Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate my speech.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

The Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up For Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007 provides financial support for some first and second year apprentices.

Apprentices aged under 30 and training in a trade occupation identified as an area of national skills shortages will qualify for $500 every six months.

Those apprentices eligible for the additional funding will include carpenters, joiners, welders, bricklayers, electricians, plasterers and fitters.

The Bill also makes this additional income exempt from assessment as income for tax and social security purposes.

These measures are about attracting and keeping young people in apprenticeships.

The Minister in his second reading speech noted that wages for apprentices are low and this is particularly true for 1st and 2nd year apprentices.

In many cases young people can earn more by taking on unskilled or semi-skilled work—by taking on work as labourers or factory hands.

It is not surprising that young people will look around at their friends who have taken on this type of work, see they have more money to spend on the week-end and decide not to take on an apprenticeship in the first place or else drop out.

The Government will make much of the fact that there are almost 400 000 apprentices and trainees.

What they won’t mention though is that less than 160 000 of those are traditional apprenticeships—the area in which Australia faces the most dire shortages.

And they won’t mention that less than a third (29%) of new apprentices and trainees are tradespeople.

Or that less than ¼ of completions in 2005 were traditional trade apprenticeships.

They also won’t be drawing attention to the 2% increase in cancellations and withdrawals.

In 2005 almost 130 000 apprentices and trainees cancelled or withdrew from their courses.

Over the term of the Howard Government completion rates for traditional apprenticeships has dropped from 64% in the years 1998-2002 to 57% in 2002-05.

The Democrats recognise that we need to be encouraging more young people into apprenticeships and we need to be keeping them there.

Clearly these financial incentives will go someway to encouraging young people to stay in their courses and to complete their training.

It has been suggested that one possible reason for higher completion rates for apprenticeships in Western Australia and Queensland compared to Victoria and NSW in particular is because the large mining firms in Queensland and WA are offering extra pay to retain apprentices.

The Government needs to make sure that the wages of 1st and 2nd year apprentices are sufficiently attractive over the long term if it wants to encourage young people into trades. The value of top-ups will of course erode over time.

But this is an inadequate response from the Government—an inadequate response to a problem of its own making.

The reality is that Australia is simply not producing enough skilled workers to feed the economy.

This is the result of the Howard Government’s chronic underinvestment in education and training—something which will no doubt be seen as one of its biggest failures.

And something that will reverberate through our economy for years to come.

There has been a failure on the part of State and Federal Governments to chart Australia’s skilled workforce needs and there has been a failure to make sure those needs can be met by local training.

We need a concerted effort to identify skills shortage not only now but also for the future.

The shortage of skilled labour can not be fixed by simply providing a little more money to the apprentices who are currently in the system.

This is simply a sort term solution. More needs to be done.

I think we can all agree that skilled tradespeople are scarcer than hen’s teeth.

The latest skills vacancy index produced by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations shows that skilled vacancies for some occupational groups are still showing rises.

Vacancies in electrical and electronics trades rose by 2.0 per cent; construction, 1.6 per cent; and automotive, 1.9 per cent.

The Federal Government’s response to this situation in recent years has been to allow employers to bring in skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill gaps.

This has of course suited employers—after all a short term fill-up by workers who can be shipped back to their home countries when demand dries up allows them to avoid their responsibilities for investing in long-term skills development.

The number of people coming in on 457 visas has grown from 28,000 in 2005 to almost 40,000 in 2006.

There have of course been problems with this programme—I am sure we have all heard the reports of workers being treated very poorly by their employers and the claims of bogus qualifications.

And of course this approach can only go so far when Australia is competing for specialised workers with many other countries who are also short of skilled workers.

It is true that the Government has finally recognised what we and employer and industry groups have been emphasising for sometime—that is that Australia’s economic prosperity can not continue without real investment in skills.

Unfortunately the Government is still taking a piece meal approach. It’s more bits and pieces here and there. There is no real coordinated plan.

There are vouchers to help meet training costs, for literacy and numeracy courses, for business skills.

There’s money to help buy tool kits.

But we need a longer term strategic solution. We need to be looking at how we structure and deliver apprenticeships and vocational training and how we encourage this as a valid career option.

We need to be looking at the role of schools in supporting the development of trade related skills.

There is general agreement that more exposure and experience in trade-related skills in the mainstream school environment is desirable.

It provides students with more information to assist them in career decisions and improves student readiness for the world of work.

But not all schools provide the opportunity for students to participate in trade related subjects and apprenticeship training.

Schools need to be adequately resourced to be able to support these types of programmes, including working in with local TAFE institutes and industry.

We also know that sourcing adequate numbers of quality structured workplace learning placements for students is a problem. Industry has to step up and carry its fair share of the costs of training.

Without the appropriate involvement of post-school training institutions and workplace learning opportunities young people may not get the best possible training experience.

We also need to see trained career advisors in all secondary schools. Without information and guidance many young people are not aware of the options available to them—particularly the advantages of pursuing training which in the short term may not seem as attractive as better paying options but which longer term will provide greater career options.

Trained career advisors can support young people in navigating from school to employment and training.

But there is still work to be done on making those transitions more flexible and smoothing out the barriers between school and post-school institutions and the workplace.

Young people need to be able to move more easily between school-based training and other settings.

It also needs to be remembered that many skilled tradespeople are unwilling to train apprentices because of over-regulation, concerns about their ability to support the apprentice over the required length of time and the high, indirect costs associated with taking on an apprentice.

We need to be supporting these small and medium sized employers and the organisations that support them in taking on apprentices to a greater extent.

Without this we will not see more apprenticeship places or better completion rates.

There have been some recent moves towards shorter apprenticeships, allowing a person to progress based on achieving specific competencies rather than the number of years spent training.

Moves in this direction have the potential to make apprenticeships more attractive by allowing people to move more quickly to levels at which their pay is more adequate and their jobs more satisfying but we must make sure that quality is not compromised—either of the training experience or the outcome.

There is ample evidence that the quality of the training experience links to completion rates, so if we want to see more people finish their apprenticeships we can not afford to make apprenticeships shorter if the quality of training decreases. We will end up no better off.

Pushing young people through training into the workforce quickly may have an appeal to the Government as a quick fix for urgent skill shortages but we do not want to see people end up with narrow, partial qualifications that will meet the needs for some immediate job but go no way to providing high quality transferable skills.

We do not want substandard tradespeople and we do not want young people who are disadvantaged in the long term because of the quality of their training.

I am encouraged by recent talk of high-level trade qualifications. Providing tradespeople with the opportunity to increase their skills and qualifications may encourage more people to stay in their profession, rather than moving to another career if they want to develop more skills.

This may also improve the status of trades within the community which will improve their attractiveness to both young people entering the workforce and those retraining or returning to the workforce.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.