Julian McGauran (Victoria, National Party) Share this | Hansard source

You were against the GST, then you were back on board, of course. I could go through a whole litany of reforms, and you have not supported one. Time does not permit but I could identify how each one has been proven a correct policy by the government. We had to make the hard decisions and we had to get them through a hostile Senate, but we stuck to our guns. And I can point to each one of them feeding into an economy that has strength today. To those on the other side I say: you do not get a strong economy unless you manage it responsibly and you make some hard decisions. You seem to think it just appears overnight. It does not.

This is one of the hard decisions we have had to make, and you have railed against it. This might have been the one exception when you could have stood back and said, ‘We agree with the return of the technical colleges. We have a trades shortage, a skills shortage, in this country. It is a good long-term policy. Those politicians of the eighties who abolished it, those state governments—ironically, Labor state governments—who abolished it based on some sort of academic snobbery were wrong. It is 20 years on now and we will return them. We can see the benefit in it.’ In your heart of hearts you know that. That is the foolishness of all this. Senator Carr does not know it; he wants to constantly rewrite history. But Senator Campbell, Senator Conroy and Senator Hutchins—the three Labor Party senators who bothered to turn up in the chamber today—know it to be so but they are maintaining this line that it is not so. What an absurdity you have reached as an opposition.

Having made those points about the debaters on the other side, in the short time I have left I would like to address the issue of the skills shortage. Of course, the Australian technical colleges are one arm of the government’s strategy to tackle the skills shortage. This situation—and things have come to a crisis point now—is a consequence of a successful economy that has grown over the past 10 years. When you have unemployment of some 4.6 per cent—nearing full employment, whatever that magical figure is of full employment—of course you are going to have a tight labour market, and skills such as those of plumbers, electricians, engineers and other experts are going to be hard to find. Quite frankly, a good plumber has been hard to find for a long time, but it is even harder now because most of them are over in Western Australia earning big money. The rate of return for skilled workers now across the board, particularly in the trades, is very high. Just like a decade ago, when accountants were hard to find and people started filling accounting courses at universities, to a degree the market will again solve this problem: it will increase the rate of returns. It will become attractive to take up plumbing as a profession or to become an electrician or a carpenter. The market will attract people into these trades.

Over and above that, the government believe that intervention is necessary and incentive is necessary. To that end, we have introduced a very short-term policy—that is, to increase our migration skills program up to a ceiling of 97,000 new migrants, if that ceiling is able to be filled. There is a skills shortage right across the world and every country is attempting to attract skilled labourers. Australia has increased its skilled migration program as a short-term policy, but, most importantly, we established the Australian Apprenticeships scheme. The Australian Apprenticeships scheme has been a huge success, regardless of what Senator George Campbell said in trying to find fault with it. The success of it is in its figures. When we first came to government, there were only 154,000 apprentices in training. That was the legacy of the previous Labor government. In a decade of giving incentive payments to employers and employees—apprentices—we have lifted that piddly little figure of 154,00 to 400,000 apprentices in training today. That is an enormous success. With the technical colleges, that figure can only go higher.

Added to that, late last year the government announced its work skills voucher system to attract older and more mature workers back to the trades to take up an apprenticeship. It provides for those who left school in year 12, who probably looked for a tech college and would have gone to tech college but did not find one, and who would not go to university. They are exactly the type we will pick up under this new policy. The generation coming up will find a tech college to go to. Under this policy, we are introducing a voucher system so that those who are unskilled and left school at year 12 will be able to collect a voucher from the government and take up training in a skill. It is for people 25 years old and over. Mature, unemployed and unskilled people can take up this new government voucher system. That is a tremendous initiative.

Of course, we do not expect credit from the other side, but we do not expect damnation either. The other side should show some national interest. Is there anything in the national interest you will support from this side of government? You lost the majority in the Senate on the grounds you were obstructionist for 10 years—you ought to wake up to that. We did not receive the majority at the last election for no reason at all. The public could quite easily see you were obstructionist for the sake of obstruction. This is one particular area where one would think you could come to the party but, no, you decide not to.