Brett Mason (Queensland, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Education) Share this | Hansard source

The opposition will not be opposing the Skills Australia Bill 2008. Anything that will assist in the skilling of our nation is a good thing, but I might just make a few broad observations. I note what the Minister for Education, Ms Gillard, said in her second reading speech. Indeed, I have listened enough to my Labor colleagues haranguing the former coalition government for presiding over skills shortages and not doing enough, allegedly, to solve the problem. I have been in the Senate long enough to know there are two sorts of problems: there are good problems and there are bad problems. A bad problem was when the last Labor government had not enough work and too many people looking for jobs. We had a million people unemployed. That is a bad problem. The problem we have today in this country is too much work for not enough people. We have a labour shortage or a so-called skills crisis. That is a good problem. What do working families need most of all? They need work, and at least during the coalition government there were record levels of employment—higher than there had ever been in this nation. Under the previous Labor government, of course, more than one million people were unemployed. There were working families without any work.

There is a double irony in the current rhetoric of Ms Gillard and the Labor government. It is not just that during their last stint in government they did not seem to be too interested in jobs but, rather, they were not too interested in skills either. When Labor were last in government, between 1983 and 1996, they spoke a lot about higher education and promoted the idea that many more Australians should go to university—and I agree with them. I would be the last person to say that is not a good idea. I probably spent too much time there myself. However, it is also extremely important that Australians who, for all sorts of reasons, might not wish to go to university can pick up a trade and technical education. I think one of the great failings of the Hawke-Keating years was the disservice to those seeking a technical education and a trade. The previous Labor government did not do enough.

However, under the Howard government much was done. Under the Labor Party, men and women who today are in their late 20s or indeed 30s, who should have been undertaking apprenticeships or studying at TAFE in the late eighties or early nineties, often did not because of the Labor Party’s seeming denigration of a trade career. What happened was that there was a major gap in our skilled workforce, and these people are Labor’s lost generation of tradesmen and tradeswomen.

By contrast, the coalition government increased the number of apprentices in training by more than 2½ times, from over 154,000 in March 1996 to over 414,000 in March 2007. This was backed by an increase in investment in vocational and technical education from $1.1 billion to $2.9 billion—an 87 per cent increase in funding in real terms. That is an enormous increase in real funding. There are now more than 160,000 people aged 25 and older undertaking apprenticeships. There are now more mature age apprentices than the total number of apprentices when Labor left office.

I make this point: while it is okay for Ms Gillard and the Labor government to talk about the fact that there is a skills shortage in this country, when Labor were last in office they did not do enough, and it took the coalition government 11½ years to pick that up. It is all very well to talk about universities—and that is great; it is important that Australians be encouraged—but we now know there was not enough emphasis on technical and further education, and that is a glaring hole in the legacy of the Hawke and Keating years.