Michael Hatton (Blaxland, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I can do soporific—what the member for Bruce says is quite true. I will start in this case not from the very beginning but from the core of what this is about—a bill which just says one thing: ‘We need to bring some money forward in order to kick-start this process because we have not got enough people taking it up and in future we do not want people to know about the maladministration that is happening, so we will just make the changes by regulation and probably the only person who will know then is Alan Ramsay because he is the only one who follows what happens at the regulation level and within the Public Service departments.’ This is a line that has been put into operation in about three other bills recently. A government by regulation is no government at all. It should come under the purview of this parliament, in particular because of the fundamental inadequacies of the entire approach the government has taken.

We have seen 10 years worth of the government walking away from their responsibilities with regard to Australia’s technical colleges. In the end, at almost two minutes to midnight last year, we had the quick run to the judge to say, ‘We’ve come up with this brilliant idea and we will actually have technical colleges. There will be 24 of them’—once we finally get them going, of course, we can now say in relation to this bill—‘and they will be the answer to our problems.’ If you look at the order of magnitude of the problems, even when the colleges are up and running they will provide for about 1,000 students. If you listen to the Australian Industry Group, they say that the demand for skilled people in Australia—and, from a Labor Party point of view, we say they should be Australians who are trained and given the skills to take up these jobs rather than importing people from overseas on four-year TEPs or bringing them in from overseas in order to take on apprenticeships in regional areas—is for 100,000 immediately. What do we get in the government’s proposal? We get 1,000th of what is needed—not 100th and not a 10th but 1,000th.

We have seen this government effectively deny 300,000 young people places at TAFE. We have seen them walk away from the major problem that Australia has—that the fashion with regard to apprenticeships and trade training changed. The major employers such as Telstra and State Rail stopped training people. A lot of industry simply went with that trend. In an attempt to save costs, they put trade training aside as being too difficult, too costly and too intensive. This has been a 30- or 40-year program—apprenticeships have fallen over that time—but the government have been responsible for the past 10 years and their initial approach under Dr Kemp, as the relevant minister, was simply to say, ‘We’ve got this wonderful new program, we’ll come up with New Apprenticeships—a new way of training.’

The old style of apprenticeships has long gone. No more are people trained across the board with a depth of skills who are able to say at the end of their period of training that they are fully qualified tradespeople. It does not happen any more. The crisis is enormous. The average age of tradespeople in the traditional trades in Australia is 54. Ten years from now, if we keep going the way we are, that average age will be 64. Where are the people to replace them? The Prime Minister, in his answer to my question today, which he did not answer relevantly, re-endorsed effectively the position he had taken previously—‘You can import them.’ Do what the government has been doing—plugging holes to fill the gap—and import them, in an extraordinary way. Four-year temporary entry permits used to be for large multinationals to fill a specific hole when they could not get someone with expertise in Australia because the nature of the work was so different, people were not trained to do it and there was a corporate culture that needed to be taken into account. Very small numbers of people came through, not hundreds of thousands of people in the traditional trades.

The back end of this is that, at the end of the four-year TEP, those people then get preferred entry into Australia if they apply under the full migration program. There is a discount on the number of points they need. So people from England, Ireland and other countries are coming in under this program and some of them—60,000 to 70,000 a year or so—are coming on to the end of the normal immigration program. This is not part of the normal skills based program but an add-on. What is the effect on young Australians and why are we in a major skills crisis now? It is because the government has not seen it as its responsibility to do something about this.

Labor has had a good, long, hard look at that situation. We have expressed our ideas in the second reading amendment in front of us. I will reiterate the first three points and then go to some substantial planning as to how we actually fix it, but that is based on having a complete commitment to really doing something about this. The first point we make is:

... the House condemns the Government for:

(1)

creating a skills crisis through during their ten long years in office ...

And I would add the rider: and not doing anything to solve it but in fact making worse by taking the temporary measures that they have. The second and third points are:

(2)

its continued failure to provide the necessary opportunities for Australians to get the training they need to get a decent job and meet the skills needs of the economy;

(3)

reducing the overall percentage of the Federal Budget spent on vocational education and training, and allowing this percentage of spending to further decline over the forward estimate period ...

The member for Batman, in his contribution earlier in the day, gave excellent coverage of these three points. He gave practical examples from his discussions with Australian industry leaders on what they saw as the depth of this problem. He talked about the fact that their industries face an immediate crisis and we need to train people as fast as possible in order to be able to do away with the capacity constraints that industry is facing. We cannot continue to grow at a sufficient level unless the capacity constraints that are there now, because of the lack of skilled people, are met.

The member for Batman properly outlined part of our approach. We need to think about this in a new way. It is no use having a Dodgy Brothers approach to New Apprenticeships—the traineeships which are larger in number than the real apprenticeships that they replaced but which do not give people full and proper training. We need to take account of the fact that the old style of training, the extended period of time that there was, needs to be foreshortened in a number of traditional trades from four years to two or from three years to two. In part this can be done by concentrating the training for young people in the first year and a half of an apprenticeship, all the tech elements, either at school in years 11 and 12, in specific specialist schools that can do it or, alternatively, at a rejuvenated TAFE level. The approach is to concentrate that so that their apprenticeship training in the job can be more useful.

Part of the reason it could be more useful and part of the reason that more people might then stay on and complete it, because we have at least 40 per cent of people not going through with their apprenticeships, is Labor’s $2,000 to $2,500 apprenticeship completion bonus. They would get half of that halfway through and the final amount at the end. The second element to encourage them is $800 per year for a skills account. We would abolish up-front fees and pay the money directly into the skills account to be spent on TAFE fees, textbooks or materials for every traditional trade apprentice. That would do away with that disincentive that is currently there and provide a bonus incentive for people to complete their apprenticeship.

Compressing the amount of time it takes by allowing people to get advanced standing in their apprenticeship would enable them to get paid more money—to get paid at third and fourth year rates. This is another element that is quite critical. Young people going through years 11 and 12 find themselves in a position where it is easier to go out into the broader workforce and earn quick money readily. They do not want to be in an apprenticeship and earning less than their peers. A key problem is the differential, which is part of the reason people do not complete their courses. Our bonus is a way to help narrow that differential.

I am very proud of the fact that in September 2005 Labor, in considering the difficulty that we faced and the deficiencies in front of us, came up with a skills blueprint. I want to note for the House the elements of that blueprint. Our program for getting skills into our schools was to (1) offer young people better choices by teaching trades, technology and science in first-class facilities and rid our schools of dusty and Dickensian workshops, (2) establish a trades-in-school scheme to double the number of school based apprenticeships in areas of skills shortage and provide extra funding per place, (3) establish specialist schools for the senior years of schooling in areas such as trades, technology and science and (4) establish a trades taster program so years 9 and 10 students can experience a range of trade options, which could also lead to pre-apprenticeship programs.

I have taught years 9 and 10. I also taught people who left school early and did their diploma entry 1 and diploma entry 2 at TAFE. I know from my experience that keeping up to 80 per cent or so of the cohort at school at years 11 and 12 and trying to give them a comprehensive education with only bits and pieces of woodwork, metalwork or other trade based approaches—technics programs and so on—or, over time, photography classes and others that would have some advanced standing in trade training and trade skilling simply does not go near addressing the fundamental problem. There has been a long extension of what kids see as irrelevant training in a comprehensive area and a lack of direct, on-the-job experience and a lack of direct physical experience, particularly in trade training.

In 1975 I saw in Holland with my very own eyes a system where they had the courage to split the kids between an academic stream—about 20 per cent of the population—and an alternative stream. There was a choice to change over into the academic stream for those who wanted to go there. From about 14 or so, kids would go through what is effectively a technical high school or a specialist high school which provided not only a full comprehensive education but also complete trade training. At the end of that period of training people would come out as carpenters or electricians. Indeed, the normal impulse was to have a double trade qualification at the end. Speaking to Dutch representatives recently, I found they moved away from that model in the last number of years but are now moving back close to the purity of that original model because they realised that you cannot run a society without people trained in trade skills and without an adequate number of professionals to provide what really is the engine room of the economy. In this regard Labor’s plan lays out the future. I endorse it completely and I endorse the second reading amendment.

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