George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

The Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill (No. 2) 2006 provides an increase in funding of $112 million over the next three years. Labor has supported funding continuously to enhance our vocational education and training skills and will reluctantly support this bill. I say ‘reluctantly’ because this is one of the poorest policy options we have seen introduced in this parliament. It is a policy option that has done nothing and will do nothing to contribute to dealing with the massive skills shortage that we face in this country.

This could and should have been achieved by funding the TAFE sector and expanding its capacity to train greater numbers of apprentices. This government has failed abysmally to address the skills shortages in this country. The Prime Minister announced that ‘boosting the esteem and prestige of technical and further education’ would be a key goal if he were to win another term in office. He has had four terms. He has suddenly woken up to the fact that in the next term he should boost spending on technical and further education. Where has he been for the past 11 years? Where was he in 1995 before he came into office—where was the policy then? I will come to what the policy of this government was in respect of technical and further education in a minute. He went on to say:

I still remain very committed to boosting the esteem and prestige of technical and further education in this country. I think we did make a terrible mistake a generation ago on this, but the Australian technical colleges are a good start.

The Prime Minister said it; I did not say it. He said, ‘I think we did make a terrible mistake a generation ago on this, but the Australian technical colleges are a good start.’ They are not even a drop in the ocean.

Mr Robb in the other place yesterday said that in coming years more than 60 per cent of jobs would require vocational and technical qualifications, yet only 30 per cent of the working population had those qualifications. He then sought in his answer to put the blame on the former Labor government. We have been out of office for 11 years, but they blame the former Labor government for the problem. What absolute rot! This government has had 11 years to address this problem and has done nothing. They made the announcement back in 2004 to introduce 25 technical colleges. How many are up and running?