Simon Crean (Hotham, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Regional Development) Share this | Hansard source

Skills development is one of the key drivers of an economy. It not only boosts opportunity for the individuals concerned but also boosts productivity. It is a win-win outcome. I have said before in this place that education is the great enabler of a society and skills development is the means by which we become smarter, more innovative and more adaptive and compete at the higher wage end of the job opportunity scale. It is a means by which we become more productive and provide more diverse and rewarding opportunities for our people, not just young people. It is true that there are individual benefits that come from skills development, but there is also a national benefit. That is why it is always important in these debates to remind people that education and skills development is a public good. (Quorum formed) So investing in our capacity to advance education and skills is one of the essential investments a government must make—not just that it can make but that it must make—but it is an investment that this government has failed to make.

Labor have been arguing for a decade that this government is letting the country down and letting its individuals down by failing to invest properly in skills development. Belatedly, not only has the government acknowledged the problem but it has understood it has had to act; hence, this injection of $837 million over five years to address the problem. It is an investment made too late and still too narrow in its focus.

This is a skills crisis that we have been warning of for years and, particularly in the context of the resources boom and the capacity constraints, what that failure to invest in skills has produced. We have heard the government rabbit on about infrastructure bottlenecks, but only now has it admitted the problem of the skills shortage. Over the years under this government, we have seen a crisis resulting from the underfunding of our universities and TAFE sectors, where the government has shifted heavily the cost of funding these sectors to the individual and the states—a government vacating the field and expecting others to pick up the cost. In 10 years, 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE—300,000 Australians turned away from acquiring skills that would have benefited them and the nation.

It is interesting—and the member for Blaxland made reference to this—that, whilst this is an important but belated statement, Labor are aware of the government’s commitment in the lead-up to the last election to establish the Australian technical colleges. It was a program that was deliberately designed to circumvent the states’ TAFE programs—a program that the government had underinvested in—but I think it is pretty instructive to look at what has been achieved.

The government promised two years ago that it would establish 25 colleges. Only four of them have been established to date—I think there might have been an additional one established just recently which would take it to five; let us give them the benefit of the doubt—with just 320 students. Is this a serious response to the skills crisis? That is the fundamental question that I think has to be posed. No wonder we have still got the problem that has resulted in this sort of statement.

So we have again been proven right, just as in the last term the government belatedly realised it had to do something with another one of those important public good areas—health—and reinvest to save our Medicare system because Labor had identified the problem and posed costed alternatives to address it. At the end of the last parliamentary term we went to the election proposing an initiative, fully costed and funded, which would have seen an additional 20,000 places in our TAFEs and our universities. Just imagine the opportunities that that would have provided—the opportunities not just for individuals but for the nation.

My point in saying that is that it is easy for oppositions to just be critical of the government but Labor have had a consistent track record of putting forward constructive alternatives to address this problem. When we were in office—the 13 years that we were in office—we saw a real commitment to lifting the skills and educational ability of our people. We increased skills funding by 55 per cent in real terms. We increased TAFE funding by 56 per cent in real terms and we increased university funding by 60 per cent in real terms. This government comes nowhere near that sort of commitment.

We recognised the importance of addressing the problem from a national perspective and established the Australian National Training Authority. We developed the Working Nation program, which I had the privilege to not only develop but implement. It is a tragedy that it was not able to continue, because it was making huge headway. One of the mechanisms under the Working Nation program to complement the jobs compact and the subsidy arrangements in terms of getting long-term unemployed back into work was Netforce. This mechanism recognised the importance of driving skills development not just in the traditional trades but also in the new economy jobs, jobs not traditionally known as trades but jobs that nevertheless needed skills development for which there was no accredited training. It was Labor that established that mechanism. I think it is very interesting when the government gets up and talks about its record on unemployment. We should not forget that when the Prime Minister was Treasurer in the Fraser government that was the record unemployment that was created in this economy. It is also true that under Working Nation—

See this speech in context