Michaelia Cash (WA, Liberal Party, Minister for Employment, Skills, Small and Family Business) Share this | Hansard source

The Prime Minister has made it very clear that our recovery from COVID-19 is well and truly a skills led recovery. We need to ensure that businesses, industry and employers in Australia have the employees with the requisite skills they need. That is why the Morrison government is investing, this year alone, a record $7 billion in our vocational education and training system within Australia. This includes our JobTrainer skills package, along with the wage subsidies that we're putting in place, including the boosting apprentices and trainees commencements measures and also the supporting apprentices and trainees measures that we have put in place.

As part of our JobTrainer package, partnering with the states and territories we will deliver around 340,000 additional training places to our vocational education and training system. The key to these places is that they are in areas of actual labour market need. We have worked closely with the individual states and territories to determine on the ground, in those states and territories, what are the additional training places they need. I'm very pleased to inform the Senate that, with Victoria lifting their restrictions, all states and territories are now signed up to JobTrainer. In fact, training is now being delivered in South Australia, Western Australia and New South Wales. With these three states alone, we already have coming online an additional 200,000 training places. In my home state of Western Australia, the first starter—it was only launched in September—there are already 7,868 enrolments. People want to train in areas of labour market demand.