Jess Walsh (Victoria, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

( his government's record on TAFE training and skills can be summed up with two words—cuts and neglect. It is workers and businesses that have paid the price. This government has cut billions from TAFE and millions from universities, and has overseen the loss of 140,000 apprentices and trainees. This has been at the same time as business has cried out for skilled workers, and everyday Australians are crying out for jobs.

In this country, we have a serious mismatch between the skills that workers have to offer and the skills that businesses need. Before the COVID-19 pandemic hit, almost two million Australians were unable to find enough work. At the same time, nearly three-quarters of businesses were saying they couldn't find workers with the skills that they need. So, even before the pandemic and recession, we were facing a jobs and skills crisis in Australia. Now 2.6 million Australians are unemployed or underemployed, a number that is of course predicted to rise over the coming months. If you look at the government's own skills shortage list, you'll find that we're lacking people with the skills to be early childhood educators, car mechanics, midwives, electricians, bakers, nurses, teachers and many more. So why is it that kids finishing school today can't count on this government to deliver them the skills and training that they need to fill these vacancies? How is it that we've got to a situation where we have high unemployment, high regional unemployment, high youth unemployment and, at the same time, we can't train Australia's young people for these absolutely core essential jobs? The answer is: cuts and neglect from this government.

The National Skills Commissioner won't do enough to fix the mess that this government has created. We are facing one of the greatest economic transformations of our lifetimes, and the speed of that transformation will only increase with this pandemic. We have choices as a nation about how we deal with that. The choice is: do we continue down this government's path of record cuts and of neglect, a path that lacks ambition for working Australians, or do we actually seize this opportunity? If we seize this opportunity, what we're going to need is a government that actually plans for tomorrow's economy, a government that is focused on creating good and secure jobs and ensuring Australians have the skills to do them and are supported to get their skills through a quality and robust TAFE, training and university sector.

The government has demonstrated that it can barely plan for today's economy let alone tomorrow's. Even before COVID-19 hit, this government had over two million Australians either unemployed or underemployed while at the same time businesses were saying they needed people now. This is now 2.6 million workers. It is young people who are really doing it tough, who really have it particularly bad under the Morrison government. They were already struggling for opportunities before COVID-19. But now the youth unemployment rate has hit almost 14 per cent and in some regional parts of Australia youth unemployment is as high as 24 per cent. Many of the industries that have been hardest hit by the shutdowns in the health response to COVID-19—sectors like retail and hospitality—are large employers of young people. Many young people have struggled to find a place at university or at TAFE in recent years. Why is that? It's because this government has inflicted cuts and underspends on our TAFE, training and university sectors. From TAFE alone, the government has cut $3 billion and underspent its own budget by another $1 billion. Apprentice numbers have already fallen by 140,000 since this government took office. If the government doesn't take action, apprenticeship numbers are predicted to fall by another 100,000 by the end of this year. That would mean a 35 per cent drop in numbers this year alone.

We all know that we're going to need skilled workers to recover from this recession and that people desperately need good, secure jobs that are supported by quality training. It's one thing for the government to announce construction projects and $150,000 bathroom renovations, but they're actually going to need people to do the work to build these $150,000 renovations, just as we need nurses in our hospitals, carers in our nursing homes, early childhood educators, electricians and mechanics. These workers come from our TAFE system and also from our university sector—two sectors that have been absolutely hung out to dry by the Abbott-Turnbull-Morrison government.

So we support reliable analysis of our labour market and skills needs. That's a good idea, and we hope that the National Skills Commissioner will provide that analysis. But what is the government going to do with the information that they get from the National Skills Commissioner? What are they going to do when the commissioner reports that there's a skills shortage that needs to be filled, only to find out that TAFEs and universities no longer have the capacity to train in those areas? Australians deserve excellent TAFEs and universities. They have pride in our TAFEs and universities. But the Liberals have gutted both sectors, and right now they're doing nothing to protect universities and TAFEs from the impacts of COVID-19 and the shutdowns that it has created. This is incredibly short-sighted because, in the university sector alone, we know that courses are being cancelled, campuses are shutting and 21,000 jobs are currently at risk.

Instead, what is the government focusing on? They're spending their time announcing plans that are all talk and no substance—plans that are so light on any detail that you can't really call them plans at all, like JobMaker. I mean, what is JobMaker? We don't really know. When the government first announced this plan without a plan a few weeks ago, the Prime Minister slammed the training sector as 'unresponsive'. Perhaps when he did that he forgot that his team had been in government for the past seven years and that he was in fact talking about his own failures and that it's this government that has been unresponsive to the needs of Australians for good quality training and for decent, secure jobs. If he was so concerned that the sector wasn't working, why did it take a global pandemic for him to make any announcements about it and to finally turn his attention to it? Perhaps he could try to do better than a phoney announcement, with no time frame, no extra funding and essentially no detail at all. When the coalition took government, they vacated the field on this issue.

So the creation of the National Skills Commissioner is really just a tweak, when we actually need major and real reform. We support the need for analysis of our labour market and we absolutely support making policy based on expert advice. But the National Skills Commissioner essentially replaces the Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency, which this government scrapped in 2014, six years ago—six years wasted, while other countries have been doing the right thing and investing heavily in skills and education, while we've been left behind.

As usual with this government, this is just too little too late. It's not a plan, just like the JobMaker program isn't a plan. And a government without a plan for education and skills is really a government without a plan for our future. Even more concerning, it screams of a government without a plan for our economic recovery either.

Right now, in our first recession for almost 30 years, we need a government that is serious about creating good, decent, secure jobs. We need a government that assesses its decisions by whether they create decent, well-paid work for all. That is what Australians need going forward. And we need a government that provides Australians with the skills that they need to do those jobs.

The Labor team is focused on this. The Labor team has always been focused on this. In fact, it was last October that the Labor leader, Anthony Albanese, announced our intention to establish Jobs and Skills Australia. This will be an independent statutory authority that provides a genuine partnership with business leaders, state and territory governments, unions and education providers. It will bring everybody together to make sure that workers have access to the skills and jobs that they need and that businesses have access to the skilled workers that they are seeking as well. This will be a model of genuine partnership and collaboration, investing in the skills of Australian workers. We need this now, more than ever, as we look towards our recovery post COVID-19.

On this side of the chamber, we have a vision for decent and stable jobs, supported by quality training. This is absolutely in our DNA and we are already there. We see education as an investment in our future and we will always support hardworking Australians who want a quality education. We will always support good, secure jobs for all Australians.