Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the revitalising national planning and vocational education and training statement that was made in the House yesterday by the Minister for Skills and Training. After a decade of inaction, it has fallen to the Albanese Labor government to rebuild Australia's vocational education and training system, a system that is so vital to our collective effort of remaining a skilled, developed, innovative, prosperous and productive nation—a system, I must point out, that should not have to be rebuilt and should never have been savaged in the first place.

As the minister highlighted in his statement, Australia is facing one of its biggest economic challenges in decades as a result of the shortage of skilled workers across the economy. The shortages are acutely felt an industrial cities such as mine in the Illawarra. OECD data has identified Australia as having the second-highest labour shortage amongst OECD countries, and the Skills Priority List shows that occupations in shortage areas nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, jumping from 153 to 286.

The minister's statement notes that in March 2020 the former National Skills Commission predicted that, over the next five years, nine out of 10 new jobs would require postschool qualifications, with four out of 10 requiring vocational training. Jobs and Skills Australia's quarterly report, released on Tuesday, found that, over the year to May 2023, 91 per cent of total employment growth was in occupations that require postschool qualifications, and this is before we even start preparing for the new skills that we will need in the coming years in industries like renewables.

Labor's skills and training agenda is not only about repairing; it is also about preparing. A great example of this is in Jobs and Skills Australia's clean energy capacity study. The capacity study will provide critical evidence and insights to support workforce planning, policy development and program design, all key elements that are needed to build a strong and vibrant clean energy sector and contribute to the government's Powering Australia plan. The study, which is expected to be released next month, will outline the employment, upskilling and reskilling opportunities that our transforming to a net-zero economy will create.

This is important for my community, particularly following Minister Bowen commencing community consultations last month for the Illawarra offshore wind zone. The proposed zone is close to 1,500 square kilometres in size, with the potential to produce 4.2 gigawatts of electricity. On a side note, I encourage all of my community to get out and have their say before consultations close on 16 October. Some public consultation sessions will kick off next Monday and go through to Thursday. I encourage everyone to visit the department's website and have a look at when those sessions are, to come along and ask all the questions you need to ask to get the information and the facts firsthand, and to have your say and contribute.

To succeed in building our workforce—and we must—in this endeavour we are going to need a skilled and agile workforce. It is estimated that, in the Illawarra, offshore wind zones will be able to deliver up to 2,500 jobs in construction and 1,250 jobs ongoing. Nationally, the job opportunities of an offshore wind industry in Australia range from 3,000 to 8,000 jobs annually. I have not wasted a second in preparing the groundwork for these new jobs, securing a $10 million investment to establish an Energy Futures Skills Centre at the University of Wollongong so we have the skilled workforce to build the grid of the future. I have also secured a $2.5 million investment for a Renewable Energy Training facility at Wollongong TAFE, which will include upgrades to equipment and teaching aids.

The Energy Futures Skills Centre will deliver the education, training and engagement needs for the workforce of the future in partnership with local industry, community and global partners. The centre will aim to utilise our university's broad range of innovative materials and system research to provide a real-world example of how new energy solutions can be adopted and implemented from a workforce and industry perspective, as well as engaging with communities on their energy transformation. We must make sure that we understand the training needs of these new and emerging industries so that we have workers ready to go when we need them.

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the Maersk Training centre in Esbjerg, Denmark. The training centre provides training focused on basic safety and technical skills for operational employees in the wind industry. The centre provides specific technical know-how and advanced qualifications for workers. The centre includes a survival pool, a fire ground, a working-at-height tower, helicopter underwater-escape training and escape-chute training. I actually wanted to sign up for the helicopter underwater-escape training, myself. It looked really great. This is a facility that is located close to the port of Esbjerg, which is a leading port in Europe for the handling and shipping out of wind power. It has transformed from a major oil and gas port. One of our local journalists, Connor Pearce, from the Illawarra Mercury, travelled over to Denmark with us and told a great story of a local worker, Jakob Lykke, who has been in the fishing industry, the oil and gas industry and is now working in offshore wind. He has seen his port and his community, and the jobs they have there, transformed three times over his lifetime. It is now one of the major epicentres for offshore wind in Europe. The port has specialised facilities for transporting, pre-assembling, shipping out and servicing wind turbines. Port Esbjerg ships out 80 per cent of Europe's offshore wind capacity.

In my discussion with Maersk, they outlined that they work on the calculation that for every megawatt in an offshore wind project you will need one technician requiring specialised training to work on and around the turbines. On this basis, we are going to need ongoing training for thousands of technicians. Maersk, as a training provider, work in a collaborative manner with other industry players, equipment manufacturers, unions, schools and the Danish equivalent of TAFE to be able to meet the workforce need of their own renewable projects. This is the exact approach that this government has tasked the JSA to undertake when it comes to our own skills and training framework, including 10 new jobs and skills councils, which have been created to provide Australian industry sectors with a stronger and more strategic capacity to ensure that training is relevant to their needs. Both Jobs and Skills Australia and the jobs and skills councils feature tripartism in their design. Tripartism in the governance of Jobs and Skills Australia and jobs and skills councils is a key ingredient to their success.

I note the member for Farrer took issue with this approach in her comments to the House, ridiculing it and making an unfair characterisation that this approach was only about seats at the table for union mates. Over my years working in this building, I have had the absolute pleasure of working with union representatives with years and years of experience in training our workers—people like Pat Forward, Angelo Gavrietalos, Andrew Dettmer, Ian Curry, Mark Burgess, Rob Long, Maxine Sharkey, Arthur Rorris and many other passionate campaigners for the rights of workers to a comprehensive and robust training system that provides workers with portable skills that they can build into lifelong careers, and training that is robust enough to make workers able to go through transitions like Jakob Lykke did in Esbjerg.

At the outset, I want to refute this assertion, as tripartism, at its core, is about bringing industry, business and unions together to get education and training outcomes for workers. Our unions are a vital part of these discussions. Do you know why? It's because they have the interests of workers at heart: the electrician who installs electricity—your lights, your air conditioners, your hot water—the builder who builds your house, and the maritime worker who transports ships in and out of our ports safely and gets goods in and out of the country. Unions work hard to make sure that workers get paid properly and get home safely, and this is especially vital in areas like mine, where we have mining and heavy industry. Unions also work hard to build productivity and prosperity.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:10 to 10:22

David Smith (Bean, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

Thank you to the member for Cunningham, my friend Alison Byrnes MP, for her contribution. I know Alison is helping drive a skills revitalisation in her home of Wollongong, getting the training needed for the jobs of the future. Alison follows a great member in the former member for Cunningham, Sharon Bird MP, a former minister for vocational education and one of the great champions of TAFE. In Canberra, the heart of that VET skills reorganisation will be in my electorate of Bean, both in Philip at our new TAFE precinct and in some of the industrial areas where some of the more interesting and innovative organisations are developing here in the Austrian Capital Territory.

As the minister noted in his statement to the House, we face challenges as a nation. OECD data identifies Australia as having the second highest labour shortage amongst OECD countries. And the Skills Priority List shows that occupation shortages nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, jumping from 153 to 286 occupations. In March 2022, a former national skills commission predicted that over the next five years, nine out of 10 new jobs would require post-school qualifications, with four out of 10 requiring vocational training. This is the legacy we inherited.

With that challenge outlined, I speak in support of the ministerial statement on revitalising national planning in vocational education and training—with some experience working with some of the most experienced technical workers in this country. Before I came to this place, I worked for Professionals Australia and represented and engaged with technicians, scientists and engineers in both the public and private sectors. I worked closely with the Electrical Trades Union and the AMWU, two of the giant technical unions in this country. I understand quite well their commitment to skills development as well as everything else in the world of work.

My organisation, Professionals Australia, was responsible for developing the first MBA program in Australia. Investment in supporting undergraduate qualifications but also understanding the need to buttress that with additional training, both in the workplace and through institutions, both VET and universities, has always been central to the Professionals Australia ethos. One of the standouts for me was that quality skills or VET training drove quality in the workplace, and that, in turn, was good for their organisations. But what I saw over a decade was a drop-off in investment in qualifications in engineering and science, and, at the same time, I witnessed the almost complete loss of technical skills in and across workplaces, particularly in government departments.

Rebuilding this capability is critical. The Albanese government get this. If we are to meet the challenges of the future—clean energy, defence industry, software and application programming, a greener transport fleet, natural disaster mitigation, agricultural production, high-skilled manufacturing and making the utmost of our critical mineral reserves—then we must have a skilled workforce in place, and a workforce that combines both technical and professional skills.

We were given a mandate to drive improvements in the VET sector, and Minister O'Connor has done a power of work laying down the foundation for that reform—reform that will ensure that national planning for the skills our economy needs is timely, high quality, evidence based and tested for veracity against the first-hand knowledge of industry and all the key industry players. The establishment of Jobs and Skills Australia and the creation of 10 Jobs and Skills Councils are significant milestones in the skills and training portfolio. These are strategically linked to provide effective, structured, national and sector based planning frameworks and the modern, timely skills development that is needed for Australia to be a more productive and prosperous nation.

Jobs and Skills Australia and the Jobs and Skills Councils have industries and experts at the core of their governance and work programs. Jobs and Skills Australia replaced the National Skills Commission. The commission provided an important body of work, but it was limited to a narrow mandate and was not structured or resourced for deeper engagement with industries and state and territory governments. A critical element that is central and baked into the design of Jobs and Skills Australia is ensuring that impacted industries and knowledgeable stakeholders have a seat at the table.

As I said before, ten tripartite Jobs and Skills Councils have now been established: energy, gas and renewables; agribusiness; early educators, health and human services; arts, personal services, retail, tourism and hospitality; public safety and government; manufacturing; finance, technology and business; mining and automotive; building, construction and property; and transport and logistics. These councils will work hand in glove with Jobs and Skills Australia, providing on-the-ground industry perspectives of the real economy. Jobs and Skills Australia data and analysis will be integrated with the experiences of those running businesses, who are often the first to identify emerging trends. The councils will then lead workforce planning for their industries to identify immediate skills needs, as well as those needed in the future. They'll both work directly with industry sectors on the planning and training required to address immediate medium- and long-term skill needs. But right at the heart of this is tripartism—employers, unions and governments working in cooperation.

As I said before, my experience in these sectors is that the unions put intense work into skills development, whether it be through licensing or encouraging apprenticeships. As I said, my old organisation had the first MBA program in Australia. We've always been at the heart of the skills challenge. Creating improvements to address national skills requires more than the Commonwealth government working in isolation or with a few select and favoured partners. We all need to work together.

It's worth mentioning, in support of this ministerial statement, that this government has already been delivering on other areas in the skills challenge. We've taken a focus on increasing participation at both the school and the tertiary level. We're rebuilding a sector wilfully neglected by the previous government because we understand that a strong VET sector is critical to nearly all of our key policy challenges. That's why the Albanese government is investing over $400 million to reform foundation skills programs through the redesigned Skills for Education and Employment program.

We also know that the skills challenge is even more acute for our First Nations Australians, with about 40 per cent of adult Indigenous people having minimal English literacy. This figure can rise to as high as 70 per cent in remote communities. For this reason we've emphasised co-design and First Nations led delivery in the government's plan for the future of foundation skills programs.

By working in genuine partnership with our state and territory counterparts, our fee-free TAFE program is helping support key industries experiencing skills shortages. It's focused on areas of emerging growth while providing access to priority cohorts, including the most vulnerable in our communities. The numbers have already spoken for themselves. In the first six months we exceeded our target of 180,000 enrolments, with almost 215,000 Australians enrolling in fee-free courses. That's 215,000 people accessing high-quality training in areas where we need skilled workers.

Demographic data shows that this approach is making inroads in supporting disadvantaged and in-need Australians, with enrolments including more than 50,000 jobseekers, more than 15,000 people with disability and more than 6,000 First Nations Australians. We're not stopping there. We're providing funding for a further 300,000 fee-free TAFE places starting next year. Put simply, the opportunities of fee-free study can change lives. But, at the same time, it will change our economy and help us address the key critical policy challenges that we face.

Every member of our government knows the importance of skills and training for jobs of the future. I thank the minister again for the hard work of his team and, of course, the hard work of his department.

Joanne Ryan (Lalor, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I rise today to speak in response to the ministerial statement by the Minister for Skills and Training, the Hon. Brendan O'Connor MP, the member for Gorton, who, for a long time, was a neighbour to the seat of Lalor. For many years we shared similar constituencies with similar concerns.

The statement made by the minister is about revitalising national planning of vocational education and training. It's an important statement because it outlines to the House the direction that this government is taking. That direction is being driven, in the first instance, by the skills shortage that we've inherited, which is global. Unfortunately, Australia has been identified as having the second-highest skills shortage in the OECD. It's not something that we should be proud of. That is driving this new direction, as is as our critical understanding that we are in a transformational economy and we need to shift, be agile and plan carefully. We need to ensure that what we do is evidence based, that we're not clutching at straws. We need to ensure that the plans we have and the training we provide our young people in this country will lead them into a future, into a career path and into work where they can progress over time and where their lifelong learning has a good foundation. The outlining yesterday of this new direction was critically important.

The minister outlined for us that Jobs and Skills Australia has replaced the National Skills Commission. He outlined two fundamental reforms implemented by the government in skills and training. As I've said, that current situation around the skills shortage is quite dire. We have a skills priority list that nearly doubled in 2021-22, and the occupations where the shortages were went from 153 identified occupations to 286. So in coming to government we were on the back foot from the outset before you look at the transformation that we are planning in cleaner energy, before you look at the way the economy must transform to meet our climate targets but also to remain a leader and to keep our pace as the globe changes and as other economies shift and change.

This skills shortage was highlighted March 2022 by the former National Skills Commission, which predicted in their report that nine of 10 new jobs would require postschool qualifications and, of those, four of the ten would be requiring vocational education and training. The report released on Tuesday highlighted that, in the year to May, 91 per cent of total employment growth was in occupations that require postschool qualifications and over half of them require vocational education and training. So the need is critical.

I'd like to congratulate and commend the minister on the planning that's gone into the new direction. We've got a huge challenge, and it's critical we ensure that we've got a framework to not only cope but to thrive. We've got to ensure that younger Australians, like the young people I represent, are given the opportunity to thrive.

That planning for our skills and for our economy needs to be timely. It needs to be high-quality, it needs to be evidence-based and it needs to be tested for veracity against firsthand knowledge in the industries where those shortages exist. The response is the establishment of Jobs and Skills Australia and the establishment of 10 Jobs and Skills Councils. These are strategically linked to ensure that what we provide is effective, structured, national and sector based, and that the planning frameworks are modern, timely and targeting the skills development that's needed.

Both the Jobs and Skills Australia and Jobs and Skills Councils have been developed after extensive national consultation, and they've got support—most importantly—from the stakeholders. Changing direction and meeting the demand and the challenge that we've got before us means that we need all of these stakeholders onboard. We need employees, we need employers, we need our unions, we need the peak bodies, we need state and territory governments, we need vocational education providers and we need universities. All of those stakeholders have been involved in the consultations around this new direction.

Both the JSA and JSCs will have a tripartite approach. That is, there'll be extras at the core of the governance and their programs who are working directly with industry. Employers, unions and governments will be the three arms working together, because we—and I as a former educator—have seen in the past and mourned a lack of direction. There seemed to be a scatter-gun approach of: 'Oh, there's a shortage here. Quick, everybody rush over and try and fix the shortage,' but who is at the table to make the decisions about how we would fix those things? Sitting in committees since coming to government, and in the nine years prior, we've been listening to young apprentices come and tell us that they're doing their apprenticeship and they're fixed in the modules they have to do. But, where government was assuming there were options and they could choose parts of their apprenticeship, we found that actually that wasn't happening on the ground. So we've got electrical apprentices who are still learning what we needed 20 years ago and who are blocked from what we need them to have for this new economy and for this transformation.

So it's critical that we get the right people in the room and that they're at the table. This includes people from those industries that are going to be leading this transformation. It's imperative that we ask the right questions of the right people so that we get this right the first time, and every time, so that what we implement is evidence based and so that we know that the courses we're providing will lead to employment and build the basis for lifelong learning so that people can shift and change across the course of their lives to continue to be employed, for all of the reasons that we want people to be employed: so that they're productive, so that they have purpose and so that life has dignity. This will also ensure that we're building the right kind of economy and that we've got the right people in the right places. We want to avoid error and waste. We need government to be asking the right questions of the right people, and we need government to be listening deeply to the experiences of those who have been on the ground.

I want to pause there and commend the minister for this approach, because it is very easy in government—and it's very easy as a local MP—to have someone come to you with an anecdote and, from that anecdote, to generalise and have a single anecdote inform policy, rather than do the deep dive and actually ask people on the ground: 'So, this course that has been running, is it working?' I want to add that I have absolute faith that this minister understands electorates like mine—most importantly, upfront. He understands the people who live in my electorate. More importantly, he has lived experienced of the vocational education and training sector in electorates like mine. He knows how quickly a TAFE campus can be closed—rather than shifted, modernised or changed in its direction—and how things can be taken away from the western suburbs of Melbourne, requiring our young people to travel further and further. He understands that they can then pop up again because there's an individual need, but not be built with the longevity that we need and not be built with the capacity to shift and change.

The direction that this minister has set for jobs, skills and training in this country is most welcome, and I look forward to working with him. I look forward to being part of the feedback process as we roll this out, and I look forward to having the comfort of knowing that we have industry, unions, employers, employees and state and territory governments, as well as vocational education and training providers, at the table to make the decisions we need to ensure that we have timely movement and informed decision-making at the heart of this.

Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to talk about one of my favourite topics, which is, of course, education. Education is the most powerful weapon we have against disadvantage. It is what confers the skills that enable people, particularly young people, to achieve social mobility, and economic and financial security. Skills are the bedrock on which we build our lives. They are what make us useful to others and to our community. Skills are foundational to a competitive economy.

We, on this side of the house, understand that. We are acutely aware of it because, when we came to government, we discovered we had inherited a chasm when it came to skills—a void. Australia was languishing at the bottom of the OECD league table with the second-lowest skills shortages, just ahead of Canada. In addition to this, we found yawning gaps in our skills mix, with 85,000 fewer vocational training places in 2021 compared to 2013. Why? It was because successive Liberal governments failed to invest in our most important asset: our people. We also found that the Skills Priority List for occupation shortage had nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, from 153 listed to 286. All of this was evident in shopping strips, in hospitals, in schools and in businesses right across our economy. We didn't need any of this data to tell us what we already knew—that is, there are trailing shortages right across the economy, particularly in child care, aged care, health care, IT and construction. Everywhere you go, you will still find shortages due to the long tail of a lack of investment over a long period of time.

This was evident at the Jobs and Skills Summit we convened in September last year. It was one of the first things we did, and it was a very public demonstration of our commitment to kickstarting our economy on a much stronger footing by bringing together diverse voices. I had the opportunity to attend one of those days, and it was striking to see a room full not only of the captains of industry but of young people, of neurodiverse people, of people with disability and lived experience, of all our government ministers—the frontbench were there, the Prime Minister was there—and of my colleagues from right across the country and across the chamber. We had several representatives from the crossbench, but, sadly, I don't recall any Liberal members attending, even though they were invited—which, again, speaks volumes.

The Jobs and Skills Summit provided a blueprint for a better way. The work from that is now feeding into related portfolios that are working on overhauling our broken migration system, and there will be a migration review that will land towards the end of this year. There is our employment white paper and the Intergenerational report, which came out a few weeks ago and clearly shows that as we age we are going to need more and more skilled workers in the care and support economy as well as future focused industries—particularly renewable energy, manufacturing, IT and just about everything else. In order to create that better future, we need to invest in our people—our most valuable asset.

We've been really busy. We came to government with an election promise of fee-free TAFE. We had 180,000 places in our first allocation. This has been a roaring success. It has been oversubscribed and exhausted in its first six months. We have had 215,000 people, both young and old, who have jumped on board. The priority sectors we identified included agriculture, the care sector, construction, defence, early childhood education, hospitality and tourism, sovereign capability, technology and digital. We have found that 51,000 of these places have been allocated to the care economy and nearly 17,000 to IT, and there have been 21,000 enrolments in the construction sector. That is absolute music to my ears.

In the chamber right now, the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill has been returned from the Senate. It has passed the Senate and we are basically tying off loose ends now. This is a historic day for our nation. The Housing Australia Future Fund is an investment vehicle—and, yes, in the next five years it will deliver 30,000 social and affordable homes. But the key here is that this investment vehicle will stand in perpetuity and will accrue over time. It will allow successive governments, whether Labor or Liberal, to tip money into this fund going forward so that homes can be built forever; it will never be retired. We chose this model, which was introduced by the Howard government many years ago—in 2006, I believe—because it is basically bulletproof. The future fund model is managed by the Future Fund Board of Guardians, and they have returned into the fund 9.1 per cent per year over the last decade. The returns have been strong, despite fluctuations in economic headwinds over that period of time.

The real success story of our investment in skills is in the detail. The devil is always in the detail. The detail clearly shows that, of that cohort of 215,000 people who jumped on board and adopted these spots, 51,000 were jobseekers, 15,000 were people with a disability and 7,000 were First Nations Australians. That screams out that creating a pathway is so much better than giving a hand out. Indeed, when you remove the cost barriers to skills acquisition, this is exactly what happens—people are eager to improve their lives. That speaks deeply to aspiration. They do so by looking through a suite of programs that are available, and, without those cost barriers, they find their passion. It is absolutely fantastic to see this many jobseekers doing that. They can see that we have a tight labour market and businesses and industries desperate for workers. They can also see what is coming down the pipeline. We are investing in our energy transformation. A country that has been a climate laggard is now moving to become a climate leader, and we seize that opportunity with two hands.

In just over a year, Australia has already got the runs on the board. We've gone from 33 per cent renewable energy last year to 40 per cent this year as we push hard towards 82 per cent by 2030. In order to achieve that goal, we need people with the right skills to build those offshore windfarms, to rewire our nation with the $20 billion we've allocated to modernise the grid down the east coast and to invest in green hydrogen, where there will be multiple jobs in that sector. We've also pumped millions into solar thermal and geothermal. To get to that better future, we need Australians to stop privileging universities above TAFE and vocational training. As far as I am concerned, and as far as our government is concerned, we see these as equivalent. At the end of the day, it is important to acquire a skill, to find your passion and to get some hands-on, practical experience so that you can go on to become employable and contribute to society. Not only is it incredibly worthwhile to the individual; our country will be eternally grateful to our young people and older people looking for new career options.

Cassandra Fernando (Holt, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

NANDO () (): As a former TAFE student, I am proud vocational education and training has been at the forefront of the Albanese government's priorities since day 1. Yesterday, the Minister for Skills and Training, the Hon. Brendan O'Connor MP, shed a light on two fundamental reforms within the skills and training portfolio. These reforms are pivotal to ensuring that our national planning for the skills our economy need remains timely, evidence based and informed by industry experts.

Creating Jobs and Skills Australia and establishing 10 Jobs and Skills councils is the bedrock of transformation within our skills and training portfolio. These two initiatives are strategically intertwined to provide structure and sector based planning specifically to nurture the skills essential for a modern economy. The design and scope for both JSA and JSCs have been shaped with extensive consultation and support from a broader spectrum of stakeholders across Australia. This includes employers, trade unions, peak bodies, state and territory governments, vocational educational providers and universities. The coordination between Jobs and Skills Australia and the new Jobs and Skills councils will be instrumental in planning and guiding training and education priorities. This coordination is the key to ensuring that our workforce possesses the right skills for securing employment and career advancement. It also ensures that our nation has the skilled workforce needed to meet the demands of current and emerging jobs.

Australia currently faces one of the most significant economic challenges in decades, driven by a serious shortage of skilled workers across various sectors of our economy. Since being elected, the government has been clear about the extent and urgency of these challenges for Australian industries. The OECD data has singled out Australia as having the second-highest labour shortage among the OECD countries. The Skills Priority List paints a concerning picture, showing that occupations in shortage nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, rising from 153 to 286. Furthermore, predictions made in March 2022 by the former National Skills Commission suggest that, over the next five years, nine out of every 10 jobs will require postschool qualifications, with half of them having vocational training. The latest quarterly report from Jobs and Skills Australia, released earlier this week, underscores the gravity of the situation. It reveals that, over the year leading to May 2023, 91 per cent of total employment growth occurred in occupations requiring postschool qualifications. More than half of this growth is concentrated in vocations that demand vocational education and training pathways.

In response to these pressing challenges, I am pleased the Albanese Labor government is ushering in a new era of industry engagement within the Skills and Training portfolio. Australian industry must be equipped with the best possible skills planning framework to address the evolving skills landscape. The primary focus of the JSA and the 10 JSCs will be to work directly with industry sectors to plan and execute the necessary training to address immediate medium- and long-term skills needs. Central to this approach is the principle of tripartism, with employers, unions and governments collaborating closely to tackle our skills challenges. The government's commitment to consultation and inclusion stems from an understanding that diverse perspectives lead to better solutions. Whether it's with employers, unions, educators or state and territory governments, this government is intent on building relationships and creating the architecture for inclusive tripartite governance.

Jobs and Skills Australia has taken the place of the National Skills Commission, which provided important work but whose mandate and resources needed to be expanded for broader engagement. A crucial change central to the design of the JSA is the assurance that relevant industries and knowledgeable stakeholders have a seat at the table. The JSA is required under legislation to maintain a governance structure that is both tripartite and expert. In the coming months the minister will appoint a ministerial advisory board from across a range of stakeholders to guide JSA's work priorities, strategies and governance. JSA has already emerged as a significant driver of policy development, providing independent advice to the government on current and emerging workforce needs.

Informed by the signature tripartite and inclusive approach of this government, JSA is set to deliver a national clean energy capacity study next month. The study will outline the employment, upskilling and reskilling opportunities arising from our transformation to a net-zero economy. The government has made it a legislative requirement that JSA consult and publish an annual work plan. I am excited about the upcoming release of the 2023-2024 work plan, which will focus on core challenges, including the shift to a net-zero economy, growth in the care and support sector, and digital skills. Jobs and Skills Australia will expand its data based capabilities to provide deeper industrial engagement and qualitative analysis. This will enhance its independent evidence based analysis, which is crucial for national skills planning and support for skilled migration programs.

Another key priority for the Albanese Labor government and the JSA is to improve education and employment outcomes for historically marginalised individuals. This includes those affected by age, health, gender and disability and those who are of diverse cultural, linguistic and socioeconomic backgrounds. JSA's economywide perspective, informed by tripartism and data informed decision-making, is the approach needed to solve the challenges we face today. The 10 tripartite, industry led jobs and skills councils that have been established will work collaboratively with JSA. These councils will provide on-the-ground industry perspectives, complementing JSA's data and analysis with their real-world experiences. JSCs will lead workforce planning for their respective industries, identifying both immediate and future skills needs.

The first major task of each jobs and skills council will be to consult extensively across their industry sectors to develop workforce plans that address existing and emerging skills needs. They will leverage their industry based knowledge and understanding of trends to provide valuable insights. JSCs will also collaborate closely with educators and training providers to develop world-leading qualifications for workers and employers. By drawing upon industry knowledge and the expertise of educators, JSCs will play a crucial role in delivering the skills our workforce and economy require. The 10 councils will encompass various sectors, including energy, gas and renewables; agribusiness; early educators, health, and human services; arts, personal services, retail, tourism and hospitality; public safety and government; manufacturing; finance, technology and business, mining and automotive; building construction and property; and transport and logistics.

The roles of the JSCs and the JSA are complementary and interrelated. While JSA has macroeconomic focus, JSCs possess a deeper knowledge and connection to specific industries. JSA excels in data and analytic capabilities, while JSCs boost deeper connections to the real economy.

I am proud that the government is continuing to work extremely hard to make sure that Australia is ahead when it comes to jobs and skills.

Debate adjourned.