Joe Ludwig (Queensland, Australian Labor Party, Manager of Opposition Business in the Senate) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That item 2 [Division 1.4E—Sponsorship: trade skills training (incorporating Subdivisions 1.4E.1 to 1.4E.4)] of Schedule 7 of the Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9), as contained in Select Legislative Instrument 2005 No. 240 and made under the Migration Act 1958, be disallowed.

Schedule 7 of the Migration Amendment Regulations 2005 (No. 9) is the government’s new trade skills training visa—at least, it was in November. However, I did note from today’s Australian that Senator Vanstone intends to cut back skilled visas—so there is obviously a new one, but it may be overtaken shortly by another plan that Senator Vanstone is hatching in the skills area. I think it only indicates that skills training in Australia is being planned by Senator Vanstone. Senator Vanstone is the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, not the minister for training or for trade skills—or for education, for that matter. I might allude to this later in this contribution.

The trade skills training visa will, according to the government, allow noncitizens ‘to undertake apprenticeships in regional areas of Australia in trade occupations experiencing skills shortages where no Australian has been found to fill the position’. In reality, however, this regulation is another attempt by the Howard government to apply yet another bandaid to Australia’s skills shortage—a skills shortage all of the government’s own making. The Howard government has failed to adequately train Australians and instead has continued to turn to the option of importing skills. We all know we have a skills shortage in Australia and in some areas it is, indeed, at crisis point. However, it is not a recent phenomenon. It did not happen last year or this year; you can at least trace its early signs, I think, back to when this government got into office in 1996 and started slashing spending on training and education—particularly vocational education and training.

Skills shortages in the medium to long term are best addressed through education and training initiatives. Since 1996, however, TAFE, other vocational education and training, and university funding have declined while skilled migration has increased. During a skills shortage—this is a little bit staggering, really—under this federal government, education and training have declined and skilled migration has increased. It has been a long-term failure by this government is to invest in our own people. This is not a policy that will take Australia into the future. It is not about building Australia for the future. This government is looking for a short-term political fix. This government has been critical of Labor for expressing so much alarm at the cuts to Commonwealth funding of universities. It has even claimed that the Labor Party, which established TAFE, has no interest in apprenticeships. I can say that I do have a vital interest in apprenticeships. I was up in Toowoomba on Friday supporting Kim Beazley’s plan for no TAFE fees for apprentices. It is a good initiative; it is a pity the government has not got an initiative equal to it.

When you look at the government’s policies on universities, however, turning thousands of qualified students away from universities does not miraculously increase the numbers of those seeking to learn a trade. The government does not seem to understand that there are different markets—particularly if you have cut funding to TAFE at the same time. Quite simply, this government has failed, for quite a long time now, to turn its mind to training Australians in TAFE courses and trade courses and to encouraging them to go to university—in other words, this is right across the board. This government’s reliance on skilled migration to address the skills shortage has itself failed. This government is now importing unskilled workers and getting Australian businesses to train them. This government does not understand the problem.

There are two basic impacts of a skills shortage. One seems blatantly obvious to me—I think the government should see it as well, but they have certainly demonstrated no inclination to understand it: that business cannot get the people they need. That is one; it is quite simple. The second is that there is the potential for wages growth in those certain occupations where there is a shortage, without there being any increase in productivity. The net effect is that it costs business more; it can lead to increased costs to business. It costs consumers more because businesses will endeavour to pass those costs on, and it can have an inflationary impact. These are the downsides; if you have a skills shortage and you do not look at the long-term needs, then you can quickly get yourself into a position where those issues start to hurt small and medium sized business.

But let us not downplay skilled migration. Skilled migration is a valuable component of Australia’s cultural and economic development, but it should not be a primary means of addressing our skills shortage. It should not be the only policy left. Senator Vanstone is starting to look more like the minister for vocational education and training than like the immigration minister, but that is not the main way you are going to address and deliver adequately skilled labour to this country. It is clear that there is a skills shortage, but it is not an immigration issue. This government is using immigration, but it can only be a bandaid. The government is treating the skills shortage as an immigration problem, as I said. It is moving the debate over there. This government is good at that—at shifting the debate away from where it really is. The debate is about skills shortage in this country, not about using migration to fill that void. The skills shortage is not an immigration problem; it is actually an education priority. That is where this government’s mind and work should be.

So we can ask whether Senator Vanstone is the only one in charge of fixing the problem. She is not here in the chamber, but I am sure the news will be passed on to her that it seems that she is the only one seeking to fix the problem of skills shortages in Australia. That is in itself the real question: why is the immigration minister leading the government’s campaign to address the skills crisis in Australia? We know that the Treasurer, Mr Peter Costello, is pleased with this approach. Training is long term; it takes time, resources, commitment and money. Those words—time, commitment and money—do not sit well with the Treasurer. Without significant investment in education and training, however, the skills shortage will become a permanent feature of our economy. Many of the occupations on the in-demand list for skilled migration have been on the list for almost a decade. If you want to see how bad this government’s neglect has been, have a look at the migration occupations in demand list for professions and trades from 1999 to 2005. In 1999 there were five trades and vocational occupations on the list. In 2002 there were three. And in 2005 there were 27 trades on the migration occupations in demand list. That trend looks like continuing through 2006.

Now the Howard government wants to import unskilled labour under a skilled migration program—has it really got that bad? Clearly, investment in domestic training has been woefully inadequate. The Liberal Party and National Party—I will keep referring to those separately because the coalition is starting to fray and they might want me to use the two different names—have been hoarding taxpayers’ money and refusing to invest in skills, and they need to start to address this with policy initiatives. We know that employers prefer to train people from their regional area in order to help the community build and grow. Those people stay as tradespeople in the community and commit to long-term investment in the area. That is how rural communities have lived and supported themselves over many years. This government, of course, is abandoning rural voters. It is abandoning rural areas and saying, ‘There is a skills shortage in rural communities and we are going to fix that by skilled migration,’ rather than investing in those communities with training and education opportunities for the young people in those areas—and not only the young people but also the 18- to 35-year-olds, the people who can be retrained and helped back into the labour market.

Instead, in 2004, the number of apprentices and trainees enrolling took a four per cent hit and the number of students enrolled in VET took a seven per cent hit. So what is the government doing to address that? Very little. The result is, firstly, that we are now turning to overseas fee-paying students to meet the government’s skilled migration program and, secondly, we are getting a new visa class to support the use of unskilled apprentices—unskilled, untrained labour—under a skilled migration program. The bulk of the government’s skilled migration program includes overseas fee-paying students and unskilled, untrained foreign nationals. That seems to be the policy initiative that this government is pursuing. It should turn itself to how it can effectively help regional and rural Australia rather than pursue the course it has set.

There are two significant problems with this visa. The first relates to the fact that the apprenticeship is less likely to contribute to Australia’s skilled workforce in the long term than if you trained people from a rural and regional area. A person who completes their apprenticeship under the trade skills training visa is more likely to take that skill away from that regional and rural community to a capital city or offshore. The skill would then be an export from Australia rather than an import to it. The second problem is that the trade skills training visa is simply another avenue for those seeking to immigrate to Australia to obtain a visa. That is not a bad thing. This is a great country and we always encourage people to come to Australia. But the argument is about committing and investing in regional and rural Australia to ensure that people in those regions get the opportunity to train and work in those communities—because that is what they want to do. Neither of these two problems are part of that, and nor is the government investing in them. In each case, it is going to make it in any instance harder for people to obtain apprenticeships and remain in rural areas. This visa will drag people from overseas into regional and rural apprenticeships, which could be at the sake of young and not so young people in the community having that opportunity themselves.

The government claims that its trade skills training visa requires a potential employer to demonstrate that there are no local people prepared to take the job. I have to say, that is hard to accept when nowhere among the 50 questions on the employers’ application form does it require them to have even advertised the job. It is pretty basic that you might want to require them to advertise it to make sure that, in the first place, it is well known that there is in fact a job there. You have not exhausted all avenues when you have not even taken the time to advertise in a local newspaper that you have vacancies for apprenticeships. In the meantime, businesses are being forced to fill the skills gap with short-term measures.

As a nation, we must look beyond short-term fixes like skilled migration. They are part of but not the solution. They cannot replace the competitive advantage of training our own young people from rural and regional areas to work in those areas. Labor’s concern is simple: under this federal government we are importing our present and future requirements rather than training our own. The government’s answer of importing unskilled labour under a skilled migration program is not sound skills planning. It is not sound immigration planning and it is not sound population planning either. Unfortunately, with its new trade skills training visa, the government is undermining the competitive advantage we really have. This government needs to understand that sound policy is much more than an announcement.

Going back to Senator Vanstone, she is floating her new ideas again. The plan seems to be to cut back skills visas, which goes to considering measures to cut the number of less-skilled technology workers entering Australia. That is based not on work by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations but, it appears, because the minister disagreed with them, on data generated from within her own department, which she commissioned. It seems that sometimes you might commission a report because you disagree with the area that might be actually trying to help with and work through the issue. One can see provided in that a worrisome example of short-term fixes for what are really long-term problems that need to be addressed. And the best time to start addressing those is now.