Jennie George (Throsby, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Environment and Heritage) Share this | Hansard source

I am very pleased to participate in this MPI debate, because it is very important. The Labor Party has argued from the beginning that the trade skills training visa is just another quick-fix solution to a problem this government has known about for the decade it has been in government. The Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs talked about the major economic challenges facing our nation—and no-one denies that those challenges are real and obvious to us all. But no-one can deny the simple fact that, having known about these issues, particularly the issue of the emerging skills crisis in our nation, we have not heard any coherent strategy from the Howard government about how one addresses these endemic problems.

All the reputable authorities in Australia are telling us that the skills crisis in our nation is one of the largest brakes on our future prosperity and our potential economic growth. The government does nothing about any coherent strategy to address the skills problem but resorts to bringing skilled migrants to Australia—and now there is the proposal to have unskilled apprentices brought from overseas to be trained in Australia. Because Labor oppose that and say it is short-sighted and the wrong policy, we are somehow just putting on a political stunt—I think the parliamentary secretary used those words—and, worse still, we are being accused of being xenophobic.

I think the government is very defensive about this training visa because the community appreciates that it is the wrong way to go. Why is it the wrong way to go? Because today we have 193,000 young Australians aged 15 to 19 who are not in work and who are not in training, who would be desperately happy to have the opportunity of an apprenticeship in this country. It is all right for the Treasurer in his defensive mode to flick-pass to the regional certifying bodies, but it is not the regional bodies that are responsible; it is the federal government that has allowed this visa to be introduced as another quick fix to an endemic problem.

At least the Parliamentary Secretary to the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs now recognises that we have a crisis in skills in this country. Where has this government been for the last 10 years, when the alarm bells were ringing? All we have seen, time after time, are quick-fix, short-term solutions. I could not believe it when I heard the parliamentary secretary say that as he travelled around Australia, particularly regional Australia, he was told that one of the problems was that we did not have a critical mass of people who wanted to take up apprenticeships. In the time that the government has brought in 270,000 skilled migrants—and we are all for migration; skilled migrants have helped build a prosperous nation over the years—we have turned away 300,000 young Australians from TAFE courses.

You do not have to tell me about needing a critical mass. Come to my region in the Illawarra, where I have an unemployment rate among young people of over 35 per cent. In the last two years, in a coalition with business, the unions and the group training providers, we have put 200 and more young people, many of them unemployed, into apprenticeships. And when we go around to try and extract money from this government, it is like drawing blood out of a stone. For a meagre contribution of $100,000 a year, you have to traipse the corridors and knock on doors to say to the government: ‘We’ve got a local solution that works. It’s a solution that addresses very high rates of youth unemployment combined with the skills crisis, which is a problem not just in our region but across the whole of Australia.’

How dare the parliamentary secretary say that those who oppose this visa have no regard or empathy for the plight of regional Australia? We live in regional Australia. We know what the problems are. Let me just tell you about other regions, not just my own. In the Illawarra there is 35 per cent youth unemployment; Richmond-Tweed, 37 per cent; Gippsland, 28 per cent; Tasmania, 25 per cent; and the Loddon Mallee region, 32 per cent. I think government members should be hanging their heads in shame, because you are saying to all those young people, wherever they are located, that this government has given up hope. It has no vision for them. The only response it has is a quick-fix, short-term political fix, bringing skilled people from overseas, which is necessary but not the solution to the endemic problem.

It is not as if Australia is short of workers. There would be many workers already out there at work who would be more than happy to be upskilled, and I can assure you that there are many thousands of young people across Australia currently being denied the opportunity of training in an apprenticeship who would jump at the chance. But this government has been asleep at the wheel for 10 long years. We have known that this crisis was upon our doorstep, and all we have done is resort to the solution of bringing people from overseas to fill the gaps.

That is not good enough at a time when Australia has to compete in a global economy. Why is it that Australia, among all the developed nations, has reduced its public investment in TAFEs and the universities? When our competitors are putting more and more public funds into their people, investing in their youth, investing in skills, investing in human capital, we are doing the absolute reverse and saying, ‘We’ve got no solution. We’ll wipe our hands and allow employers to bring in young people from overseas to take up apprenticeship opportunities in this country.’ I think that is an unconscionable way to proceed.

It is unconscionable, because there are low-cost alternatives, as our region has shown. I invite the parliamentary secretary to come down and see what we have been able to do with very little support from this federal government. There are alternatives, and Labor has talked about a lot of those alternatives. Why don’t you look at our trade completion bonus, so that we can do something about the problem of 40 per cent of young apprentices dropping out before they finish their studies?

On top of that, when the budget had all this surplus money to invest in the skilling of our people, what did we find? The one thing that I have relied on locally to convince our employers to take on an unemployed young person in an apprenticeship was a program that was only worth $13.7 million, an incentive program to encourage local business in regional and rural Australia to take on young people. What happened to that program? That program was axed. And what happened to funding for vocational education? We have a smaller percentage being spent on vocational education than ever before.

This government has no coherent strategy to address a problem that it has known about for a long time. It is not as if this has suddenly descended upon us. Alarm bells have been ringing. The AiG, a reputable employer organisation, has said that by 2010 we will need 100,000 additional trained tradespeople.

Another quick-fix solution was the panacea of the Australian technical colleges—the 25 that we were promised as the solution to apprenticeship training. At last count, I think four of them were up and running. One of them, in Gladstone, has one apprentice. At best they have 100. In the meantime, through a low-cost program, 200 young people in the Illawarra have had a chance to get an apprenticeship. So there are solutions to the problem, if only the government wanted to listen to and learn from some of the creative and innovative suggestions that have been made across the nation.

A quick fix is no fix, and this visa is yet another quick fix to a problem that should have been addressed a long time ago and that is still crying out to be addressed. The Australian people are rightly demanding of this government that its first obligation is to create opportunities for our youth, to create opportunities for our workers to be upskilled, to train Australians first and train them now. The government has the means to do it. Put the money in and make the investment, because there is no better investment than investing in the future of young people across this nation.

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