Steve Hutchins (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you very much, Madam Acting Deputy President. The point I want to make is that, since the coalition has been in power, 300,000 young Australians have been turned away from TAFE colleges. No funding has been made available for that. Three hundred thousand—that is, 30,000 a year—since John Howard has been in power. What is the government’s answer to this debilitating skills crisis? It builds colleges in East Africa or South Africa. I have no problem with that and I do not make a racist comment about it, but it just strikes me as strange that we have the money to build these TAFE colleges in other parts of the world but we deny them to our own people.

Let me go to the government’s record on skills investment. It is, as I said, appalling. Australia is the only advanced economy that has gone backwards on education spending since 1995. Spending has been cut by eight per cent. The average in OECD countries has been to increase education spending by 38 per cent. Ten years of John Howard’s government has had the effect of deskilling this country. By 2010, it has been estimated that Australia will fall short of tradespeople by 100,000. The government makes much of the unemployment rate, but, significantly, there are two million Australians who want to work, or want more work, but cannot get it. What this points to is the skills base failing to correspond to the demands of industry, causing a generation of Australians to sit idle—untrained, unskilled and ignored by the Howard government.

At the last sitting of parliament, I made a contribution concerning the loss of jobs in regional New South Wales. I mentioned the jobs that are being lost at the Central Coast, the central west of New South Wales, Western Sydney and the Illawarra. I mentioned that there are hundreds of jobs being lost. Those people would welcome the opportunity to retrain or reskill, but what is the government’s contribution to them? They are indeed making available to some sections and to some of these men and women an ability to get more redundancy pay. Big deal. That can last for only so long. They would say: ‘Why can’t I work in a job where there is a demand for that skill? Why are you trying to continue to bring people in from overseas? Why are you building TAFE colleges in East Africa when you should be doing it here for Australians?’ The second part about that, as we all know, is that it is meant to put downward pressure on wages. We saw evidence outlined in today’s paper by the Australian metalworkers union. They have outlined exactly how much less a man earned in a week by working under those conditions. We cannot compete with our neighbours. We are a First World country, but without an investment in skills we cannot be competitive.

On Tuesday, in the Sydney Morning Herald, Bob Birrell, the Director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, said:

There are plenty of skilled workers in the Philippines, China, India and elsewhere willing to work for wages and conditions well below the market rate in Australia.

Australian workers are increasingly having the odds stacked against them under the coalition. Work Choices strips away overtime, leave loading and leave entitlements. It exposes workers to instant dismissal without recourse for appeal. To add insult to injury, the coalition are making it easier to import cheap overseas labour that does not even meet the skills criteria in some cases. Those people can enter the workforce for up to four years on a 457 visa, and that places downward pressure on wages.

Australian workers do not want charity; they want a fair go. They want a government that is looking after them. I started my contribution by saying that I think that the government is becoming delusional. If they really think that putting money into TAFE colleges in East Africa is going to go well out there in the electorate, they are becoming delusional. It will be up to people like you, Madam Acting Deputy President Troeth—from Victoria, the primary manufacturing state in this country—to change the direction of this government or they will be out on their bum at the next election.