Ed Husic (Chifley, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary to the Shadow Treasurer) Share this | Hansard source

Member for Banks, there is a problem with your time machine. You need to crank it back a little bit further. It is not good enough to just go to '07 and look at what happened there. The genesis of the trade training centres was to clean up the mess left by the Howard government when, as part of this broader strategy dealing with federation, it refused to properly fund key areas where agreements were held with the states and territories.

One of them was education and, within education, vocational training. We had the Howard government hell-bent on reproducing the TAFE system. They refused to properly fund it. They created a separate stream, the ATC stream, that would have set up individual TAFEs to rival TAFE. It is because the Howard government did not want to fund the states and territories.

In that circumstance that we saw the failure of that system and decided to scoop those ATCs up and bring them within schools and provide trades. In my part of Western Sydney, where manufacturing—particularly for the Chifley electorate—generates 10,000 jobs, you know very quickly that the priority is to develop people with trade skills, and the best way to do it is within schools.

What you are seeing now is a movement within schools to bring together universities and vocational training within schools much earlier on, to make the transition smoother. In our area, where we have a high demand for manufacturing and trade skills, you would argue that anything that helped strengthen the availability of quality tradespeople would be something welcomed by all and not turned into a football by some. It was incredibly stupid for the coalition government to make a decision that would rip the heart out of the trade-training centres program—nearly $1 billion stripped out by Treasurer Hockey. That would have funded 650 trade-training centres in schools through 2018. It is an absolute travesty, because the trade-training centres in our area are chalking up impressive results.

Let us talk about Loyola Senior High at Mount Druitt. Its Trade Training Centre director, Tammy Prestage, proudly boasts that the trade-training program at the school level has a 97 per cent success rate with students undertaking courses. That is 97 per cent against a national failure rate of around 50 per cent for first-year apprentices outside the school system. That is remarkable. Loyala began with seven courses in 2010-11. So successful has been that it has now expanded to 13 courses, attracting 200 students for next year. Their program includes child care, beauty and hospitality; importantly, it is integrated with local industry that advises on the skills required.

They have had many success stories. These include Darryl Martinez, who last year won the Prime Minister's Award for Electrotechnology. Congratulations to Darryl. It also includes Alexandra Vassallo, who took out the Western Sydney category in the School Based Apprentice of the Year awards. There are similar success stories from other schools in the area. For example, at Evans High and Doonside Technology High the shadow assistant minister visited, which I was very happy about, and was able to walk through and see the work there. Some of the students were so keen that they were there in the trade training centre in their lunch break, building up their skills and working on projects. They were very excited about their own futures.

These young students want a trade. The corporate sector is not on their radar. They see that they can provide great benefit by applying their skills, energy and enthusiasm through trades training. The longer-term goal should be to encourage more of those students in there. One of the tragedies of the Hockey budget is that it stopped the evolution of these centres. Ideally, it would have been used to identify and help in other skills-shortage areas. For example, in the ICT sector there are massive skill shortages. We could have seen trade-training centres move into that space, but now that has been cruelly denied.

Trade training in schools works. It removes distraction, provides greater focus and ensures that in Western Sydney we get the skills we need. What we have now is high youth unemployment, funding cuts to various programs and being set back even further because of the trade-training centre scheme being gutted by the Abbott-Hockey government.

Debate adjourned.

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