Annette Hurley (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I would like first of all to talk about the Australian technical college that has been established in the northern suburbs of Adelaide. The northern suburbs of Adelaide is an area of very high youth unemployment, often about double the state average. It is an area where training for job skilling is desperately needed. I am very pleased indeed that a technical college has been set up in the northern suburbs. This college is well supported by the local area. It was established by a consortium comprising the Catholic Archdiocese of Adelaide in partnership with the Northern Adelaide Industry Group, which includes leading manufacturing and industrial companies in the area—Steel Building Systems Pty Ltd, Hirotec Australia, ZF Lemforder Australia and the RAAF Workforce Development Unit—as well as employment and group training organisations. It is currently housed in temporary quarters—an old council depot at Elizabeth, which is nevertheless quite a useful facility—and it is under Principal Rob Thomas, who, if I am not mistaken, was deputy principal at St Columba College, where my son went to school, which is also out in the northern suburbs.

There are a number of other job training and support facilities in the area. Indeed, just last week I went to one that was set up by the Boys Town group. It operates at the TAFE campus at Elizabeth under the management of Trevor Grant, whom I have known for a long time. He has been working in the northern suburbs in the area of employment for both the federal government and other organisations. He is well experienced in this area. They concentrate on helping children who otherwise would probably have fallen through the cracks in the schooling system. They concentrate on a number of areas before they even think about further education—including literacy, numeracy and social stability—because it is certainly very difficult for any student to study and think about long-term prospects if they do not even have a home to go to or if the home they are in is fraught with violence, instability and poverty. They have the ability to deal with these issues in conjunction with their partner organisations as well as encouraging their students to go on to further education, preferably, or to jobs, possibly.

This illustrates the problem that we have to deal with. We are not dealing with straight educational opportunities. It is true that the resources boom and other economic factors have created a jump in employment. Frankly, that means we are talking about a harder cohort of students who would not necessarily have completed their education or gone on to further education. We need to think a bit more carefully about what is required and how we get them to fill the skills shortages that have developed in Australia. Many government members have talked about a labour shortage rather than a skills shortage. There may be some justification for that, but you still have to ask: what has the Liberal government been doing for the past 10 years to address the labour shortage, the participation rate and the skills shortage caused by students not going on to further education? The answer to that question, quite patently, is that the government has been doing things that are similar to the Australian technical colleges initiative. It is a good initiative on its own; it fills a particular niche and it is useful. But it is one of those things that the government does not do until the last minute, when there is a desperate need. It plugs the gap with an influx of money, of which this bill is a part; plugging in a bit more money to fill a problem.

Time and time again we have seen this approach across the range of government activities, particularly in education and training: you reach a crisis, put in a short-term solution and hope for the best. It is this government’s focus on short-term solutions—indeed, often political fixes—that has created a lot of serious problems for us in skills shortages and training. Successive education ministers have waited until it is a real political problem. They have tried to curry favour with the electorate by attacking teachers and bullying state governments. They have tried to deflect criticism and they have tried to deflect attention away from the inadequacies of the system by putting in place things like a requirement for schools to fly flags or put up posters of Simpson and his donkey and things like that. There is nothing wrong with those things in themselves, but they do nothing to seriously address our education problems.

This happens not only in schools but in tertiary education as well. We had Brendan Nelson interfering with the giving out of research grants and so on. The Howard government has continued its approach, from when it first took government, of ripping funding out of education. Underfunding has continued and it has never quite caught up after that dreadful blow that the government dealt to education when it first got into government. The Liberal government seems to have a chronic inability to put plans in place for the future in large and important areas like education and training, and that is a great shame for this country. It is a long-lasting legacy of this government that it is unable to grapple with these complex problems.

On 20 February the Productivity Commission released a report on the potential benefits of a national reform agenda. The report illustrates to some extent the approach which might have been taken by the Howard Liberal government if it had had a strategic approach to education and training. It illustrates what we might have achieved if state and Commonwealth governments had worked together to get some improvement in education and training. The report’s proposed approach under the national reform agenda would pull together a number of strands that affect education, including early childhood development, literacy and numeracy, transition from school to work or further study, and adult learning. The Productivity Commission understands the intermeshing of the many different factors in education and skills training—something this government does not seem to be able to do in its own strategic deliberations.

The Productivity Commission states, under ‘Key points’ in the section headed ‘Education and training’:

• If outer-envelope NRA-induced educational attainments could be achieved, it is estimated that by 2030:

–   workforce participation could increase by up to 0.7 percentage points; and

–   aggregate labour productivity could increase by up to 1.2 per cent.

Those are all very important key outcomes that this government should have been looking for. We have had minister after minister lambast the education system for outcome driven education, but it is a pity that the Howard government did not have a few outcomes of its own to strive for such as these. It might have achieved them in its 10 years of government if it had not been fixated on short-term solutions. We need this kind of approach: a concerted whole-of-government approach to fixing problems right from early childhood development, including those problems that children have with literacy and numeracy. We are never going to make skilled apprentices of students who have severe literacy and numeracy problems. It sounds so straightforward and simple, but the government provides a short, dirty fix on skills training while not paying enough attention to the other end, where children are coming through school, to ensure that they have adequately fixed many children’s literacy and numeracy problems.

It is important to look at the overall aspects of education and not concentrate only on skills training. In this debate we have had a lot of emphasis, quite naturally, on the importance of apprenticeships and training in skills that are in short supply. There is no question in my mind that skilled boilermakers, skilled fitters and turners, skilled plumbers and skilled hospitality workers are worth their weight in gold in terms of advancing our economy and that we do indeed need such people. But we also need tertiary educated people and we also need people in unskilled jobs who are satisfied in those jobs and are able to fulfil the criteria of those jobs.

I briefly want to go back to tertiary education. Statistics show that those in the northern suburbs of Adelaide, where we have an Australian technical college—and that is a good thing; we fixed that—are underrepresented in tertiary education. I want to see opportunities for everyone. If they have the desire to go into an apprenticeship for a trade, I absolutely agree that they should have that pathway available. But the evidence is that students from the northern suburbs are having trouble getting into tertiary education as well. The member for Wakefield, Mr David Fawcett, in talking about the initial bill for Australian technical colleges, said:

Trades should be valued as a first choice. Too often over the last 10 years—and, in fact, even before that—we have had career counsellors, teachers and other people say to students that if they do not complete year 12 and go to university then they are somehow a second-class citizen.

That is very true, but you are not a second-class citizen if you go to university. We need not only apprentices but also engineers to guide them and managers to guide them, and directors of companies and people who create the products that those tradesmen and tradeswomen make. I think there is a great deal of talent amongst the people in the northern suburbs who are not making it into tertiary education. I call on this government to pay some attention to the fact that many academically talented students in the northern suburbs are still not getting into the university courses that they should be getting into. It is no good for anyone to think that, because the northern suburbs of Adelaide are a low-income area, they produce just factory and unskilled labour fodder. They have also produced—and could produce more—tertiary educated people of great value to the Australian economy. The government must, as the Rudd opposition is doing, look at the entire field of education to make education a priority for Australia and to give the opportunity to all Australians to go into whichever field of endeavour they feel is appropriate to them. Clearly, that is not happening in the northern suburbs of Adelaide at the moment.