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

As has been stated, the Rudd government is committed to increasing skills in this country. Throughout the election campaign and long before that, the Labor Party made skills and training one of its main priority areas. We know that Australia is in the midst of a skills shortage. Skills and training have been a major topic of debate in this place and in the media and community for many years. In fact, when I looked at the news service this morning I found an article there by Colin Brinsden, economics correspondent for AAP Canberra. The article is illuminating. It says:

CONTRARY to what the former coalition government led people to believe, WorkChoices and employment laws are the second largest hindrance to expansion, a major survey shows.

The survey by global business consultant Grant Thornton found that shortages of skilled workers remained the biggest problem affecting the expansion of Australian businesses.

The survey of 250 medium-sized to large Australian companies showed that regulation and red-tape scored 32 per cent as a hindrance in expanding their business, up from 27 per cent in a similar 2007 survey.

This included 27 per cent saying employment laws have had the biggest regulatory impact on their ability to expand their business, followed by environmental regulation at 17 per cent and health and safety laws at 10 per cent.

The former Howard government promoted its controversial Work Choices laws as providing greater flexibility for business.

“Governments need to work more closely with business, and those organisations which understand the privately-owned business sector, to identify their future needs and aim to address the regulatory issues ahead of the need, rather than constantly playing ‘catch-up’,” Tony Markwell, national head of private business services at Grant Thornton said.

Still, regulation fell well behind the impact of skilled shortages as a constraint to growing a business at 58 per cent, which is almost identical to the 59 per cent recorded last year.

The report is part of a wider global study of 7,400 business owners across 34 countries which found an average of 37 per cent of businesses being impacted by skilled worker shortages, up from 34 per cent last year.

Businesses in Thailand were most affected by skills shortages, at 68 per cent, while the Philippines equalled Australia as the country second most constrained by skills shortages at 58 per cent.

This is the legacy that those on the other side have left this country and this economy. This is why the Reserve Bank is warning that this matter needs to be dealt with urgently. How did the opposition treat the issue of skills shortages when it was in power? When those on the other side sat on this side of the chamber, what did they do? We had an inquiry by the Senate Standing Committee on Education, Employment and Workplace Relations back in 2002. There was a virtually unanimous report with 52 recommendations on how to address the issue of identifying skills shortages—which is what this bill is about setting up—how to measure where the needs would be into the future and there were a series of proposals on how to address the training needs in those areas in order to deliver the skilled workers. What did the former government do? It virtually ignored the report. The minister could not even be bothered to respond to the recommendations. I think it took him something like nine months to actually respond to the recommendations. The government was not interested.

If you look at the history of how the Liberal-National Party government dealt with the issue of skills shortages, it was always about short-term fixes that looked good in the public eye. They were political fixes. They were never fixes that were meant to be enduring and to provide long-term solutions, which is what this bill is about setting up. It will create a body that will start to address from the ground up where the skills shortages are in our economy. It will address how those skills shortages can best be dealt with by meeting them in the longer term and ensuring that we never get caught in a set of circumstances like this again. We found in that inquiry back in 2002 that there are many examples of good systems that have been established around this country to provide skilled workers. One of them in is in Brisbane, in Queensland—