Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Citizenship and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

I move:

That the Senate take note of the answers given by ministers to questions without notice asked today.

In particular, I refer to the question asked by Senator George Campbell to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs representing the Minister for Education, Science and Training. I think it was a very lacklustre response to a very important issue in the budget about pensions and particularly about skills training in today’s question time. This has been a golden period for Australia. Our terms of trade are the best they have been for many decades and commodity prices are underpinning a booming economy. The commodities driving this are principally resources commodities, which are in great demand from the rising economies in China and India. Our agricultural commodities, however, are a bit patchier and are a useful reminder of the cyclical nature of commodities booms.

Australia has taken advantage of the good times, and this has been possible because of some far-sighted changes in the structure of the economy set up by the Hawke and Keating governments in the 1980s and 1990s. The Howard government that has followed has proved to be a good manager of the accounts but a disappointing leader of economic change. This period is opportune for us to set in place the economic conditions that will see us through the next cycle of downturn and upswing. This is where the 2006 budget has been a signal failure and part of a string of failures by the Howard government.

There is no doubt about it—this is the time to invest in people and in infrastructure. I think it is the biggest signal failure of this government that it is neglecting people in the areas of education, training and industrial relations. No doubt, the leader of the Labor Party, Mr Kim Beazley, will expand on this in his budget reply tonight. But I would like to talk about one example I encountered recently which illustrates, in the form of an anecdote, the way the government is failing to pay adequate attention to traineeships. The minister can reel off figures all she likes, but this is what is happening on the ground. I received a letter from a man who was concerned about a young man in the Gawler area who wanted to do an autoelectrical apprenticeship. He graduated from year 12 last year, contacted the Motor Trades Association about the autoelectrical apprenticeship and is very keen to start. He was told—and this was confirmed to me by the Motor Trades Association apprenticeship group—that 800 to 900 applications are received every year from people wishing to be apprentices, and only 230 positions are found for those people.

Here we have a country that is crying out for apprentices. Even assuming that some of those inquiries are not genuine, we have large numbers of young people wishing to take on apprenticeships, and yet there are not sufficient positions for them to take up. This is an appalling situation. The Motor Trades Association’s response to this was that this young man should just keep trying. He was told that there were about six to eight autoelectrical apprenticeships given every year, and that he should just sit there and wait until he was contacted. I did not think this was good enough and contacted a number of people who are in the business of assisting apprenticeships, including a union based organisation in the south of Adelaide that I visited with Kim Beazley, and they were most helpful. I then contacted the Service to Youth Council, and they also provided advice and encouragement about where he should go now.

This is the kind of thing that is happening as a result of the government’s neglect of training and skills based apprenticeships. People who want to take on these roles and want to be part of our booming economy are being blocked from doing so because insufficient attention has been paid to the pathways from schools through to appropriate skills training or other tertiary training, because the government has also neglected that area. But this is an appalling waste. (Time expired)