Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Vocational Education) Share this | Hansard source

higher than the global financial crisis, which those opposite like to pretend never happened—in fact, the highest unemployment rate in 14 years. The budget does not have a plan to address that for the long term. In areas across the nation like mine and the member for Chifley's there is an ongoing deep concern about endemic unemployment, particularly for our young people. In fact, it was a topic of the OECD and a major focus for the OECD. What we need to see happen, and it has been told to the government time and time again—it was told to us in government and we responded with a significant investment in both skills and infrastructure—is investment in knowledge, skills and the tools with which to utilise them to ensure the growth of new jobs and the ability of people to take up the emerging jobs of the future. We have not seen that in this budget.

I want to deal with my own shadow portfolio of vocational education and skills. If you look at what the budget says about this, it confirms that there is a massive 20 per cent cut over the forward estimates in skills funding. That is the reality—a 20 per cent cut. It has totally failed to make any new announcements about investments in skills and training. This abject failure to act comes on the back of last year's budget, where they cut $2 billion out of the portfolio.

Of particular concern in a debate about jobs and in particular when someone claims they are the Prime Minister for 'Tony's tradies', they cut $1 billion out of apprenticeships and traineeships. Not a single dollar of that has gone back, nor is there a single new initiative in this budget for apprentices and trainees. It seems it is all right to love the current generation of tradies, but heaven forbid you actually invest in the next generation of them.

What we actually saw put in place was the abolition of a whole range of programs that were there— (Time expired)

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