Ross Lightfoot (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you, Mr Acting Deputy President. Senator Wong, who introduced this matter of public importance today, said, ‘It’s a truth that the government has chosen to ignore over so many years.’ She was talking about the dearth of education, students and so on. She went on to ask: ‘What has the Prime Minister done? Government investment has gone backwards by seven per cent and 300,000 students have been turned away from TAFE.’ These were generic references by Senator Wong but there were nothing specific, apart from those erroneous examples. She said that over two million people are unemployed—or underemployed; she corrected that statement some time later.

It is not that Senator Wong was perhaps misleading the Senate in the sense that we should take the matter further, but let me read from a grab by the ABC, quoting a Dr Kell, who said:

The skills shortage is no accident when ... underinvestment for 10 years. I think the key issue is resourcing needs to be contextualised differently. As we explain in the report, it’s not more of the same; it’s about shifting the resources in a different way to enable and energise the system.

I am not quite sure what that means, but it was a criticism of the government and its education policy. But it was a union, the Teachers Federation, that commissioned that report. That is the trouble: the truth is not necessarily contained in union organised reports of this nature.

Senator Wong talked about investment sliding backwards and she referred to a figure of 300,000-odd students. Let me read out the facts quickly, in the short time remaining to me. Australian government funding for VTE in 2005-06 was $2.6 billion. That represents, in comparison with the figure in March 1996, a real increase of 88 per cent. Total Australian government funding for VTE over the four years from 2006-07 to 2009-10 will be $11.3 billion. Total funding over five years was $837 million.

Under the 2005-08 Commonwealth-State Agreement for Skilling Australia’s Workforce, there are 128,000 places. There will be 7,500 places in Australian technical colleges in 2005-08, and 20,000 places under the Australian Apprenticeship Access Program. The figure for group training in the trades program is 11,500. This gives a total figure of 167,000 places. With respect to training, in the year ending June 2006 there were 403,600 Australian apprentices.

The major reason that apprentice numbers are down is that we are going through boom conditions never before seen in my 55-odd years of work and probably never to be seen again—certainly in my lifetime. One of the other reasons is simply this: when I was in the union movement it was illegal for a lot of people to employ apprentices unless they had a ratio of tradesmen to fit that particular request. It was not so much a request as an obligation for employers to make sure that where they had one apprentice they also had one skilled tradesman. In some cases, it was two skilled tradesmen for one apprentice. The reason that we do not have enough apprentices and we do have a skills shortage today is simple because the apprentices did not pay full union fees, if they paid union fees at all, and the union movement wanted full fee paying, skilled tradesmen before they would agree to apprentices coming along and taking their places.