Sharon Bird (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I know that the smartcard is catching up fast, but I still think it has a fair way to go to take on the incompetent implementation of the technical colleges. During the 2004 election campaign, the minister had the brain-snap that the government would set up 24 technical colleges around the country. At the moment, four colleges are operating and the minister is running around threatening to take away the contracts from other areas. The goalposts for this idea have moved with every announcement the minister has made.

The last time the minister came to my electorate to talk to interested bodies about establishing a technical college, he said the government was going to be ‘flexible’ about meeting local demands and that a local area could put together a proposal that suited local circumstances. My understanding is that the committee in my area have been knocked back every time they have put forward a proposal to the department. They have reached the point where they are getting ready to say to the minister, ‘We can’t do anything that meets our local demands that you will tick off on.’ The minister’s implementation of this program is significantly failing to deliver in terms of the skills shortages occurring in my area. Indeed, the program itself—being flawed in that it had such a long lead time to provide skilled tradespeople—is now blowing out because the minister cannot even implement the policy correctly and get these things up and running.

The skills shortage is not a surprise; it was identified. These jobs have been on the list for the 10 years this government has been in power. With businesses screaming that the No. 1 issue of concern for growth in the future is not industrial relations but the skills shortage, the government responds by expanding not only the skilled immigration category but also the unskilled immigration category—something we have never seen before. In particular, the member for Ballarat and I share the problem of very high youth unemployment in our areas. I have a son who left school four years ago. I had five boys who, as teenagers, when they were sitting around for more than 12 months desperately trying to find a job, would have jumped at the opportunity to have a trade. The government might be pleased to hear that one of them ended up going to uni and doing science teaching—another skills shortage area. Another three eventually went off and did other things. Only one of them ended up in a traditional trade, and he travels to Sydney for that work.

The reality is that there is no snobbishness on this side of the House, nor in our communities, about trade training. There are young people in our areas who want those opportunities and jobs. They do not want a toolbox. They do not want to go back to school at some trade college. They just want investment in trade training opportunities, and the government has walked away from funding our TAFEs—our world-class, world-recognised trade training institutions—for its own ideological bent. The minister can spin and throw accusations at this side of the table as much as he likes, but he is an abject failure in this portfolio. I have little doubt that even the minister at the table, Minister Hockey, would do a 100 per cent better job in meeting this requirement. (Time expired)

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