Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also wish to speak on this matter of public importance, and I thank Senator Wong for bringing this matter to our attention. There cannot be too much attention given to the skills crisis in Australia. It is the single biggest issue holding back Australia’s future economic progress. The skills shortage has arisen despite this government’s claim during the last federal election that only they could be entrusted with managing the economy. They have mismanaged and neglected this crucial component of Australia’s economic and social future. But we should not be surprised that the government has neglected the nation’s training imperatives during its decade in office. After all, they have spent the same 10 long years neglecting the environment, neglecting our defence forces, neglecting our future energy needs, neglecting the future security of our water supplies—and the list goes on.

When you have spent 10 years working on how to implement long held vendettas against trade unions and student unions, I guess you do not have too much time to worry about things like the future of Australia’s skills needs or how we are going to have enough skilled people to make sure that we are a prosperous country with the industries and infrastructure we need to be competitive with other nations. This government, under the Prime Minister, has spent 10 long years finetuning its extremist, low wage, American style Work Choices—or no choice—legislation and no time building Australia’s skills base. The government apparently thinks that the future for Australia is to compete against other nations on the basis of who can pay the lowest wages, when we should be competing on the basis of how much better educated, how much more highly skilled, how much more innovative and how much more competitive and productive our workers are—not on how cheap their labour is. We are, after all, talking about a government that has spent a decade working out how to kick single parents and people with disabilities off welfare and onto the dole—so it has not had time to worry about the skill shortages.

The government also spent the last decade addressing some issues to do with education, including the crazy notion that teachers in our schools are somehow closet Maoists who need to be retrained and re-educated in Latin. So instead of working out how to get people trained for the jobs that need to be done, we have some bizarre teacher bashing exercise perpetrated by the minister for education and the Prime Minister. It is a classic example of how this government fails to address the things that really matter to Australians.

The government’s neglect of Australia’s training needs came despite Labor’s continued warnings about the skills crisis—and not just Labor’s warnings, as we heard from Senator Wong. As we know, the Reserve Bank has been ringing the alarm bells since at least 1997, when the bank’s November statement on monetary policy noted that there were persistent reports of skill shortages and pressure on wages in the construction sector. Again, in November 2004, the bank noted that a broad range of firms was finding it difficult to obtain suitable labour. In 2005 the bank noted skills shortages in industries including construction, engineering, accounting, information technology, the resources sector and the business services sector. So the Reserve Bank and other commentators and organisations have been noting since at least 1999 that skills shortages would, if they were allowed to continue, push up inflation and put upward pressure on interest rates. We saw the interest rate prediction come true this year. There are strong suggestions of another interest rate rise before Christmas. That will be an unwelcome Christmas present, I am sure, for those Australian families who are already wondering how they can afford to pay their mortgages.

Maybe it was the interest rate rise that finally made the government do something, or maybe the Prime Minister smelled the winds of electoral change, but now we have the recently announced desperate, cobbled together attempt by this government to buy its way out of a crisis and back into public favour. Maybe the government read the tea leaves and saw that Australians were becoming increasingly suspicious of the use of 457 visas to fill a skills gap that we should never have had in the first place—270,000 people have had to be brought into this country under the Skilled Migration Program to fill skills gaps, while we have denied 300,000 people access to TAFE courses. Maybe the 25.7 per cent of teenagers in metropolitan Adelaide, in my state, who are unemployed have been asking why they could not get into an apprenticeship and why they could not get into TAFE. Why are the doors of that ATC down at Kingston electorate still closed, and how many enrolments are there at the moment? Not many, I would think, if any at all. So at this late and desperate stage we have the government reaching into its budget surplus to buy the Prime Minister some favour with an increasingly sceptical Australian public. It is a desperate plan that borrows heavily from Labor’s ideas announced earlier this year. Indeed, the wage subsidy for mature age apprentices goes back a lot longer than that. It was an initiative of Labor’s Working Nation plan, which this government dumped when it came to office.

Still, as the Labor Leader Mr Beazley said this week, we do not mind the government resurrecting our old ideas and pinching our new ones. We are concerned abut the future of the nation. We are not precious, in the Labor Party, about sharing our ideas. I will talk more about Labor’s plans for our skills future in a minute, but let us go back to the government’s recent announcement. We can see just how this is going to go from here on in until the next election. Having built up a budget surplus—in part by slashing investment in and spending on Australia’s education system by denying our young people opportunities to go to TAFE and by increasing university fees to the second highest in the world—the Prime Minister is now going to plunder that budget surplus to buy himself some electoral advantage. Having taken the money out of skills development over the last 10 years, he is now going to put a bit of it back in. We can expect some sort of glitzy advertising campaign to accompany the government’s too late, too little response to the nation’s skills crisis. But the Australian people will not be deluded by this strategy, because they have already seen and suffered the consequences of the complete failure of this government to plan a skills future for Australia.

Senator Wong mentioned earlier the OECD figures which clearly illustrate how Australia’s investment in education compared to that of the rest of the developed world has gone backwards. It has gone backwards to the tune of eight per cent while other nations are investing upwards of 48 per cent more in their education systems. How can we possibly hope to compete on the international stage when our investment in education is going backwards? It beggars belief.

The nation’s HECS debt has almost reached $20 billion. No wonder our young people are thinking twice about enrolling in university. I mentioned before the ATCs that the government announced with much fanfare, and I think five of them are open at the moment. That is a woeful record. Under this government, the non-completion rate for trades apprenticeships, as we heard earlier, is higher than 40 per cent. There are no measures in the government’s latest desperate attempt to address the skills crisis to tackle the high attrition rate for our young tradespeople. I note that, when Mr Beazley was minister for education, the completion rate for trades apprenticeships was 80 per cent. It is half that under this government.

The Australia people can tell the difference between a plan for the future and a shambolic, cobbled-together, desperate attempt to address the skills crisis. Labor have real plans for our training future—plans that include HECS relief for degrees in areas of skills shortages, expanding associate degrees to address the national shortage of technical skills, creating extra university places in areas of skills shortages and scrapping full-fee degrees for Australian undergraduate students at public universities.

In the area of the traditional trades, we have a plan for a future as well. It includes a skills account for every trades apprentice that will give each of them $3,200 towards offsetting TAFE fees and other costs associated with their training. That will benefit some 60,000 people per year in our TAFE system. We will reward people who complete their apprenticeship with a trade completion bonus of $2,000. Labor has other plans to get young people into well-paid, meaningful jobs in the traditional trades areas with our trade taster program for years 9 and 10 secondary students and a national system of specialist trades, science and technical senior high schools.

The differences between the government’s neglect of the training needs of the nation over 10 long years and Labor’s plans for the development of Australia’s skills for the future are stark. Once again, I thank Senator Wong for allowing us the opportunity to debate this important issue.