Daniel Mulino (Fraser, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak about one of the great challenges and the great opportunities for my community and electorate of Fraser, for the broader community of western Melbourne and indeed for all similar communities around Australia—outer suburban areas and regional areas, particularly those that are disadvantaged—and that is the need to invest more in the skills and job opportunities for our young people. It was wonderful to have a visit from the shadow minister for industry and innovation last week in Fraser, and we visited many employers and training providers. It was a very positive day that reinforced the need for many of the policies that the Labor opposition and the Leader of the Opposition, Anthony Albanese, are promoting at the moment.

I want to talk about a bit of the context in which we need to think about the need for more investment in skills and employment opportunities. If we look at the west of Melbourne at the moment we see that 13 per cent of people aged 15 to 24 are not in employment, education or training. Now, there are two things to note about that. Firstly, that rate of 13 per cent is significantly higher than the rate overall for Melbourne, which is nine per cent. Secondly, we are talking about a disadvantage that isn't just affecting school leavers but is tracking well into people's lives in their mid-20s. This is something that is simply not good enough and that is entrenching disadvantage and entrenching intergenerational disadvantage.

It's also important to look at the fact that modelling by the West of Melbourne Economic Development. Alliance suggests that in the next 10 years there will be 100,000 more people looking for work than there are new jobs created in areas like my electorate of Fraser. Also, if we look at the rates of underemployment and labour underutilisation in Melbourne's west, we see that for those aged 15 to 24, even pre-COVID, underemployment was 18.2 per cent and unemployment was 14.9 per cent, for a scandalous underutilisation rate of 33 per cent. This is clearly an area that demands more policy attention and more investment from government.

There are lots of bright spots, which we can learn from and which point to the way forward. Let's look at skills, for example. The Victoria University skills hub is a wonderful example of the way forward if we put more investment into this area. The skills hub was opened in February 2020. It is a world-class component of the VU Polytechnic and includes a health and community services centre of excellence. It is highly collaborative and involves students, local schools, TAFEs, universities and industrial employers, all working together. Importantly, it is focused on robotics, virtual reality and 3D printing. But it is not just those specific skills. What inspired me was the fact that it's looking at those skills in a hybrid environment—looking at coding, looking at robotics and looking at virtual reality, and there are four people looking to work in the caring economy, in health—and the way we can provide very targeted skills for people who are going to get employment in the future in those growing parts of the economy.

Another example is the Victoria University Cyber Security Training Centre. I was thrilled to be at the opening of this centre. It is now thriving. It is providing skills in one of the fastest-growing parts of the economy to students in the area of Melbourne that I represent, which is so in need of employment opportunities for people coming from disadvantaged backgrounds. This is going to be one of the growth areas in the economy, and we know from its performance already that the VU Cyber Security Training Centre is giving students precisely the skills they need. Again, it is highly collaborative. It was invested in collaboratively by VU, along with Cisco. Last term alone they had 700 applicants.

The next part of the chain, if you will, is jobs. We can look at Bell Environmental as an example. I visited Bell Environmental with the shadow minister. This is a firm that provides world-leading, first-class emergency services vehicles, with significant potential for export. It's providing services right across Australia and beyond. It also has potential to extend its services into the defence sector. Bell has around 180 full-time jobs. Importantly, it has expanded to this level of employment from something like 35 jobs just a couple of decades ago. Importantly, they're looking to extend, notwithstanding all the economic headwinds they've faced over the past 12 to 18 months. And many of the job opportunities they're looking to create will be for apprentices.

That takes us to the way forward. Let's look at some of the policies the Leader of the Opposition and the Labor opposition have put forward. We need more investment in VET. More than $3 billion has been ripped out of TAFEs. There are 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees than there were when this government came to office. We also need more apprentices through major projects. The Australian Skills Guarantee—ensuring that one in 10 jobs on major federal projects will be for apprentices—is a good example of that, and there are so many more other wonderful opportunities.