Trish Crossin (NT, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The main purpose of the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006 is to bring forward funding for the establishment and operation of the proposed 25 Australian technical colleges. Funding will be brought forward from the 2008-09 years to meet expenditure in 2006-07. This amendment also includes regulation-making power for situations where funding needs to be carried forward or moved to another calendar year, thereby removing the need for amendments such as this. The total amount of the funding committed to these colleges by this government will remain the same.

The government claim the need to bring forward funding is due to the significant progress made on setting up these colleges. One, of course, would question the use of the words ‘significant progress’ in this policy area. Of the 25 proposed colleges, successful applications or agreements have been completed on only 22. Even slower is the progress on actually having them open, with only five having actual students, making up a total of under 350 students. The government’s original proposal was for 300 students at each of the colleges, not in total. I said in my speech last year on the Australian technical colleges bill 2005 that I thought it would be difficult to find 300 students for each college—supposedly doing, as they would be, both trade and Higher School Certificate studies. It would seem likely the numbers will remain below the original estimates.

Remember these are the colleges which represent a part of the government’s answer to our long-term, growing and ever-increasing skills shortage. The other part is letting in thousands of skilled migrants, where minimal requirements for checking their qualifications are imposed. Only five colleges open with only 350 students seems somewhat less than significant progress.

The proposed Australian technical college in Darwin, in Solomon, in my own electorate, seems to have had not significant progress but significant problems in putting together a proposal and getting its act together. This has been put back and back, and it seems that business involvement in education may be a bit outside of their area of expertise or ability. I understand any progress made has been largely due to the involvement of Group Training NT. I am certainly aware that Minister Gary Hardgrave had to make a flying visit to Darwin some time in the last couple of months to urge them to get their act together—probably because he wanted to save face over this announcement.

Furthermore, according to information from officers at estimates, as at 30 May 2006 only $18 million had been spent—so why the need to bring forward funding? Little enough seems to have been spent to date. It is worth noting that any financial information was not easy to draw out at estimates. DEST refused to provide any information on individual colleges. Government departments seem to be getting much more adept at hiding information from scrutiny, with the backing, of course, of relevant government ministers. The Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education Legislation Committee opposition senators’ report into the provisions of this bill expresses concern at the lack of financial transparency surrounding these colleges. They comment that DEST have refused to give any funding details of the contracts actually signed to date but have provided only the overall, total figures.

So here we are with a government commitment to fund 25 colleges to turn out tradespeople to lessen our ever-growing skills shortage—a skills shortage which the Howard government knew about for years and did nothing about except complacently watch it grow and grow and get worse year by year. In fact, even worse, while they sat and watched and refused to increase funding, hundreds of thousands of young people were turned away due to a lack of TAFE places. They were told loud and long and warned about the skills shortage by industry groups and by TAFE Directors Australia and, just as now, with much legislation, they failed to listen. In their complacency or arrogance they said they knew better.

The government refused to provide any growth funding in the vocational education and training area for six of the past nine years. All they did was blame the states and territories or the workers—anyone but themselves. They are ever ready to claim any credit for any success but never, ever prepared to accept any blame for any failure in this policy area. They claimed to be having great success with traineeships and apprenticeships—unfortunately, not in the right places. Traineeships in retail trades were the main areas to get the numbers, along with hospitality, but many of these starters also failed to finish. The traditional trades languished with declining numbers over the years. This is a government that has steadfastly followed their rigid ideology of cutting funds to public education and/or attaching funding to extreme industrial relations requirements. These are then pushed through by nasty, bully-boy tactics.

We now see the results, with industry struggling to find skilled workers in the trades area. My latest information from my own city of Darwin is that the waterfront project desperately needs up to 50 more concreters and they are just not available. Again, the government reaction is not to greatly increase funds for education and training in order to upskill our population and value add to our primary production. No—what they want to do is simply import tens of thousands of overseas workers while at the same time ramming through workplace legislation that will see Aussie workers’ pay and conditions slide downhill. They think cheaper labour is the answer, not more skills and training.

We saw a recent OECD report for 2006 commenting on the low priority that the government put on training, but then this is not the first year that they have done so. For several years now the OECD has commented critically on Australia being the only developed nation to have continually reduced public spending on education and training. The Howard government’s record in spending on public education and training is, in fact, a disgrace. Public spending on higher education and TAFE has fallen in Australia by eight per cent since 1995 in real terms. The OECD average is an increase of 38 per cent.

We do not oppose the Australian technical colleges as such, as with such a mean-minded government any spending on education and training is an improvement—albeit far too little and far too late. Any additional resources going into trade training and skill development are welcome. Urgent action is needed to address our national skills shortage. However, the whole decision about the technical colleges appears to have been made initially on the run and with no consultation—another thought bubble from the Prime Minister. Ever since, it seems that neither the bureaucracy nor the stakeholders have been able to catch up in the implementation of the idea in any really organised or convincing way.

The implementation is just like most of the changes in Indigenous education funding: poorly thought out and poorly executed. Here we are, months down the track, with only five colleges open and 350 students enrolled nationally. These students are years away from a trade and being qualified, and then there will only be a handful compared to the need. These colleges are most definitely too little and too late. The first qualified tradespeople from these colleges will not be turned out until 2010. By then the demand for skilled workers will have grown still more, so these few hundred qualifying from these colleges will scarcely be more than a drop in the ocean.

This is certainly not a sign of a successful policy idea. Had the appropriation of $343.6 million been given to already existing state and territory training bodies we could be fairly certain that a lot more than 350 additional students would be enrolled already. But, as I have said, ideology has played a major part in this whole process—the ideology of privatisation, of keeping out unions and of workers being on AWAs. There should be no room for blinkered ideology in education, which is an investment in our national future. But unfortunately that has not been the way of this government, and all education funding has been tainted with their ideology, from schools right through to tertiary education. The result is the massive skills shortage that is a major threat to our economic growth and productivity.

Australia must invest in skills training, and Labor will do that. The government have already failed badly in this area. While Labor support this bill we do so only to help, in any small way, a seriously stricken aspect of our education system. We do so to at least enable a few more young Australians to get a sound training for the future. We can only condemn the Howard government for failing to acknowledge and act earlier on the skills crisis; for reducing expenditure on vocational education and training; for the incompetent implementation of these technical colleges; for the apparent secrecy about the funding and operations of these colleges to date; for their complete failure to provide enough extra skills training to meet the future demand; and for the forecasted shortfall of 100,000 skilled workers by 2010.

We believe that a far more cooperative approach with the states and territories is needed, and far more than these 25 colleges are needed. When the Labor government is elected we will work with the states and territories. Our blueprint outlines our proposals for getting skills into schools. A Labor government would bring trades into schools in a similar way that these technical colleges do, but into all schools and not just a handful of private colleges. Students would have the opportunity to experience a range of trades in years 9 and 10 before making any final decisions. We would have specialist schools for certain trades.

We would overhaul the struggling New Apprenticeships system, or Australian apprenticeship system, as I understand it is now called. At present at least 40 per cent of apprenticeship starters do not complete their courses. Imagine if we could get those young people to complete their training. Labor would turn that around by offering a $2,000 trade completion bonus so that we would give young people an incentive to finish their trade. We would pay the TAFE fees of traditional trade apprentices and childcare trainees to encourage them into trades and childcare work. Labor’s priority is all about training Australians first and training them now—not, by contrast, doing what this government is doing: going for a quick-fix approach and bringing in tradesmen or women from overseas with minimal checks on their actual qualifications. Unlike this government, Labor would give priority to education and training and see it as an investment in our future, not as an ideological plaything to be messed around with.

While we support this bill—it gives some crumbs of funding to vocational education and training—we condemn the government for a decade of failure in this area; for creating a skills crisis during its 10 long years in office; for its continued failure to provide the necessary opportunities for Australians to get the training they need to do a decent job and meet the skills needs of the economy; for reducing the overall percentage of the federal budget spent on vocational education and training, and allowing this percentage of spending to further decline over the forward estimates period; for its incompetent handling of the Australian technical colleges initiative as evidenced by only five out of the 25 colleges being open for business, and enrolling fewer than 350 students; for failing to be open and accountable about the operations of the Australian technical colleges, including details of extra student enrolments, funding levels for the individual colleges, course structures and programs; for denying local communities their promised Australian technical college because of their ideological industrial relations requirements; and for failing to provide enough extra skills training so that Australia can meet the expected shortfall of 100,000 skilled workers by 2010.