Ruth Webber (WA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate Senator Carr’s and Senator Stephens’s remarks.

Leave granted.

Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Industry) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

The Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up for Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007 legislates for additional financial support for first and second year apprentices to be exempt from assessment as income for tax and social security purposes.

Such additional tax-free funding for apprentices is welcomed.

Labor has long acknowledged the importance of encouraging more people into traditional apprenticeships and has been calling for a Trade Completion Bonus for apprentices since 2005. As a consequence, Labor is critical of the Government’s delay in addressing ongoing skills shortages in the economy.

This Bill exempts the value of the $2000 top-up payments for Australian Apprentices who are under thirty and are undertaking an Australian Apprenticeship in a trade occupation identified as experiencing national skills shortages, from assessment as income.

After a decade of underinvestment in the vocational education and training sector leading to nationwide skills shortages, it is heartening to see Labor’s message about the need for greater investment in education at every level including vocational education and training is being heard by the Government, even if it is only because there is an election just around the corner.

The Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up payments will be made to apprentices who are under 30 years of age and who are undertaking Australian Apprenticeships in areas of skill shortage as defined by the Migration Occupations in Demand List.

This additional financial support for apprentices acknowledges that the first and second years of an apprenticeship can be particularly difficult, when wages are at their lowest. It also acknowledges how important these people are to our continued economic competitiveness, performance and growth.

Under the Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up payment, apprentices under the age of thirty who are undertaking an Australian Apprenticeship in a trade occupation listed on the Migration Occupations in Demand List will be eligible to receive a $500 payment at the 6, 12, 18 and 24 month points of their training.

Full-time apprentices will receive $1000 per year, $2000 in total, while part-time and Australian School-based Apprentices will receive $500 annually over a longer time frame totalling $2000.

Completion Rates

This measure is about keeping people in apprenticeships and comes two years after Labor began calling for additional payments to apprentices in the traditional trades in the form of a $2000 Trade Completion Bonus for Apprentices.

The latest annual figures show that in 2005, over 128,000 apprentices and trainees cancelled or withdrew from their courses. That is a staggering 49 per cent of all those who commenced apprenticeships or traineeships that year.

While the Government often talks about the 400,000 apprentices in training, they fail to mention that only 140,000 of these apprentices are completing their training, or the fact that less than a quarter of those in training are undertaking traditional trade apprenticeships.

Over its 11 long years in office, the average number of traditional trade apprenticeships under the Government has been about 120,000 a year. The average achieved by the previous Labor Government was 13 per cent higher, at 137,000.

When you look at completion rates for these traditional trade apprenticeships, those areas where Australia faces the most dire shortages, the Government’s record is even worse with only 24,700 traditional apprentices completing their training in 2005.

Over the term of the Howard Government, completion rates for traditional trade apprenticeships have fallen from 64 per cent in 1998 to only 57 per cent in 2005. This is significantly less than Labor’s last year in office, when Australia had an apprenticeship completion rate of more than 70 per cent.

The Government’s constant claims that there are 400,000 apprentices in training is an attempt to disguise what is really happening: less than 25,000 traditional trade apprentices are completing their training each year.

And this comes as no surprise.

In 1997 the Howard Government cut funding to TAFEs, reducing Commonwealth investment in vocational education by 13 per cent in the three years to 2000. Furthermore, Commonwealth investment only increased by 1 per cent between 2000 and 2004.

According to data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, real expenditure per hour of TAFE curriculum has fallen by nearly 24 per cent since 1997.

In this context, the expenditure on apprentices in the budget only begins to undo some of the damage done to vocational education and training by this Government. This Bill is welcome, but it is clearly belated.

Labor’s Trade Completion Bonus

In May 2005, Labor called for the budget to include a Trade Completion Bonus for apprentices to address the skills crisis, and while it has taken the Government two years to accept Labor’s positive policy proposal, it is better late than never.

Labor’s plan involved two payments of $1000 to be made to apprentices in traditional trades on the National Skill Shortage list. The payments were to be exempt from taxation or classification as income for social security purposes.

While the Government’s Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up is to be paid in the first and second years of an apprenticeship, Labor’s trade completion bonus would make one payment of $1000 half way through an apprentice’s training, and a further $1000 payment at the completion of their apprenticeship.

The Government has, disappointingly, not taken up this key element of Labor’s proposal or recognised the need to target this extra payment towards the completion of an apprenticeship rather than simply the first two years of training.

Labor’s trade completion bonus was targeted to increase the rate of completions of traditional trade apprenticeships by providing payments to reward those who continued with their training beyond the first year, and again to those who completed their apprenticeship.

Income Support

This Bill allows for the Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up payments to be tax-free and not count as income for determining eligibility for income support such as Youth Allowance or Austudy.

Labor strongly supports this measure, as it means that not only will the apprentice receive the full $2000, but that the top-up will not prevent eligible apprentices from receiving additional, ongoing income support or push them into a higher tax bracket.

This tax free element of the Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up is welcome, however, it draws attention to the Government’s poor record on providing income support to Australian apprentices.

Despite making income support through Youth Allowance and Austudy available to apprentices for 2005, the harsh participation requirements for these payments have meant that only a small number of apprentices are benefiting from this support.

Of the 60,000 apprentices the Department of Education, Science and Training estimated would receive Youth Allowance in 2005-06, only one quarter of this number, or 15,000 apprentices, actually received income support.

The Department’s explanation for the low take up rate was that apprenticeship and parental incomes were higher than anticipated, yet the Government acknowledges through this Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up measure that these wages need supplementing.

Along with the failure to provide adequate financial support for apprentices and to address the shocking completion rates, particularly in the traditional trades, the Government has presided over 11 long years of neglect and underinvestment in the vocational education and training sector.

Skills Shortages and the ATCs

Over the past decade the Government has slashed investment in vocational education and training and we are now paying a high price in the form of acute skills shortages across the country.

The Government’s own estimates show Australia facing a shortage of more than 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years.

The Government’s cynical political response to this national skills crisis, has been to spend half a billion dollars on a standalone network of Australian Technical Colleges that at best, will only produce 10,000 graduates by 2010.

While the Government has been in power, the TAFE system has turned away over 325,000 people and is crying out for additional recurrent funding and much needed investment in infrastructure.

Instead, the Government is establishing 30 duplicative Australian Technical Colleges across the country.

Of the 20 colleges that are currently open, two thirds are not registered training organisations and are being forced to use the facilities of the existing TAFE system due to delays and implementation problems.

Three years after the Colleges were announced, they are yet to produce a single graduate.

Labor’s Positive Approach

In order to seriously address the magnitude of the current skills crisis, Australia must focus on the areas of maximum impact, including:

• TAFEs which are responsible for the substantial majority of post-secondary VET;
• VET in Schools; and
• On-the-job trades training.

That is why Labor has already announced a 10 year, $2.5 billion Trades Training Centres plan aimed at the 1 million students in Years 9, 10, 11 and 12 in all of Australia’s 2,650 secondary schools.The plan will provide secondary schools with between $500,000 and $1.5 million to build or upgrade VET facilities in order to keep kids in school, enhance the profile and quality of VET in schools and provide real career paths to trades and apprenticeships for students.As well as providing infrastructure to improve vocational education and trades training in secondary schools, last week the Federal Labor Leader, Mr Rudd and I announced Labor’s plan to introduce a Job Ready Certificate for all vocational education and training in school students. This Certificate will assess the job readiness of secondary school students engaged in trades and vocational education and training.Students will obtain the Job Ready Certificate through on the job training placements as part of Labor’s Trades Training Centres in Schools Plan.The Job Ready Certificate will be a stand alone statement of a student’s readiness for work and will be in addition to a Year 12 Certificate and any separate vocational education or trades training qualification.The certificate will provide students who complete secondary school with an increased focus and awareness of the skills necessary in the modern workplace.It will also provide employers with a tangible reference, indicating whether students are capable and ready to work.The Job Ready Certificate will demonstrate that students possess basic workplace skills, including:

• Communication
• Initiative & Enterprise
• Self-management
• Technology
• Team Work
• Problem Solving
• Planning & Organisation

At present, there is no requirement for education and training providers to formally issue a statement of employability skills.

This has been an ongoing issue for industry, with repeated calls from the Business Council of Australia (BCA), the Australian Industry Group (Ai Group), and the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry (ACCI).

As early as 2002, the Howard Government in response to these calls developed an Employability Skills Framework, its implementation, however, has stalled.

Federal Labor is committed to making education and training more responsive to the needs of industry.

Australia’s ability to meet the growing need for skilled employees across the country is crucial to ensuring our future prosperity.

The Job Ready Certificate is a key part of Labor’s 10-year $2.5 billion Trades Training Centres in Schools Plan—which includes $84 million to ensure students involved in trades training received one day a week of on-the-job training for 20 weeks a year.

It will be implemented in cooperation with industry, States, Territories and schools.

By making VET a viable option for all our secondary students, Labor’s plan will make a real and significant dent in the current skills shortage.

The longer the Government pretends a few technical colleges will make up for more than 11 years of complacency and neglect in vocational education and training, the more damage he will do to the prospects of our children and our economy.

Ursula Stephens (NSW, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Leader of the Opposition (Social and Community Affairs)) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

The incorporated speech read as follows—

I am pleased to contribute to the debate on the Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up for Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007 before us this evening, and in general terms I support the measures that it contains.

The measures in this bill attempts to address one of the biggest problems confronting Australia at the moment, and that is the shortage of trade labour. Our problem is that the shortage of trade labour is now adding to cost pressures that exist in delivering projects on time and on budget in Australia. It is also at the point where it is essentially going to hold back investment in Australia and reduce export earnings. For example, in the resource and tourism sectors we do not have the available labour to fulfil our potential international commitments in the export sector.

In relation to the budget announcement, the government’s intention is to top up the wages paid to apprentices under 30 years of age and who are undertaking an apprenticeship in an area of skills shortage and that those payments will total $2,000—$1,000 for each of the first and second years of training. The payment also recognises the low level of apprenticeship wages in those first two years of training, estimated to average about $15,000 in the first year and $19,500 in the second year.

Of course, evidence could suggest that these low wage structures may be one of the contributing factors discouraging potential apprentices from undertaking training.

Labor have long acknowledged the importance of encouraging more people into a traditional apprenticeship and has been calling for a trade completion bonus for apprentices since 2005. Labor are critical of the government’s delay in addressing ongoing skills shortages in the economy but we do welcome this measure, albeit belated.

These measures respond in part to the high drop-out rates that have been prevalent for skilled trades training over the last decade. The top-up wage is also be paid to part-time and school based apprentices, who will receive $500 annually and attract the full $2,000 over time.

Labor supports the proposal contained in the bill, but I am reminded of the similarities to Labor’s previously announced policy in relation to the trade completion bonus. I believe this initiative alone does not compensate for the Howard government’s continued complacency and inadequate response to the skills shortage issues confronting the nation.

This measure is about keeping young people in apprenticeships and it comes two years after Labor called for additional payments to apprenticeships in the traditional trades in the form of a $2,000 trade completion bonus for apprentices. The latest annual figures show that, in 2005, nearly 130,000 apprentices and trainees cancelled or withdrew from their courses. That is a staggering 49 per cent of all those who commenced apprenticeships or traineeships that year. While the government often talks about the 400,000 apprentices in training, they fail to mention that only 140,000 of these apprentices are completing their training or the fact that less than a quarter of those in training are undertaking traditional trade apprenticeships.

The average number of traditional trade apprenticeships under the Howard Government has been around 120,000 a year. Under the Hawke-Keating government, it was 13 per cent higher at 137,000 on average. In fact, completion rates under this government have been of concern, falling from 64 per cent in 1998 to only 57 per cent in 2005 compared to the rate under Labor, which was more than 70 per cent when they left government.

In 1997 the Howard government cut funding to TAFEs, reducing Commonwealth investment in vocational education by 13 per cent in the three years to the year 2000. Furthermore, Commonwealth investment only increased by one per cent between 2000 and 2004. According to data from the National Centre for Vocational Education Research, real expenditure per hour of TAFE curriculum has fallen by nearly 24 per cent since 1997. In this context, the expenditure on apprentices in the budget only begins to undo some of the damage done to vocational education and training by the government. This bill is clearly welcomed but is well overdue.

In May 2005 Labor called for the budget to include a trade completion bonus for apprentices as a way forward to addressing the already critical skills crisis, and while it has taken the government two years to accept Labor’s positive policy proposal—it is nonetheless better late than never. Labor’s plan involved two payments of $1,000 to be made to apprentices in traditional trades on the national skills shortage list. The payments were to be exempt from taxation or classification as income for social security purposes. While the government’s apprenticeship wage top-up is to be paid in the first and second years of an apprenticeship, Labor’s trade completion bonus would make one payment of $1,000 halfway through an apprentice’s training and a further $1,000 payment at the completion of their apprenticeship.

The Howard government bill has, disappointingly, not taken up this key element of Labor’s proposal or recognised the need to target this extra payment towards the completion of an apprenticeship rather than the first two years of training. Labor’s trade completion bonus was targeted to increase the rate of completions of traditional trade apprenticeships by providing payments to reward those who continued with their training beyond the first year and again to those who completed their apprenticeship.

The bill allows for the apprenticeship wage top-up payments to be tax-free and not count as income for determining eligibility for income support such as youth allowance or Austudy. Labor strongly supports this measure as it means not only that the apprentice will receive the full $2,000 but that the top-up will not prevent eligible apprentices from receiving additional ongoing income support or push them into a higher tax bracket. This tax-free element of the apprenticeship wage top-up is welcome; however, it draws attention to the government’s poor record in providing income support to Australian apprentices—particularly from regional Australia.

Despite making income support through youth allowance and Austudy available to apprentices for 2005, the harsh participation requirements for these payments have meant that only a small number of apprentices are benefiting from this support. Of the 60,000 apprentices the Department of Education, Science and Training estimated would receive youth allowance in 2005-06, only one-quarter of this number—15,000 apprentices—actually received income support. The department’s explanation for the low take-up rate was that apprenticeship and parental incomes were higher than anticipated, yet the government acknowledges through this apprenticeship wage top-up measure that these wages need supplementing.

Along with the failure to provide adequate financial support for apprentices and to address the completion rates, particularly in traditional trades, the government has presided over 11 long years of neglect and underinvestment in the vocational education and training sector. Over the past decade the government has slashed investment in vocational education and training and as a nation we are now paying a high price in the form of acute skills shortages across the country. The government’s own estimates show Australia facing a shortage of more than 200,000 skilled workers over the next five years. The government’s cynical political response to this national skills crisis has been to spend nearly half a billion dollars on a stand-alone network of Australian technical colleges that will, at best, on the government’s own figures, produce 10,000 graduates by 2010.

While the government has been in power, the TAFE system has turned away over 325,000 and it is crying out for additional recurrent funding and much-needed investment in infrastructure. Instead, the government is establishing 30 duplicate Australian technical colleges across the country, generally scattered in marginal seats.

Of the 20 colleges that are currently open, two-thirds are not registered training organisations and are being forced to use the facility of existing TAFEs due to delays and implementation problems. THREE years after Prime Minister Howard unveiled the system of Australian Technical Colleges, still not one student has graduated and enrolments are below capacity.

It is estimated the federal Government spends $25,000 to train each students in an Australian Technical College, compared with $9500 to $12,000 for a TAFE student.

On the government’s own figures, in the face of a skills shortage of anywhere between 200,000 and 240,000 positions over the next five years, the stand-alone Australian Technical Colleges duplicated in marginal seats scattered around the countryside will purportedly produce 10,000 graduates. Such is the government’s neglect, incompetence and complacency when it comes to addressing a long-term skills crisis.

In announcing an additional $84 million over five years to establish three of these new Australian Technical Colleges in Brisbane, Sydney and Perth the Treasurer Mr. Costello did not offer any form of assistance or incentive to potential students from regional Australia to help them relocate to allow access to these colleges.

The skills shortage is hitting hard in Regional Australia. The Howard Government gives lip service to providing regionally trained professionals such as doctors and veterinarians, what about trades apprentices and Technical Colleges. Access to training institutions like the Australian Technical Colleges in regionally based locations will alleviate numerous issues. It is a commonly held belief that if you can get people trained in regional areas closer to their homes and support networks, that this will help professionals and tradespeople stay in the regions.

Tertiary education has become a pathway of life for all Australian students as the job market grows and globalisation reaches our shores. For rural people, the way into a future with a sound, challenging education enabling students and families to live their lives and achieving their aspirations is having access to educational pathways. Students who live in rural and remote Australia are still being denied this access. Barriers are placed before them which severely restrict their ability to access tertiary education.

The logistics for a rural and remote student to attend tertiary studies—be they technical colleges, TAFE or any other training institutions—is more and more becoming beyond their financial means. Fuel, travel, accommodation and other costs related to attending training are increasing and inherently more for rural students.

In order to seriously address the magnitude of the current skills crisis, attention needs to focus on the areas of maximum impact, including TAFEs, which remain responsible for the substantial majority of postsecondary vocational education and training; vocational education and training in schools; and on-the-job trades training.

Labor has announced a $2.5 billion trades training centres plan aimed at the one million students in years 9, 10, 11 and 12 in all of Australia’s 2,650 secondary schools. The plan will provide secondary schools with between half a million dollars and $1.5 million to build or upgrade vocational education and training facilities in order to keep kids in schools, enhance the profile and quality of vocational education and training in schools and provide career paths to trades and apprenticeships for students.

As well as providing infrastructure to improve vocational education and trades training in secondary schools, Labor has a plan to introduce a job ready certificate for vocational education and training in schools. This certificate will assess the job readiness of secondary school students engaged in trades and vocational education and training. Students will obtain the job ready certificate through the job training placements as part of Labor’s trades training centres in schools proposal. The job ready certificate will be a stand-alone statement of a student’s readiness for work and will be in addition to a year 12 certificate and any separate vocational education or trades training qualification. The certificate will provide students who complete secondary school with an increased focus and awareness of the skills necessary in the modern workplace. It will also provide employers with a tangible reference, including whether students are capable and ready to work.

The job ready certificate will demonstrate that students possess basic workplace skills, including communication, initiative and enterprise, self-management, technology, teamwork, problem solving, and planning and organisation. At present, there is no requirement for education and training providers to formally issue a statement of these job ready or employability skills.

Australia’s ability to meet the growing need for skilled employees across the country is crucial to ensuring our future prosperity. The job ready certificate is a key part of Labor’s $2.5 billion trades training in schools plan, which includes $84 million to ensure students are involved in trades training and receive one-day-a--week, on-the-job training for 20 weeks a year. This will be implemented in consultation and cooperation with industry, states, territories and the states and independent school systems. That stands in stark contrast to the approach and attitude taken by the Howard government: refusal to work cooperatively with the states and the territories and refusal to acknowledge that the TAFE system still trains, in Australia, 75 per cent of the students or 85 per cent of the hours.

These measures are welcome albeit better late than never.

Lyn Allison (Victoria, Australian Democrats) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I seek leave to incorporate my speech.

Leave granted.

The speech read as follows—

The Social Security Amendment (Apprenticeship Wage Top-Up For Australian Apprentices) Bill 2007 provides financial support for some first and second year apprentices.

Apprentices aged under 30 and training in a trade occupation identified as an area of national skills shortages will qualify for $500 every six months.

Those apprentices eligible for the additional funding will include carpenters, joiners, welders, bricklayers, electricians, plasterers and fitters.

The Bill also makes this additional income exempt from assessment as income for tax and social security purposes.

These measures are about attracting and keeping young people in apprenticeships.

The Minister in his second reading speech noted that wages for apprentices are low and this is particularly true for 1st and 2nd year apprentices.

In many cases young people can earn more by taking on unskilled or semi-skilled work—by taking on work as labourers or factory hands.

It is not surprising that young people will look around at their friends who have taken on this type of work, see they have more money to spend on the week-end and decide not to take on an apprenticeship in the first place or else drop out.

The Government will make much of the fact that there are almost 400 000 apprentices and trainees.

What they won’t mention though is that less than 160 000 of those are traditional apprenticeships—the area in which Australia faces the most dire shortages.

And they won’t mention that less than a third (29%) of new apprentices and trainees are tradespeople.

Or that less than ¼ of completions in 2005 were traditional trade apprenticeships.

They also won’t be drawing attention to the 2% increase in cancellations and withdrawals.

In 2005 almost 130 000 apprentices and trainees cancelled or withdrew from their courses.

Over the term of the Howard Government completion rates for traditional apprenticeships has dropped from 64% in the years 1998-2002 to 57% in 2002-05.

The Democrats recognise that we need to be encouraging more young people into apprenticeships and we need to be keeping them there.

Clearly these financial incentives will go someway to encouraging young people to stay in their courses and to complete their training.

It has been suggested that one possible reason for higher completion rates for apprenticeships in Western Australia and Queensland compared to Victoria and NSW in particular is because the large mining firms in Queensland and WA are offering extra pay to retain apprentices.

The Government needs to make sure that the wages of 1st and 2nd year apprentices are sufficiently attractive over the long term if it wants to encourage young people into trades. The value of top-ups will of course erode over time.

But this is an inadequate response from the Government—an inadequate response to a problem of its own making.

The reality is that Australia is simply not producing enough skilled workers to feed the economy.

This is the result of the Howard Government’s chronic underinvestment in education and training—something which will no doubt be seen as one of its biggest failures.

And something that will reverberate through our economy for years to come.

There has been a failure on the part of State and Federal Governments to chart Australia’s skilled workforce needs and there has been a failure to make sure those needs can be met by local training.

We need a concerted effort to identify skills shortage not only now but also for the future.

The shortage of skilled labour can not be fixed by simply providing a little more money to the apprentices who are currently in the system.

This is simply a sort term solution. More needs to be done.

I think we can all agree that skilled tradespeople are scarcer than hen’s teeth.

The latest skills vacancy index produced by the Department of Employment and Workplace Relations shows that skilled vacancies for some occupational groups are still showing rises.

Vacancies in electrical and electronics trades rose by 2.0 per cent; construction, 1.6 per cent; and automotive, 1.9 per cent.

The Federal Government’s response to this situation in recent years has been to allow employers to bring in skilled and semi-skilled workers to fill gaps.

This has of course suited employers—after all a short term fill-up by workers who can be shipped back to their home countries when demand dries up allows them to avoid their responsibilities for investing in long-term skills development.

The number of people coming in on 457 visas has grown from 28,000 in 2005 to almost 40,000 in 2006.

There have of course been problems with this programme—I am sure we have all heard the reports of workers being treated very poorly by their employers and the claims of bogus qualifications.

And of course this approach can only go so far when Australia is competing for specialised workers with many other countries who are also short of skilled workers.

It is true that the Government has finally recognised what we and employer and industry groups have been emphasising for sometime—that is that Australia’s economic prosperity can not continue without real investment in skills.

Unfortunately the Government is still taking a piece meal approach. It’s more bits and pieces here and there. There is no real coordinated plan.

There are vouchers to help meet training costs, for literacy and numeracy courses, for business skills.

There’s money to help buy tool kits.

But we need a longer term strategic solution. We need to be looking at how we structure and deliver apprenticeships and vocational training and how we encourage this as a valid career option.

We need to be looking at the role of schools in supporting the development of trade related skills.

There is general agreement that more exposure and experience in trade-related skills in the mainstream school environment is desirable.

It provides students with more information to assist them in career decisions and improves student readiness for the world of work.

But not all schools provide the opportunity for students to participate in trade related subjects and apprenticeship training.

Schools need to be adequately resourced to be able to support these types of programmes, including working in with local TAFE institutes and industry.

We also know that sourcing adequate numbers of quality structured workplace learning placements for students is a problem. Industry has to step up and carry its fair share of the costs of training.

Without the appropriate involvement of post-school training institutions and workplace learning opportunities young people may not get the best possible training experience.

We also need to see trained career advisors in all secondary schools. Without information and guidance many young people are not aware of the options available to them—particularly the advantages of pursuing training which in the short term may not seem as attractive as better paying options but which longer term will provide greater career options.

Trained career advisors can support young people in navigating from school to employment and training.

But there is still work to be done on making those transitions more flexible and smoothing out the barriers between school and post-school institutions and the workplace.

Young people need to be able to move more easily between school-based training and other settings.

It also needs to be remembered that many skilled tradespeople are unwilling to train apprentices because of over-regulation, concerns about their ability to support the apprentice over the required length of time and the high, indirect costs associated with taking on an apprentice.

We need to be supporting these small and medium sized employers and the organisations that support them in taking on apprentices to a greater extent.

Without this we will not see more apprenticeship places or better completion rates.

There have been some recent moves towards shorter apprenticeships, allowing a person to progress based on achieving specific competencies rather than the number of years spent training.

Moves in this direction have the potential to make apprenticeships more attractive by allowing people to move more quickly to levels at which their pay is more adequate and their jobs more satisfying but we must make sure that quality is not compromised—either of the training experience or the outcome.

There is ample evidence that the quality of the training experience links to completion rates, so if we want to see more people finish their apprenticeships we can not afford to make apprenticeships shorter if the quality of training decreases. We will end up no better off.

Pushing young people through training into the workforce quickly may have an appeal to the Government as a quick fix for urgent skill shortages but we do not want to see people end up with narrow, partial qualifications that will meet the needs for some immediate job but go no way to providing high quality transferable skills.

We do not want substandard tradespeople and we do not want young people who are disadvantaged in the long term because of the quality of their training.

I am encouraged by recent talk of high-level trade qualifications. Providing tradespeople with the opportunity to increase their skills and qualifications may encourage more people to stay in their profession, rather than moving to another career if they want to develop more skills.

This may also improve the status of trades within the community which will improve their attractiveness to both young people entering the workforce and those retraining or returning to the workforce.

Question agreed to.

Bill read a second time.