lindsay with those of other parts of Western Sydney, I compared the number of people under the age of 15 in each of those other electorates. For instance, in Werriwa the number of people under the age of 15 is more than 37,500, in Macarthur it is 33,500, in Fowler it is 29,400, in Prospect it is 28,700 and in Chifley it is 38,000. By comparison, according to the 2006 census, the number of people under the age of 15 in the electorate of Lindsay is just a tad over 28,900. So, on the measure of youth population, Lindsay ranks only slightly higher than Prospect, and below Chifley and Werriwa by a margin of about 10,000 each. You can only say that the government’s argument that this was another criterion for selecting Lindsay as the appropriate place to locate an Australian technical college is somewhat flawed.

Whilst I have not done the analysis of each of the seats in the Penrith area in the south-west, existing industrial capacity and growth potential would be, at best, similar to my area, which is fast becoming an inland port with the development of two intermodal terminals and a third being planned. It is certainly seen as a growth centre not only for the distribution of goods for the intermodals but also for the establishment of employment sites and employment-generating industries based around Liverpool and Campbelltown. I am not sure where Penrith sits in relation to that and I am not sure whether that measure of growth would be quite the same.

Penrith fails to meet the minister’s test on two to three measures that he cites as reasons why the new Australian technical college would be located there. However, on the most important measure—that is, the position of Lindsay on the national electoral pendulum—with a margin of just under three per cent and a Liberal sitting member, Lindsay wins hands down. While it might not stack up on the basis of reasonableness, it certainly stacks up on the Howard government’s ‘pork-o-meter’, as only electorates of need are to be measured by a desperate government. I am sure that my constituency would have been rejected by the minister, and I am sure that I will be accused of some sort of base parochialism; but, on the basis of establishing each of the criteria the minister sets down for the location of this technical college in Lindsay, it is rank opportunism by a desperate government prepared to do and spend whatever is necessary in its approach to the next federal election.

My aim in this contribution has been to highlight the base political motives behind the selection of the location of the Australian technical college in Western Sydney but more than that to look at the whole Australian technical college system, established because of the Howard government’s failure over many years to support the great vocational education systems that we have in this country through TAFE. In 1997 the Howard government cut funding to the TAFE system. Commonwealth revenues in vocational education decreased by 13 per cent from 1997 to 2000 and increased by only one per cent between 2000 and 2004. This government’s neglect of TAFE has come at a cost, which is now manifesting itself in the skills shortages that we are experiencing throughout this nation. The economic constraint that that is creating is a direct result of the actions taken by this government back in 1997. Over the past decade the government’s funding cuts in vocational education and training has forced the TAFE system to turn away more than 325,000 young people. These are young people who would have been taking advantage of the opportunities in our resource industries, who would have been filling various areas of opportunity in the services sector and who, these days, see people coming to this country on 457 visas, taking work that they should have been trained to perform over the past 11 years. This government has taken short-term decisions without looking at the development of the Australian economy with a view to the future.

TAFE has more than 1.2 million students and accounts for 75 per cent of all vocational students and 85 per cent of all training hours, yet this government ignores that fact, preferring instead to duplicate the system through a technical college system—not add to it, not help it to get further established or help it to train more people but to duplicate the system. I would much prefer to see the $1.3 million already spent on the Australian Technical College Western Sydney, the $10 million dedicated to the construction of a purpose-built campus and that part of the $74 million in funding appropriated in this bill for the new Western Sydney technical college extended to TAFE education in Western Sydney. Sadly, that is not going to occur. Madam Deputy Speaker, you know the reasons. This is all about the government’s industrial relations drive. We saw what the government did to the university sector. We saw what the government wanted to do for the TAFE sector. Unless TAFE colleges were going to be compliant with the government’s industrial relations agenda, they were not going to receive that funding. This is just a continuation of an ideologically driven government which is prepared to compromise on tertiary and vocational education. (Time expired)

Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The member for Werriwa made a pitch for his electorate and, interestingly, complained that it did not get one of these new technical colleges. Of course, it is his party’s policy to do away with all of them if it wins office. His electorate has the prospect of a college being established under this government, but if his party were to win government it would have none. The Labor Party does not believe secondary education should include vocational education and training. Everyone must be educated to a level of brilliance that would allow them to go to university and to join a student union! When did all the state technical education institutions disappear? It was while the Hawke government was in power. They were all closed down by state governments; they did not need any of that.

The member talked about 457 visas. The real skills shortage in Australia today is in the semiskilled work force, and 457 visas do not apply in that area. Meatworks all around Australia are finding it difficult to get the semiskilled workers they need because under the coalition government’s economic management those workers have found better and higher-paying jobs that are obviously more appealing. That is a tragedy in my electorate. Fortunately, some of the job vacancies are being filled by backpackers. However, the reality is that the people who would normally being doing those semiskilled jobs now have more highly paid jobs in other areas. The government has established 20 of these technical colleges and this legislation, among other things, provides funding for the establishment of another three.

The member for Werriwa was at pains to tell us that the present shortage of skilled workers was all the government’s fault. The Labor Party still argues that no apprenticeship should be less than five years. That means five years of study in addition to on-the-job training. In 1996, when this government won office, only 31,000 apprentices completed their training. Over the past four years, under the Howard government, 544,000 apprentices have completed their training. It may be an apples-and-oranges comparison, but I did a simple calculation and multiplied the 31,000 apprenticeships completed under the previous government by four and got 124,000, which is less than one-third of the number completed under this government. There are some good reasons for that difference.

I was an employer for many years and during that time there was no such thing as apprenticeships for chefs. When they were introduced, I was happy to provide job opportunities in a country town for young men who wanted that training. For the first time I had a vision of not having to employ an immigrant from southern Europe or elsewhere as a chef because Australia did not provide that training. I remind the House of the days when we had wall-to-wall awards, which imposed strict limits on the number of apprentices who could be employed. The number of apprentices employed was limited by the number of senior employees. It was argued that they needed to be there in sufficient numbers to train the apprentices. Apprentices were also quarantined from being members of a union because the unions were interested only in the senior employees and the jobs available to them.

I was involved in the administrative side of the racing industry as a committee member and the Chairman of the Western Australian Turf Club. The club approached the appropriate authorities in Western Australia to see whether we could establish an apprenticeship for farriers. It is a well-paid profession and a tough job. The only way to become a farrier was to do casual work and learn on the job. There was no proper process or academic-style training involved. To this day there is no such apprenticeship because the committee, which is dominated by trade union officials, knocked back the proposal on the ground that the program had no capacity to provide multiskilling. I asked whether it was expected that a 14- or 15-stone farrier should be trained in the skills of a jockey. It was a silly objection, but none of the trade union representatives on that committee wanted a new-style apprenticeship in Western Australia.

Many years ago I looked at employment in the fishing industry out of Geraldton, which along with a number of smaller southern ports catches 10,000 tonne rock lobsters a year. I saw 15-year-olds working as deckies and earning about $50,000 a year on a piecework basis. The trade unions hated that and have tried to unionise the fishing industry for years. Those involved tell them to buzz off; they do not want their help. Of course, 15-year-old kids could negotiate their share and they were paid about $50,000.

It became obvious to me that in later years these young people had no skills that qualified them to take over the control of a fishing vessel—that is, to get a skipper’s ticket. So I called a meeting of all secondary schools in Geraldton and asked if they could have a focus in their secondary years on developing programs and curricula so that the kids could get those skills at school and not wait till they were 30 or 35, when the opportunity arose. By that time they would be married, have a couple of kids running around the lounge room and would not want to have to go back to TAFE.

Of course, for the information of those present, the foundation of navigation is trigonometry. If you grab the average kid, who is not really planning to be an engineer or a scientist or somebody at that nature, and ask him if he will do trigonometry, he will say no. But ask him, ‘Would you like to do a course of navigation?’ and he will say, ‘Yeah, I’d like to do that.’

The principals were very impressed, but the TAFE colleges said, ‘Don’t you dare get into our territory.’ There was a demarcation dispute. In other words, they were saying, ‘Send your kids onto us after they have left secondary school.’ Fortunately, as I understand—although I have not checked it for some time—an accommodation was eventually reached and the secondary school kids go over to TAFE and do those subjects. I always remember my next-door neighbour, who had a son one year older than mine who was not academically bright. His father got him an apprenticeship at 15 and insisted he start a builder’s registration ticket. He did, and at about 17 or 18 years old he came out with both qualifications. The firm of Bunnings, where he was employed, plucked him out of the cabinet shop and put him on the front desk. In later years he managed a big timber company in Victoria, where he still resides. That is what happens when someone makes it happen.

Isn’t it amazing! It was a parent, a caring parent, who actually set all that up. Day after day we hear bleatings about young people having to negotiate their own contracts. I heard some on the ABC, which scours the world for someone to criticise us. They had some American saying, ‘Isn’t it terrible that young people have to go and negotiate their own contract.’ Of course they do not. As has been pointed out, they cannot enter a contract without the signature of a parent or guardian. And who would believe that any decent parent would not attend with an employer at the first interview of their children?

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

They are probably busy at work, mate.

Wilson Tuckey (O'Connor, Liberal Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I note that one member laughs at that, and probably he was too negligent with his kids to give them that bit of assistance. But why is it that only a trade union can do that job? Parents, grandparents or whoever else has the time can do it much better, and the responsible ones do it.

Remember that the Australian government suffered great political damage when we did the right thing to reform the Australian tax system by introducing a GST. It was hotly contested, not only by the members of the Labor Party in this place but by all those Labor premiers who, once the GST came into effect, could not get into the queue to get the money quick enough. What did our Prime Minister tell the Australian people during the campaign? He said that this was a growth tax so that state governments could properly meet their responsibilities in hospitals, law and order and education. The next speaker might tell me where the money has gone, because it has not gone into those areas. The states have closed down their tech colleges, they are closing down police stations—for example, in my electorate—and, no matter where you turn in Australia, the delivery of public hospital services is a mess. Now, in response to that and recognising the rights of the taxpayer, our government is looking at opportunities to assist community run hospitals, and I applaud the Minister for Health and Ageing for nominating those that are community run.

I do not know where the money goes, but, no matter how much we pour into state government coffers, it does not come out in better educational services. So we have had to give opportunities to young people like the young man I mentioned who ended up a senior manager. He took the opportunity to be apprenticed at the end of year 10—we called it third year in those days—but immediately commenced a night school program in his secondary years, while he was at work. Look at the benefits he achieved. All of those opportunities exist.

I want to make special reference to a secondary school program of vocational education that exists at the agricultural colleges in my electorate. These are residential and offer a very broad range of education. They give the necessary training in English, mathematics and those sorts of subjects; yet, you go to their field days and find magnificent furniture. And the card on the piece of furniture will say, ‘made by Mary Smith’. Not only that, but Bill Smith might have welded up a trailer for the family farm. Then you will find that ‘Mary Smith’ has come up from Perth to take up that educational opportunity. Yet when parents throughout my electorate want their children to take up that educational opportunity and find there is another secondary school between them and the available agricultural college, they are not given the financial assistance that is otherwise available in boarding allowances and things of that nature. I think that is silly.

This raises another issue which I want to identify to the parliament. The Narrogin agricultural college has an agreement with the Western Australian Farm Machinery Dealers Association, which assists them in running a course for agricultural machinery repairs and maintenance. These kids are coming out of years 11 and 12 well prepared to go to work with the machinery dealer and, as an apprentice, pick up the last bit of training they need.

I can remember in earlier years, as a shadow minister, visiting the Repco apprentices school in Melbourne, which was closed down by the Hawke government. It was run by Repco, doing the same thing as these colleges, and employers found it better to pay Repco to take their apprentices on for those two years and get them up to a basic skills standard so that, when they entered the workforce, they were not on the broom or all the things that are often said about young apprentices. They went straight to work, they were productive and the employer had an advantage because the money they spent in providing that education and training was saved by the productivity of the individual when they arrived in the workplace.

As a youth, I had the opportunity with my secondary education credentials to apply for a job as a cadet scientist with CSIRO. I am rather glad to say that they did not take me on; someone else got the cadetship. But what did those cadetships provide and why should big business—maybe I will remind the Business Council in my discussions with them this evening—not complain, when they abandoned cadetships, about the lack of availability of people with the skills they require? Cadetships meant you were employed but went to university when you had to attend, but when the holidays came around you went back into the laboratory or whatever was related with that training. I think it is a tragedy that big business walked away from that and expected the taxpayer to carry the full burden. The quicker they revisit those sorts of arrangements the better. It helped young people. They did not end up, as they do today, with a HECS debt.

Notwithstanding the comments that are frequently made by the shadow minister in this regard, HECS was brought in by the Hawke government, and it was brought in because a previous member for Werriwa decided Australia could have free universities and nearly sent the government broke in the process. The Hawke government introduced HECS on the recommendation of a committee chaired, I think, by Neville Wran. It was their invention and it has become necessary. Touching on that area of education, I heard the shadow minister this morning saying that Australians now have to pay $100,000 and $200,000 for a full-fee position to the exclusion of those who are otherwise qualified for a HECS position. Yet most universities at the moment cannot fill their HECS positions, so where is the statistical support for that remark? Why can’t they fill them? Because it has suddenly become valuable to take other trade positions.

I have had a lot of work done on the university facilities in Geraldton in my electorate. The member for Werriwa complains about what he did not get in his electorate and what the member for Lindsay did—there might be some comparison there of the capacity of the two members to perform—but I took the initiative of getting some university places allocated to a town that had no university infrastructure or structure at all. The universities had to go up there and chase them, and they did. In a recent discussion with the universities as to the future of that situation, I suggested they should have special courses for the fly-in, fly-out people who live in that region so that on their week off they can start to upgrade their academic skills as mining engineers or something of that nature in a mixed sort of situation of face-to-face training and extension courses. These are the things that we are doing; we are combining with the community to get results. These technical education facilities certainly meet that criterion. (Time expired)

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a great privilege for me to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 today. The reason for that is quite simple: I believe in training and in skills and I think it is important that this parliament does everything in its capacity to enhance and support that. To that effect, Labor will not be opposing the bill. But it is interesting to note a number of things that bring about the amendment to this bill. This is the third cost blow-out for the government in relation to—what I would call at this stage—their failed Australian technical colleges. They must be failed because they have not yet succeeded. There can only be one or the other; it is an on-off technical point. If they have not succeeded, they must have failed. The first round of funding was $343 million, which was not enough. It had to be increased to $456 million, and that was not enough. Now it has been pushed out to $548 million. The government might try to explain away as to why there have been these additional costs, but they are not really additional costs; they are cost blow-outs. They are a failing on the part of the government to understand in the first place why it did not need to introduce these colleges.

It goes to the intent of why these ATCs are there in the first place. The Australian technical colleges were put in place not as a solution, not for an outcome, not for training needs, not for skills and not to do something in the national interest; they were quite simply put there as a political tool. It was about an election outcome. Let us be clear about that right from the outset. There is no way from anything I have read, anything I have seen or anything I have heard, particularly not from government members or the Minister for Vocational and Further Education—in fact, the more I listen to them the more I am convinced that this was about an election outcome—that success is measured in students, results or outcomes in the national interest. Success is measured in whether this mob got re-elected, and in that they did succeed. Their primary goal of setting up something which would cost the taxpayer half a billion dollars to get them re-elected was successful.

However, we need to do something for young Australians. We need to do something for skills and for the crisis which everyone acknowledges is real. On that score the government have failed, because they are not interested. That is the reality; the government do not care. They would not spend five minutes looking at what people really need but they would spend $500 million looking at what they need for an election outcome. That is what disappoints me—the lost opportunities, the waste of taxpayer dollars, the false hope that the government put out to people in terms of providing something extra. We could put this money to good use, and I will deal with that as I consider the bill today.

This is a failed program by the government. The amendment bill before us means that there will be three new ATCs. I would have thought that the government would have concentrated on the existing ones and the ones that have not opened yet, rather than setting up new ones. There will be new colleges in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney. I welcome them. If, in the end—no matter how painful and how much it costs—there is an outcome for skills and for young people, I welcome it. I understood what this initiative was about. In the heat of an election campaign, there was desperation and the government needed to do something. We all understand that. There is no question that people understand what this government is about. But if there were an outcome and some students had some skills at the end, you could give it a tick and say, ‘We’re at least getting something.’

Probably one of the best submissions, or tenders, put forward to the government was from my electorate of Oxley. If you look carefully and closely at the government’s guidelines on Australian technical colleges—and this is about what they say, which is different from what they do—you find that they talk about skills, working with industry and partnerships. They use all the usual terms to try and convince people. They talk about outcomes and areas of need. I could not find a higher area of need than the western corridor in Queensland. The government want to talk about partnerships? We have got it all. We have the TAFE institution of the year in my electorate. I looked at the guidelines and thought: ‘This is fantastic. Finally, the government will acknowledge that we need to do something in the western corridor of Brisbane and we are going to deliver something on the ground.’ I was excited. I did not agree with their policy, because I understood what it was about—it was about the politics, not the outcomes—but I thought, ‘At least I’m going to get some money in my area.’ Guess what? There is no funding for the western corridor. I do not want to be cynical about this. As John Howard always says: ‘We’ll let the record tell the story. We’ll let the record stand for itself.’ Why is it that 90 per cent of ATCs are in coalition marginal seats?

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Really?

Bernie Ripoll (Oxley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Industry and Innovation) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Yes, 90 per cent. If it were about a fair balance of need, you could not go much further than Labor electorates in parts of Western Sydney or in western Brisbane in my electorate. There is genuine need. People are crying out for support from this government but they get absolutely nothing. Why is that? Maybe it is because of what I mentioned at the start: political outcome, not educational or training outcome. Everything in this whole dogged exercise from the government has been about the politics and about saving their own skin. All that this government, the Prime Minister, John Howard, and the Treasurer, Peter Costello, are about is their political hide. We saw it this week. I will not discuss it here as there are other forums to do so. We saw what the Treasurer is about. It is about his wanting to become the Prime Minister. He could not give two hoots about what happens to anyone in this country—young people, old people. He does not care about housing affordability or interest rates—nine interest rate rises in a row. Do they care? No. All they care about is re-election. The imperative of all government policy and funding is re-election. It is in everything they do and in all of their policies. It is disgraceful. The government will pay a very high price for it.

I do not really care about the price this government will pay because no price is too high to pay for what it has done. I am concerned about the price that young Australians are paying and the price that our national economy is paying. No matter how good the economy, it is never good enough. No matter how well we are doing and how low the unemployment rate is, it is never good enough. This government went to sleep years ago thinking that its job was done, that it was finished. It thought: ‘No more needs to be done. The economy’s great. Interest rates are at so-called low levels’—but after nine interest rate rises you would have to ask yourself how real that was—‘The job is done.’ It is all about being re-elected.

Currently in Australia the TAFE system is the one that provides real outcomes, real skills and real training—and it does it very well. There are 230 TAFEs in this country and they do a fantastic job. The courses and the training that they provide give young people the ability to take on apprenticeships. It gives them access to coursework and courses that allow them to earn credits towards a bachelor’s degree or recognised diploma. It is the primary provider of skills and training in this country. I do not think anybody can dispute that. This is the largest organisation in Australia that provides some 85 per cent of all outcomes—the outcome of not just getting people through the door but getting people out the door, the ones getting the real jobs and the real training. You would think that anyone with a bit of common sense—and, I have to say, a bit of honesty—would have asked: ‘Shouldn’t that be the system we support?’ It is not about the system. When I talk about support, I am talking about supporting the young people who go there. I am talking about their educational needs, outcomes, training and skills. It is not the system.

What have the government done over the last 11 years? What have John Howard and Peter Costello done? They just keep taking money away from TAFE—defunding it further and further each year. Year on year it has received less money. That is how committed the government are to training and skills and to looking after young people. They have created a massive problem. Labor have been talking about skills for many years. That mob opposite used to laugh at us and say: ‘Skills? What skills problem? Crisis? There is no crisis. You’re overstating it by saying the sky is going to fall in.’ Guess what? There is a skills crisis. Business—small, big and medium enterprises—and young people agree; everyone agrees. Sure, young people are getting jobs, and that is a good thing, but there is a price to be paid for it. Let them get a job, but let them get skills and training. Let them get the bits of paper that say they have a skill beyond what is the economic resource boom of today.

Things change, and we are starting to see that now in the mining industry. This government think they can just skate home on the back of the mining and resources sector; they should look at how productivity levels in mining have dropped. They should look at how people are now losing their jobs in mining. Of course, we have plenty to dig up; we have literally 200 years worth—an endless supply—of resources in just about everything. But we can’t get it out the door fast enough. That means reduced productivity. Reduced productivity, in the end, means fewer jobs. So people who went to the mines and earned incredible amounts of dollars are now coming back out. The problem for some of those people is that they have nowhere to go in terms of their skills, so they are getting unskilled jobs. The government just do not understand this. The sad part is that they do not want to understand. If you refuse to acknowledge that a problem exists, you will never find a solution for it. In the mind of the government, it does not exist.

It is the same with interest rates. One of the biggest issues in my electorate is housing affordability and housing costs. When the Liberal candidate in my electorate is asked what the big issues for the election are, he says, ‘Oh, there’s a road.’ Of course, I have been talking about the roads for 11 years, but nobody on the government side ever listened to me because they could not care about roads in south-east Queensland. The Liberal candidate said, ‘No, it’s just a road.’ When asked specifically about interest rates, he said, ‘No, everyone’s doing fine; the economy’s great.’ Which planet is he living on? How much does he pay for his mortgage or rent?

Families are doing it really tough, and it is all interlinked. This is the part that really gets to me, because it is all interlinked—this whole question about skills and about providing the educational pathways in schools. We still have government members who are living very deeply in the past—10, 15 or 20 years ago. They still talk about the competition, the class warfare, between getting a trade and getting a university degree. That is old stuff. We do not talk about that anymore. People in schools, at TAFE, at uni and in trades do not talk about that; it is all about different pathways to get to where you want to be. You do not have to start in one place and stay there for the rest of your life. You can actually learn for the rest of your life. That is what we should all be doing.

With respect to young people finishing school, I say to the member for O’Connor that maybe in his day it was all right to leave school at 15, get an apprenticeship and be set for life. That was fine; that was a normal thing to do. But today, it is very dangerous to give that sort of advice to young people. There are not too many employers out there who will give a 15-year-old a job. The other issues are the type of job and the sort of money that you would be earning. There are also the things they will miss out on. The data today is pretty clear: no matter what job you apply for, employers really want people who have completed year 12.

The government cannot have it both ways. They talk about numeracy and literacy levels and how important they are in terms of skills in industry and business. You are not going to get the sort of numeracy and literacy skills that you need by age 15. You are going to need those couple of extra years. That is really important.

I do not really care whether a young person transitioning in school wants to be a scientist, a doctor, a tradesman as I was, or go out and start their own business. They can do whatever they want to do. That is the great thing about our system: it allows people to have that flexibility in choice. But you have to provide for it. This is where government plays its role at the federal level. It is not just the fault of the states all the time. It cannot always be somebody else’s fault. Sooner or later, you have to step up and ask: ‘Where do we do something for the country?’ When is this parliament going to do something for the country? When are we going to invest in young people? When are John Howard and Peter Costello going to say, ‘Hang on, maybe we should take some responsibility’? Why is it always somebody else’s fault? It is because they do not care. As long as they get re-elected, they just do not care.

I simply suggest this to the government: have a close look at the sort of money you are spending. The provision of three new ATCs will take the figure to 28 in the country. They are not located in the areas where we need to do the most but they are still good. They are there; we are not going to take them away. It adds another layer. Again, it is about more duplication. Today, in the modern world, we talk about reducing bureaucracy and duplication. This government want to keep adding layers of bureaucracy and burden. We have perfectly good infrastructure out there called the TAFE system, with really wonderful teachers and students, yet this mob want to undermine them. I just do not get that—I do not understand it.

Maybe I do understand it a little bit: it is all about having a go at the states. The federal government is really angry that the states have the TAFE system and it does not. It has said: ‘How are we going to create a pseudo TAFE system? We’ll rebadge it and call it Australian technical colleges.’ So there is a Commonwealth badge instead of a state badge. Who cares? How about doing something for young people who have training needs? I do not really care what badge is out the front of the bricks and mortar of the school. Obviously, this government does. It is all about the badge out the front—whether it is the coat-of-arms and the Commonwealth badge out the front rather than some state badge. Personally, I could not care either way. I do not care what badge is out the front.

What I do care about is turning up to a graduation ceremony and seeing young people, accompanied by their parents or grandparents, who are proud as punch that they now have a certificate IV in whatever it might be, or they have an apprenticeship and have graduated. They are out there contributing to the economy, participating fully as a member of society and in life. Instead, we now have more than half-a-billion dollars being spent, yet delivering a zero outcome.

With respect to the zero outcome, the Audit Office report gives the details. I did not make this up; I just turned to the report to see what the government body was saying about it. I wanted to see what the government’s independent arm was saying about these sorts of programs. If you read it, you will fall off your chair, because you just will not believe how bad it is. It is even worse than you might think.

The Audit Office says that there is ‘insufficient attention paid to state and territory governments’. Again, we know why that is: they want to bypass them as if they do not exist. The Audit Office says that ‘initial tender applications were weak and inadequate’, that ‘there was little choice among ATC applicants’ and that there were ‘no student outcomes’. We have not had any graduates. Over the full life of the program, if there is a 100 per cent success rate, we will get 10,000 graduates by 2010. The problem is that we have 200,000 new skilled positions to be filled. So the figure should be 200,000, not 10,000.

The government’s solution to a problem which comprises a figure of 200,000 is to say, ‘We’ll give you five per cent, but it’ll cost you more than half-a-billion dollars.’ Do you have to be an economic genius to understand simple mathematics? Five per cent ain’t going to solve the problem, but it is a huge cost. You need to take that same money, half-a-billion dollars, and invest it back into the TAFE system—into the quality teachers and the quality infrastructure.

That is what Labor’s policy is about. We are saying that we want to work with people. We want to partner with the states, we want to partner with education and we want to partner with schools. Why bypass the schools themselves? They have 1.2 million students in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 that are currently going through the education system who need the assistance. Why not partner with them? I think it would be really good if the government actually looked at that, but it cannot look beyond itself.

Again, it all gets back to where I started: it is never a plan about an outcome or about skills or about fixing the real problem; it is a plan for the government’s own re-election and survival. And those plans always fail because they are no good for the country, for young people or for training. They do not have an outcome. We have the outcome from the 2004 ATC policy: they got re-elected. Fine; I am sure they are happy. They pat themselves on the back. They must be so proud of themselves. When they go to bed at night they must think, ‘Jeez, we have achieved a lot—zero outcome students for half a billion dollars.’ But then again, it is not their money; it is your money. It is taxpayers’ money, and the government can spend it like there is no tomorrow—like drunken sailors.

After 11 long years of this government, I think people are starting to wake up to the incompetence and to the nine interest rate rises in a row. There is a lot of irony in this place; it is one thing that I love. I just cannot get past this: in 2004 John Howard, the Prime Minister, did a fantastic job—a brilliant job—of convincing everybody that he was 100 per cent responsible for interest rates. He was responsible personally; he controlled them so much so that to vote for anyone else would be disastrous on interest rates and they would go up. People believed him. He did a good job—they believed him. Guess what? They still believe him today. He is responsible, and I believe he is responsible. I say that tongue in cheek. They believe he is responsible today for all nine interest rate rises—for the five since he made the promise. Yes! You are right! In 2004 you convinced everybody that you were responsible, Prime Minister, and they still believe you today, and now they are going to make you pay for it.

I would like to see Labor’s policy adopted. We can do something real about the 200,000 gap we have in skills—the crisis. We can do something beyond just importing labour; we can train young people. We can give them real training for real jobs. That can be achieved, and, with the half a billion dollars being spent on the ATCs, we will keep them but we will do it right. We will do it in partnership with industry, schools and the states. We will actually talk to people and consult with them, because we believe in the outcome of young people getting skills and jobs, and a national economy that works for everybody—not just the government. (Time expired)

Roger Price (Chifley, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is a pleasure to follow the honourable member for Oxley and his fine contribution to this debate on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007. From the outset I want to say that I agree with his remarks that on this side of the House we are interested in any solutions that will provide additional training opportunities for students that we represent in our electorates. We are not ideologues; we are not hidebound. We welcome innovation. It was on that basis that this proposal for Australian technical colleges was welcomed. I note that this bill is to increase the funding for the additional three technical colleges to be located in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney. The funding will increase by $74.7 million, taking the government’s overall contribution for 28 colleges to $548 million.

If you were to listen to the contributions of government members, you would not understand what businesses have been complaining about. Whether they are small, medium or large, businesses have been complaining consistently for some time that there are insufficient people being skilled and trained in this country. That is a tragedy. If we dismiss small business as just a bunch of whingers who do not know what they are talking about, we should at least take note of the Reserve Bank, which on more than 20 occasions has pointed to the skills shortage in the economy. This is acting as a handbrake on the economy. Our growth could be more sustainable if we had more skilled workers in our economy and did more training.

I want to get back to Western Sydney, my part of the world, which I am very proud to represent. We have a temporary college in Western Sydney at a temporary location. Notwithstanding it being up and operating—it is at Rouse Hill, an interim location—in 2007 it had an enrolment of 20 students. The actual enrolment was 20; the target enrolment was 25. For these 25 students the funding was $1.302 million. This is a very expensive way of training people. Consistent with the way these technical colleges are going, the training is often outsourced. So we are getting a double hit: you have to manage those contracts as well as the contracts of the students. I am proud to come from Western Sydney. In 2016 more than half of Sydney’s population will live in Western Sydney, but we have got only one technical college—its temporary location will be replaced by a permanent location at Schofields—to service Western Sydney.

I have some figures here that indicate just how many students there are in the TAFEs in my part of Western Sydney—not south-west Sydney; this is the Western Sydney Institute area. TAFEs delivered programs to 85,000 students in 2006 in eight campuses: Baulkham Hills, Blacktown, Blue Mountains, Mount Druitt, Nepean-Kingswood, Nepean-Penrith, Nirimba and Richmond. I am not counting south-west Sydney. What is the ATC delivering? It is delivering programs to 20 students—that is what it is actually delivering—and it is programmed to deliver to 25. That is a disgrace.

When you scratch the surface of the Howard government you will find an ideology. They are not interested in what is going to deliver the most practical outcomes. Where will the government and the taxpayers get the biggest punch for their money? I would have thought that the Western Sydney Institute, which is servicing 85,000 students, probably has the capacity to take on board another 25. In fact, I think it could take on a lot more if this government were serious about solving the skills shortage problems in our community. They are not. They would much rather have 457 visas, and we know all the problems that are associated with those visas. I well remember the Chairman of the Chamber of Commerce in Cairns telling me how disgusted he was that for every application that was submitted and granted to import a skilled worker—none failed; there is a 100 per cent success rate—not one check-up was undertaken by the department to see whether or not the conditions were actually being met, whether the shortage was real or not. I do not mind importing people; I do not mind having them come here, adding to our migrant population and our skills base. The thing that I really object to is when we are not doing the right thing to provide opportunities for our young people.

I would like to reiterate some of the points that the honourable member for Oxley spoke about. Now, after three years of the operation of these technical colleges, so lauded by every backbench member of the coalition, there has been not one graduate. There are only 1,800 enrolments in these technical colleges, but to that we are proposing to put in half a billion dollars. Half a billion dollars goes to 1,800 enrolments of the Australian technical colleges. Just two of the 21 colleges met their 2007 enrolment targets. I repeat: just two of the 21 colleges met their 2007 enrolment targets. What was the average cost? It was $175,000 per student. That is an enormous amount of money per student when you have not actually graduated any of your students. Only a third of the colleges are legally registered to provide training. As I mentioned previously, the colleges have outsourced the bulk of their training to TAFEs or registered training organisations.

One of the things I constantly hear from either the Minister for Vocational and Further Education or, alternatively, the backbenchers of the coalition, is that we are producing more apprentices now than we ever did. It would be a good thing if that were the truth. But, of course, the truth is that the Howard government folded traineeships into apprenticeships very early on, so they are just the one figure. So whenever it talks about apprenticeships, the reality is that the Howard government is talking about apprenticeships and traineeships. I have no difficulty with anyone doing a traineeship and I think it is a good thing that they were introduced, but I think it is very dishonest to suggest that someone doing a 12-month or six-month traineeship is equivalent to someone doing one of the more traditional trade apprenticeship programs. I think it is very dishonest of the government to run around claiming that there are more apprentices these days than there ever were under the former Labor government.

If we think that education and vocational education are really important in our society or communities—and I think they are—we would surely see an increase in spending; we would surely see that the proportion of government outlays going to education would be increasing. If that were the case, it could be truly said that the government of the day, the Howard government, was investing in the future of our society—investing in young people. But, of course, it is not. The investment is declining. Education expenditure is anticipated to decline from 7.7 per cent of total spending in 2005-06 to just 7.4 per cent in 2010-11.

Isn’t it disappointing, if you accept that there is a skills shortage, that expenditure on education is going to decline rather than increase as part of government outlays? I would like to think that it would, in fact, increase. I certainly hope that at the next election we elect a Labor government, and that would be the result over the next period of office of the government. Labor also have a program which would result in the establishment of trade facilities in schools. Something like $250 million will provide appropriate training facilities for the nation’s high schools over a 10-year period. I think that is a good thing. We have a long way to go to develop the vocational education opportunities for secondary students who are still in secondary schools. I note that in my own electorate the state government has designated Colyton High School, which will now be in the electorate of Lindsay, and Chifley College Senior Campus as part of the trade school system. That is a good initiative.

There has been an Auditor-General’s report of these Australian technical colleges and, not surprisingly, it has been very critical. It has been very critical of the haste with which the government has proceeded with these colleges. It has drawn attention to the lack of planning and integration and discussion with the state education systems. I think that the government should take to heart exactly what has been said in the Auditor-General’s report. I am not going to go through every piece of criticism.

Where does Labor stand? As I said at the beginning of my speech, we support a fresh and different approach. We wish that the Australian technical colleges could have fulfilled just one-tenth of the hype of the government, but, sadly, they have failed to measure up to date. I hope that we can get them to succeed. I think it is a good thing to have a variety of different educational and training opportunities for young people. I believe that there is a place in the sun for Australian technical colleges, but they need to be much better administered. I do not think we can continue to have them costing $175,000, on average, per student. That is horrendous. We certainly need to get those costs down. My own part of the world, Western Sydney, is the third largest economy in Australia. Having just 20 of these students enrolled in the third largest economy in Australia is, in my view, nothing to boast about. As I said, the TAFEs have a huge presence in Western Sydney.

Since the state government has amalgamated the department of education with the department of vocational education, I am looking to see more robust outcomes in the vocational area from our traditional high schools. The Leader of the Opposition, Kevin Rudd, has already announced a positive and practical measure that will allow many of the high schools in my electorate to give a better suite of choices to those students who want to enter the world of work but want to get some vocational training and perhaps even become a traditional apprentice.

We need to say in Australia that we put a priority on young people, that we value young people, that we want to give them opportunities and that we want them to be able to enter the world of work well-qualified for the challenges of working in private enterprise as apprentices or trainees. I support the amendment moved by Mr Stephen Smith, the member for Perth.

Warren Snowdon (Lingiari, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Northern Australia and Indigenous Affairs) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I thank my colleague for his contribution. He was erudite, as usual. We agree on most things, but not everything—just as I agree on some things with you, Mr Deputy Speaker Haase, but not a lot. The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 provides funding for three more Australian technical colleges. We have spoken about this in this chamber before. We support the additional expenditure in the critical area of vocational education and training, but the proposed amendments, as other speakers have said, highlight, among other things, the government’s complete lack of commitment to education within the broader Australian community. This ineptitude is felt most starkly in my own electorate of Lingiari but also, I am sure, in other regional and remote areas. In my case, it is particularly so, given the recent announcements of government intervention and a national emergency. I will come to that a little later.

This technical colleges legislation highlights a particular issue which I have spoken about before in this chamber on a number of occasions, and I am sure it reflects what is happening in your own electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker. This bill provides an additional $74.7 million for three new Australian technical colleges announced in the 2007-08 budget, to be located in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney. This appropriation takes the total cost of establishing 28 technical colleges to $548 million. That is a large sum of money—over half a billion dollars.

I want to express some grave reservations about the public policy aspects of these technical colleges and some concerns about the failure of the government, in looking at vocational education and training, to properly address the needs of my electorate. I think it is worth highlighting some of the comments that were made by the shadow minister for education and training, Stephen Smith, the member for Perth, in his speech in the second reading debate. He said that the government’s rationale behind the creation of the Australian technical colleges has been to isolate and attack the states and territories in an area that has traditionally been the responsibility of the states and territories themselves. Furthermore, he said that the government is attempting to find a political fix to an area of policy that has continued to be neglected over its 11 years in office. After spending more than half a billion dollars on a stand-alone network of ATCs, this is appalling.

I think this observation of itself is an example of the problems we are confronting—that is, that the ATCs have yet to produce one single graduate and the Howard government’s response is to build three additional colleges. The government’s own estimate is that Australia will confront a shortage of over 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years. These technical colleges are, we are told, expected to produce 10,000 graduates by 2010. That is a significant shortfall and it is hardly going to address the problem. It is like a pimple on the bum of an elephant—it will not show up. As for the impact it will have on the skills shortages across Australia, we know it will be farcically insignificant.

Over the past decade, the Howard government has slashed investment in vocational education and training. The TAFE system has been forced to turn away more than 325,000 students because of a lack of resources. There is one of these technical colleges in Darwin, which is not in my electorate but in the adjoining electorate of Solomon. It was allocated $8.265 million in the funding agreement and had a targeted enrolment of 50 in 2007. However, the actual enrolment was just a bit more than half—27. The Darwin technical college has already taken over three years to establish. The government only advertised for a college principal at the end of last year. It will take a number of years yet before it will be able to release skilled workers onto the labour market. It will not deliver enough tradespersons for Darwin’s needs, let alone for the needs of the Northern Territory generally. This further emphasises the policy failure in relation to addressing this very important national issue.

We have been told by the government that the technical colleges are located in regions with a high youth population and skills needs and which are supported by a significant industry base. Interestingly, my electorate has, I think, the highest birthrate of any electorate in Australia next to yours—Kalgoorlie—Mr Deputy Speaker Haase. Probably I am right in saying that it has the youngest population of any electorate in Australia. As in your electorate of Kalgoorlie, but not as significant in terms of the demand, there is a considerable skills shortage. As in your electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker, the mining industry is prominent in my electorate. The pastoral industry is prominent in my electorate. The tourism industry is prominent in my electorate. The fishing industry is prominent in my electorate. The housing and construction sector is prominent in my electorate, as are many other sectors. There is only a relatively small manufacturing base. Nevertheless, there is one. All of those sectors suffer from severe skills shortages. So we have a young population, a very high birthrate, severe skills shortages and a lack of educational opportunity. You do not have to be Einstein to work it out. It is a region where there is a young population, severe skills shortages and no investment at all by this government in vocational education and training. There is no technical college for Lingiari—nothing.

The Northern Territory government held a conference in November 2005 entitled 2015: Moving the Territory Ahead. It was told that regional economies were suffering as the Darwin economy boomed. In 2006 the Territory Construction Association stated that these skills shortages were leading to business closures, despite a booming economy. In addressing this concern, the conference delegates stated that there was a crucial need to involve Indigenous people. Mr Deputy Speaker, a little like your electorate—although it is a significantly higher proportion of the population—in my own electorate roughly 40 per cent of the population are Indigenous. Just shy of a third of the whole of the Northern Territory population are Indigenous. You would know, Mr Deputy Speaker, from the work which has been done by some of the mining industry players in your own electorate, how it is possible, working with local communities and education providers, to get skilled workers from the Indigenous population. Unfortunately, there is no indication from the announcements made thus far by the government in relation to technical colleges that they understand this priority for my electorate.

We know that the cost of providing one graduate from this exercise is very significant—$125,000 per student, which is not a bad sum of money. Imagine what you could do in your electorate, and certainly in my electorate, if someone offered to fund 50 or 100 kids at $175,000 each. You could build the Taj Mahal of all training centres and you would be guaranteed people to fill it. But that is not what is happening. Instead of investing resources in the TAFE sector, as Labor has suggested, and instead of investing resources in schools, as Labor proposes, what we have is a stand-alone system. We are discovering that this system is subletting or tendering the training back to the TAFE sector. So one asks the obvious question: what is the relative value of having this investment in technical colleges when we can see that it is at the cost of the broader community?

The shortage of skills in the Territory is exacerbated by the growth in the level of economic activity that the Territory is experiencing. Access Economics’ five-year Business outlook released last month predicts strong growth in the Territory economy of between five and 6.5 per cent per annum over the next three years. You know what that means in your own electorate, Mr Deputy Speaker Haase, in terms of driving demand, but, most significantly, it is driving demand for labour. We know that little effort has been made by the government to address the skills needs of industry by tapping into the untapped resource—in the context of my own electorate and no doubt in yours, Mr Deputy Speaker, and certainly in other parts of Australia—that is, the Indigenous labour force. There has been no attempt. I think it is worth reflecting just for a moment on some important information about the Northern Territory’s labour force. The Workforce NT report notes:

Over 83 per cent ... of the Indigenous population aged 15 years and over—

in the NT—

reside in remote areas. This existing and potential labour force is characterised by:

• High rates of disengagement from the labour market;
• High rates of employment through Community Development Employment Projects (CDEP);
• Declining mainstream employment ...

Dr John Taylor, author of the Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research report Indigenous economic futures in the Northern Territory, has stated:

• The only growth in census-recorded Indigenous employment since 1996 has occurred in the Community Development Employment Projects scheme, with Indigenous numbers in mainstream (non-CDEP) employment actually falling
• The CDEP scheme has thus overtaken mainstream employment as the primary employer of Indigenous people in the Northern Territory.

The CDEP program was a response to the calls of Indigenous Australians for an alternative to passive welfare—that is, sit-down money—that would meet the requirements of community development. I will come back to that in a moment.

To date, the thrust of Commonwealth policy aimed at reducing welfare dependency and raising economic status has been towards increasing mainstream employment, especially in the private sector. This has not been achieved in the Northern Territory. The underlying determinants of the skills shortage in the Territory and the inability of many in my electorate to fully engage with the labour market remain focused on the themes of disadvantage and the historical legacy of exclusion from the education and training sectors.

I want to spend a bit of time on that. You will have heard me talk about it here before, because I have flapped my gums about it so often in this place that I am getting sick and tired of doing it. But there are, in my estimation, somewhere between 3,000 and 5,000 young Aboriginal Territorians between the ages of 13 and 18 who have no access to any education services to speak of, no access to a normal high school and certainly no access to any vocational education and training—none.

We know that the significant proportion of these people, once they reach the age of 16, end up as CDEP workers. Some of them undertake very important work in communities. They might engage in major programs; they might be engaged in working in the local store, in school, in aged-care programs or childcare programs. There are a range of programs that you see in communities, Mr Deputy Speaker, about which you are aware.

We have seen, as a result of the intervention by the Commonwealth government in the Northern Territory, the sacking of 8,000 workers, effectively, by removing CDEP. As of the end of this current financial year, it will no longer exist in the Northern Territory. So the 8,000 people who are currently on CDEP will be off it. Remember what I said earlier: CDEP is about Aboriginal people themselves saying that they are sick of passive welfare and they want to actually make sure that people do something for the money that they get from the Commonwealth.

I think the first CDEP scheme operated in 1976 or 1977. I recall doing a review of the scheme when I was working for the Australian National University between 1979 and 1981. I know how it operates. What we have seen in the Northern Territory, as a result of the government’s intervention and a change in the way in which they administer labour market programs and the removal of the remote area exemption, is that Aboriginal people are going to be moved from CDEP, where they are actually doing work, onto sit-down money.

The reason for this is, of course, so that the Commonwealth can garnish or get hold of by quarantine some of the income of Indigenous people. Leaving aside the merits or otherwise of that debate, the point to be made here is that the government have taken people off a work program and put them onto the dole equivalent or into a training program and this is already causing major concern in the community. There is major concern for a number of reasons, not least of which is that we are seeing an increasing number of people relocate. They are relocating from their home communities, because of these changes, to towns like Alice Springs, Katherine and Tennant Creek. This of course places increasing pressure upon those towns and increasing pressure upon the services that they currently provide and are able to provide. Unfortunately, it is one of the negative effects of the government intervention and something which was highlighted in evidence last Friday to the Senate Standing Committee on Legal and Constitutional Affairs by the Mayor of Alice Springs Town Council, Her Worship Fran Kilgariff, and the Mayor of Katherine Town Council, Her Worship Anne Shepherd. They both highlighted this issue.

When we look at the recommendations of the report on which the government’s intervention is based, we see that one of the most significant recommendations is about education. The report points out clearly the things that I have observed over many years—that if you want to provide people with an effective capacity to be participants in the community and to take the responsibility of every other Australian citizen, you provide them with an opportunity for a job. But, to provide them with an opportunity for a job, you have to provide them with access to training or an education. We have historically seen in the Northern Territory a failure by successive governments to do just that, and we are seeing a continuation of that by this government.

So instead of seeing any expenditure at all relating to technical colleges, which will assist in the training of Aboriginal people to address their skills needs, there is no money—not a red cent, not a zack—for the provision of vocational education and training or indeed educational services in these communities. Even in the government’s response, which is currently being debated in the Senate, there is no mention of this. The government have spent over half a billion dollars, but they cannot find any money to address this crucial issue. In the context of this bill that we are currently discussing, I ask one thing: what benefit has the establishment of these technical colleges had for people in remote Australia? I say that it is nil, zilch, zero. There has been no benefit whatsoever. (Time expired)

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

I rise to speak on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007. This bill provides the funding for three more Australian technical colleges, in Perth, Brisbane and Western Sydney, bringing the total cost of establishing 28 colleges to $548 million. Unfortunately, the bill reflects the usual approach that this government has to serious issues in the Australian community and economy. It does nothing for so long, and then, when it finally does respond to a problem largely of its own making, what we get is not a real solution for the future but a political fix. This is a political fix to a problem that desperately needs a very real solution, and that problem is the skills crisis.

The Reserve Bank has warned over and over again of the growing skills crisis and the impact that it has on inflation and interest rates. Just last Monday, the Reserve Bank of Australia issued a warning again about capacity constraints in the economy and the implications for interest rates. That warning, of course, came on the tail of the most recent, the ninth, interest rate rise in a row. The Reserve Bank statement reinforced the need for positive action from the Howard government to address capacity constraints, particularly the skills shortage. And it was not the first warning. There have been 20 warnings from the Reserve Bank about the implications of capacity constraints and skills shortages in the Australian economy. The response from the Howard government was to deny it for many years and finally to come up with a highly cynical political fix.

Capacity constraints, including the skills crisis, are not things that rise up out of the ground. It is not as if the economy is moving along and then suddenly, overnight, out of the ground, rises the capacity constraint of a skills shortage. You can see it coming. We on this side of the House have seen it coming, and we have been asking for action for a number of years. Business, both big and small, has seen it coming, and it has asked for action. The Reserve Bank has seen it coming and has given at least 20 warnings. But the government denied the existence of the skills crisis even as recently as last year, just as they denied climate change and housing affordability. And, when they finally acted, they did not govern for the future of the country. They campaigned for their own futures. This is a political fix which was announced in the lead-up to the 2004 election and will be delivered to a marginal electorate near you in the lead-up to the 2007 election.

We on this side of the House are not opposing this scheme. It did go to the electorate in the 2004 election and, quite frankly, some action—any action—is better than no action on something that has such a negative impact on ordinary families dealing with interest rate rises. We do, however, have grave reservations about the effectiveness of the Australian technical colleges in fixing a problem that the government itself has created over 11 years of neglect. When the government was elected in 1996, there was already in place a non-tertiary education sector, known in the broader community as TAFE. In that first year, 1996, the government cut the Commonwealth Dental Scheme. It waited until the second year, 1997, to begin slashing investment in vocational education and training.

Between 1997 and 2000, Commonwealth revenue in vocational education decreased by 13 per cent. Between 2000 and 2004, it increased again by the extraordinary figure of one per cent. That is a 13 per cent decrease between 1997 and 2000 and a one per cent increase since then. Since 1997, on John Howard’s watch, with increasingly strong indicators that a skills crisis was approaching and would put upward pressure on inflation and interest rates, real expenditure per hour of TAFE curriculum fell by nearly 24 per cent. That figure comes from data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research. TAFE is the major provider of vocational education and training in Australia, with more than 1.2 million students. TAFE accounts for 75 per cent of all students and 85 per cent of all training hours, yet we saw it slashed by 13 per cent in the first four years of the Howard government.

Year after year, the Howard government has ignored this most vital part of our community and education infrastructure. The sector is crying out for additional recurrent funding and much needed investment in infrastructure, despite it being the area that will bear the greatest responsibility for the skills, vocational education and training development of our workforce. So what did we get with the Australian technical colleges announcement before the election in 2004? We have seen it delivered, in the main, over the last three years. Ninety per cent of the Australian technical colleges are in marginal or coalition held seats. How cynical is that? It is a political fix for the Liberal Party, not for the future for the Australian people.

More than $500 million in expenditure and so far there is not one graduate to show for it—not one. There will be graduates; the first one will be known as the ‘half billion dollar graduate’. We will see that one soon, I am sure. The Australian technical colleges will graduate fewer than 10,000 students by 2010. The government’s own figures show a shortfall of 200,000 skilled workers by then, and the centrepiece of the government’s skills program will deliver, maybe, 10,000 students by 2010. The locations for these centres were chosen not based on the need for skills but based on John Howard’s need for votes. So far, we have no graduates. Only five per cent of the government’s own estimation of need by 2010 will be met by this, the centrepiece of their skills policy. Meanwhile, the skills crisis grows week by week and continues to put upward pressure on inflation, which, as we know from the Treasurers’ comments, is exactly where he thinks we need it.

The costs also have blown out, but there have been other problems as well. The Australian technical colleges have been plagued by difficulties and low enrolments. After three years and $500 million there is not one graduate, but there are only 1,800 enrolments. Twenty-one of the 25 colleges are now open, but only two of those 21 met their 2007 targets for enrolment. The average cost per student at this point is $175,000 per student. Only one-third of the colleges are legally registered to provide training, and many outsource to TAFEs. In fact, only nine of the 21 Australian technical colleges do not outsource to TAFE, which, as I said, existed before. So they cannot fill their enrolments, they outsource to TAFE, which was already happening and where it does not cost anywhere near $175,000 per student, and they have been unable, to date, to provide apprenticeships for their students—which was, of course, the original idea.

Despite the government’s Australian technical colleges’ website noting that the colleges would be established in ‘areas where there are skills needs, high youth population and a strong industry base’, we have seen 90 per cent of the colleges instead located in coalition or marginal seats—in other words, not where the skills need is high but where the government’s vote need is high. The Australian technical colleges are the centrepiece of the Howard government’s training agenda. After years of denying there was even a skills crisis, this is it. This is their vision for the future: a political fix that will try to plug a 200,000 deficit in skilled people with 10,000 graduates, that puts marginal seats above all else, that puts politics above government, that fails to serve my community and that fails to govern for my community.

While we on this side of the House agree that any move to increase training opportunities in Western Sydney is important, we need to acknowledge that this latest technical college, the only one in Western Sydney, will provide 25 places in a city of two million people. One technical college in Western Sydney will provide 25 student apprenticeships in the third largest economy in Australia—a city of two million people and the fastest growing region, in terms of population, in the country. The Howard government has let us down badly. It has really let us down. I have spoken many times about education in my community. I have talked about the university participation rate in Western Sydney being just over half the rate of the rest of Sydney. I do not have the figures for technical college participation—they are not available—but I would expect that they reflect university participation rates, which, coincidentally, also matched the participation rates in leisure and cultural activities. In Western Sydney, we are an incredibly long way behind now. After 11 years of a Howard government that claims to govern for the battlers, it has delivered 25 places—for those people who can afford to pay—for a city of two million people that is already participating at only just over half the rate of the rest of Sydney. Well, that is going to solve the skills crisis in Western Sydney! That will do a great deal!

There are three reasons why the skills crisis in Western Sydney needs to be solved—three reasons which stand out like nothing else. The first reason is that it provides an escape from poverty and public housing. We in Western Sydney have large public housing estates—planning errors from the past, I think we would all agree. We have large areas of disadvantage. Skills, training and education are the way out for these people. But there are 25 places, if you can afford one. Too bad if your parents are unemployed; too bad if your parents have a drug problem; too bad if your parents are on a disability pension; too bad if you are on a disability pension. There are 25 places for a city of two million people, if you can afford to pay for one.

The second reason is that we are one of the largest economies in the country. We are the driver of this country. Our population is growing at a much more rapid rate than the rest of the country. If we cannot grow our business in Western Sydney to match our population growth, this whole country will wear the price of that. The skills shortage in my area is a major constraint to the development of business. It is a major constraint. Twenty-five places for 75,000 businesses in Western Sydney is not going to do the job. Twenty-five places for those who can afford it, and we have 75,000 businesses.

The third reason is one that the Reserve Bank has warned the government about 20 times: the skills crisis is putting upward pressure on inflation and upward pressure on interest rates. I do not know how many times this has been said. I do not know how many times it needs to be said in order for the government to respond to this. My area of Parramatta is one of the areas in the country where house prices are falling. It is one of the areas which has the highest insolvency rates in the country. Nobody in Australia can afford interest rate rises but, I tell you, my area is really struggling. My area is struggling like I just cannot believe. When I am doorknocking out of there, I can see the fear in people’s faces now because of this. We have to deal with the skills crisis—

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

I’m sure when you’re doorknocking you can see the fear.

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

You need to get out more, Parliamentary Secretary.

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

Order! The honourable member should ignore the parliamentary secretary and the parliamentary secretary should sit there quietly.

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

I walk 500 kilometres around my electorate.

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

The parliamentary secretary should not get so excited.

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

If the parliamentary secretary went out in my electorate with his views that there is no problem here, I think it would serve this side of the House very well. The campus, which was announced in the budget in July, was originally at Rouse Hill. It was announced last year as a temporary campus. The most recent announcement was for a permanent campus at Schofields. Currently there are 20 students enrolled at Rouse Hill with a target of 25 students. There is an extremely low completion rate of only 60 per cent. Even the one technical college that we have is clearly struggling to meet its own targets. We know that the Australian technical colleges plan is a quick fix and we know that it is a political fix. It was the rebadging of one class of 25 student apprentices from one high school in Rouse Hill. That is what it was. The original announcement of a new technical college was the rebadging of an existing class of 25 students at the Rouse Hill school, which has now been moved to a permanent home at the cost of $174,000 for 20 places. It is quite extraordinary.

We need much more than this in Western Sydney. We need real answers for young people and for adults who are retraining. In a city of two million people, 25 places does not cut it. Of course, we do not at this point know how much it will cost for one of these very lucky 25 young people to attend this school. We do not know what it will cost, but we can assume that not one adult from a disadvantaged background will benefit from the opening of this college. How much could have been done if the government had invested this funding through local schools or the local TAFE system. In Western Sydney we have eight TAFE campuses. There are none in my electorate, but Parramatta is surrounded by them: Baulkham Hills, Blacktown, Blue Mountains, Mount Druitt, Nepean-Kingswood, Nepean-Penrith, Nirimba-Quakers Hill and Richmond. In 2006 that combination of eight TAFEs delivered programs to more than 85,000 students in 1,000 vocational areas, yet this is the area that had its funding cut by 13 per cent by this government in its first four years and has had an increase in funding of only one per cent since then.

In spite of the 20 warnings from the Reserve Bank of Australia about the implications of capacity constraints and skills shortages in the Australian economy, what we get from Howard at this point is cuts to TAFE that provides training for 85,000 people and 25 places in a city of two million people. What distresses me about the 11 years of the Howard government—the last 11 of 15 years of an unprecedented boom in this country on the back of the mining boom and the growth of China and India—is the lost opportunity of it. Boom times such as those that we have had over the last 15 years were an opportunity to make a real difference—to invest for the future.

The part of all of us that is not selfish and is responsible expects much more than we have got from this government. After a decade of boom times, is our education system better? Do we honestly think that it is better for our children after a decade of boom times? The answer coming loudly from my electorate is no. After a decade of boom times, unprecedented global booms, are our hospitals better? The answer coming from my electorate is no. Are our community facilities and our ovals and sporting clubs better? No, absolutely not. Are our cities more liveable after a decade of unprecedented boom times? No. Have we bitten the bullet on water? No. Have we bitten the bullet on energy? No. After a decade of boom times, have we looked at the changing world and seen jobs moving freely around the world and even wondered where this country fits in? Have we looked at our strengths and invested in ourselves? No. We have congratulated ourselves on riding on the tail of the biggest boom the world has ever seen. We have not noticed the growing number who are left behind. We have on this side, but on the other side absolutely not. We have not put out a hand to make a difference in the lives of people with mental illness or disabilities and the families that share their lives. After a decade of boom times, are we more open, more generous, do we feel safer and are we better regarded in the world? No, we are not. These are absolutely the easy things that we understand.

It is the hard things that are required to solve the skills crisis in this country. Having consideration for the division of responsibility between federal, state and local governments—getting out there and finding solutions and cooperating—is the hard stuff. That is what was needed. We had an extremely effective system in TAFE. We have seen substantial cuts to that by this government and a $500 million political fix that delivers 25 places for the people who can afford it in a city in Western Sydney containing two million people. That is what we got from this government after 11 years—11 years of denying that there was a skills crisis.

I consider that it would be appropriate to change the name of this bill. I know I cannot do that, but when I look at the title of the  Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2007 I consider what that means in my electorate. It means Australian technical colleges in marginal electorates in order to get the government re-elected and flexibility for 25 people who can afford it in a city of two million people achieving Australia’s skills needs. That is what the government has delivered for Western Sydney: 25 places in a city of two million people and cuts to the TAFE system of 13 per cent that delivers training to 85,000.

Chris Bowen (Prospect, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Treasurer) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

As the honourable member for Parramatta said, nothing demonstrates the failure of this government’s Australian technical colleges program better than the experience in Western Sydney—one of the biggest employment-generating areas in this country and its program has been a complete failure. The previous Minister for Vocational and Further Education has been sacked but the people trying to get a technical education in Western Sydney and elsewhere continue to pay the price. The former minister has paid a price, but the people trying to get into the system continue to pay the price. Let us look at the background of this issue in Western Sydney. On 26 September the government announced the establishment of Australian technical colleges. On 15 November, Senator Payne announced that tenders would be sought to establish a college in Western Sydney. The former minister announced this college with great fanfare on 23 June 2006. He said, ‘I look forward to attending the opening of the college in early 2007.’

David Hawker (Speaker) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Order! It being 2 pm, the debate is interrupted in accordance with standing order 97. The debate may be resumed at a later hour and the member will have leave to continue speaking when the debate is resumed.