Louise Pratt (WA, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Assistant Minister for Manufacturing) Share this | Hansard source

This evening we are, of course, debating the National Skills Commissioner Bill 2020, and Labor does not oppose this bill. We note that it establishes a new statutory office for the National Skills Commissioner that will provide the minister and secretary of the department with advice on skills demand, labour market and workforce development issues. We also note that the commissioner will provide advice in relation to current, emerging and future workforce needs; pricing for VET courses; the public and private return on government investment in VET qualifications; the performance of Australia's VET system for providing VET; and issues affecting Australian and international labour markets.

The commissioner is also supposed to collect data and analyse it to inform policy development and program delivery—noble objectives, if the government had sought to get them a bit more quickly and also hadn't abolished our previous governance put in place by Labor that allowed these kinds of things to happen. We on this side of the chamber want to see that we always ensure and act on strong expert policy, evidence and advice.

Our skills and workforce development needs should have this advice and be acted on. We have an excellent track record in Labor. In government we established Skills Australia in 2008, and of course this became the Workforce and Productivity Agency back in 2011. This agency analysed and reported on Australia's current, emerging and future workforce development needs, and in contrast what did we get from the Abbott Liberal government? One of their first acts in government was to close it down back in April 2014. So, here we are, some six years later—and it's taken six years for this government to come to understand that, in order to create a quality vocational educational system, we do, at the very least, need independent, reliable analysis of our labour market and our skills needs. So, Labor does not oppose this bill. It has an important objective.

We see that the creation of the National Skills Commissioner is yet another tweak in a vocational education system that needs systematic and comprehensive reform—something that we've yet seen no sign of from this government. We need much more than a skills commissioner nestled in a government department to fix what is wrong in this system. A government that's prepared to fiddle at the edges of the current system isn't going to address the very significant, profound problems that undermine Vocational Education and Training in our nation. Consequently, the productive performance and international competitiveness of our economy is undersupported through skills in our nation.

The very unfortunate truth is: Australia's TAFE and vocational education system is under significant pressure. It's under this pressure because of Liberal's poor and incoherent policies, and indeed their significant and very, very massive cuts. There has been a palpable lack of leadership from this government in the Vocational Education and Training system. When the Liberals took government, the Commonwealth essentially vacated the field. Instead of continuing the task of building a strong and reliable system of vocational education, what did we see? We saw slashed funding to TAFE, slashed funding to training by $3 billion and an underspend of your own budgets by another $1 billion.

Under your watch, we've seen apprentice numbers fall by 140,000. This government's presided over a national shortage, a shortage of tradies, apprentices and trainees. So it's all very well for the Prime Minister to draw attention to this problem when in six years we've had a government that hasn't done anything about it. A further 100,000 apprentices and trainees will be lost by the end of this year alone if this government fails to take immediate action to keep current apprentices in jobs and support employers to take on new ones.

The nation calls on you to take this action, and yet there's nothing in your policies in this COVID economic crisis that significantly addresses this problem. Australians need and deserve excellent TAFEs and universities, and the Liberals have gutted both. The Prime Minister and the Liberals have spent seven years ignoring the vital role of TAFE and the critical role it plays in the growth of our communities and young people and in the growth of our economy. At the same time, we can see in our nation that we have 2.6 million Australians either unemployed or looking for more hours of work. We've seen years and years of abandonment by the Liberal Party, and too many Australians either have been locked out of quality TAFE training or have lost confidence in the promise of a vocational education.

The consequences of this failure are being felt right around our nation, from Bathurst to Bendigo, Joondalup to Junee. The Prime Minister has abandoned our TAFE and the Liberals have no plan of action for good jobs and quality skills development. We've seen this government forsake casual workers under JobKeeper, showing disregard for these working people. We know that skills development breaks down in poor-quality jobs. That's what comes of poor skills development: poor-quality jobs—casual and part-time jobs where people barely get the training they need to do those jobs. We've seen massive growth in low-quality, privately delivered courses putting pressure on TAFEs and other quality providers trying to keep standards high being undercut. This does nothing but result in a race to the bottom.

Across the VET system we've seen a decline in outcomes to students, with dropping enrolments and, very importantly, low completion rates. Costs have been shifting to students as they've been hit with fee increases and growing limitations on access, particularly for students in our regions, and less government support. At its very worst, we know what we've seen in terms of the defrauding and exploitation of people trying to improve their lives through getting an education and qualifications.

In the last seven years, we've had a government that has simply watched this all unfold. They have done nothing but make further cuts and contribute to further costly mistakes. Now we are in a situation where they are returning small parts of the things that they have stripped out, and they are returning those things into a broken system. We have seen seven years of utter failure and utter neglect. This government has finally at this point in time decided to establish the National Skills Commission—and, yes, we will support them in doing so. It is the right thing to do, but given the state of the crisis in our nation currently it's barely a start, given the magnitude of the problems this government has created.

Turning to the issue of skilled visas within this context, the bill establishes the Skills Commissioner to have a focus on current, emerging and future workforce needs and Australian and international labour markets. The bill—and the government—is very quiet on the issue of skilled temporary visas and how these areas will be managed in the future. This government has had an absolutely ham-fisted approach when it comes to reform in this area. The government announced changes to the old 457 visa system and then had to backpedal because those changes had been such a failure. As part of this reform, the Liberals introduced a new Skilling Australians Fund. Some three years later, just $463 million of this fund has been reallocated—money that could've and should've been spent to support hundreds of thousands of apprentices and trainees. You should be spending money to keep those apprentices and trainees in those jobs now, because that's what the money is for. It's to get Australians skilled so that you don't have to draw down on a foreign workforce.

There are plenty of questions that have been left unanswered in this legislation—such as what role the commissioner will play with Home Affairs to determine the requirements of Australia's temporary skilled workforce, what role the commissioner will play in reviewing the short-term skilled occupation list and the long-term strategic skills list, and how the views of workers and their representatives will be taken into consideration by the commissioner. We know that the interim Skills Commissioner is a former Liberal chief of staff, former chief economist at Deutsche Bank and former chief economist at the Business Council of Australia. So how will those views be balanced and all of the options taken into consideration?

These are very important issues that this government has neglected. I think it shows how transparent the government is in wanting to talk up this area when it has done nothing to address the balance between training and bringing in skilled labour from overseas. The first time we really heard the Prime Minister of this nation do anything key about skills—when was it? It was when the flow of international labour migration was turned off. That was, really, the first time we saw these issues elevated in any way.

We've had a failure on JobMaker—better known as 'JobFaker'—from this government. This government has been a skills killer. It should not have taken a pandemic for this government to turn its attention to our vocational training system. This government's spent seven years creating a tradie crisis in Australia: $3 billion cut from TAFE and training, widespread skills shortages and 140,000 apprentices and trainees gone. This is a big mess. But what has been the Prime Minister's solution? This phony announcement. It's a phony announcement with no extra funding—no money—no time frame and no detail. It's more spin, more spin from marketing. This is exactly what we've come to expect from this ad man: no plan, heavy on rhetoric, very light on detail.

In contrast, Labor put forward, with Anthony Albanese, on 29 October, its intention to establish Jobs and Skills Australia. Unlike the Skills Commission in this bill, Labor's Jobs and Skills Australia would be an independent statutory authority providing genuine partnership with business leaders, large and small; state and territory governments; unions; education providers; and those who understand particular regions, cohorts and skills. We would enhance the National Skills Commission to become Jobs and Skills Australia, to establish a more collaborative approach with an enduring structure.

It's significant that the COVID pandemic has changed the way we think about ourselves, the way we work and our interaction with the world around us. We are now experiencing one of the greatest economic transformations of our lifetime, and we are faced with choices about how to go forward. We have a government that lacks action and has no ambition for working people. Unlike the Liberals and Nationals, Labor believes that funding education is an investment in our nation's future and our future prosperity, and that it is not a cost burden. A government, such as this government, this Morrison Liberal government, without a plan for education and training, has no plan for Australia's future. We do not oppose this bill today but, as usual from this government, it is too little, too late.