Gary Hardgrave (Moreton, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I think all of my colleagues opposite are happy to be associated with those remarks. I know that Labor members have been spending a little bit of time talking about employment relations issues, Work Choices and so forth. I know that there is not a dissenting report, as I said to the House, but I took advice from the Clerk—I know that the member for Werriwa was disturbed about that—and the Clerk put the words ‘dissenting report’ in my earlier contribution in the House. So, if it is acceptable, I will disassociate myself from my own comments and say they put some other comments in there. That is what the Labor members did. They reflected a bit on industrial relations practices, as is their wont, and there was obviously a deal of interest and pressure from a variety of unions keen to put a point to the committee, which we listened to. One would suspect that Peter Olah talking about the fact that Work Choices provides some flexibility that had not been there before was in fact recognition that restrictive award conditions made it impossible for some people who were employed to do one job but were not necessarily affiliated or paid according to the various awards relating to the various tasks that they might undertake. In that regard, Work Choices means that they can have a private agreement with that person. I really do not want to spend much time in this discussion dealing with that.

I think it is fair to say that it is true, as the member for Shortland just observed—I will paraphrase what she said—that this is a sector that is vital to Australia’s economic base, that does not pay its workers as well as it might and that has only itself to blame for so many of the problems it currently has when it comes to labour shortages. As people in Western Australia observed to the committee, if you are a good cook, a good chef or a good wait staff person and you are in the local hotel, restaurant or whatever in a mining area then—guess what!—the mining industry bloke down the road is going to come and hire you and will be fairly likely to offer you some accommodation that you might not already be getting. I think that when they opened an extension to the Cable Beach resort in Broome it caused the Chicken Shack store in Broome—I think that was the name of the place—to close completely because all of those who were broiling and oiling chickens at the Chicken Shack went off to work at Cable Beach, where I am sure they picked up some other skills. The point is that there is an enormously competitive labour market in this particular area.

My grave concern as somebody from a media and marketing background who watches the ambitions of government and tourist authorities to bring more people to Australia—and I note the member for Cook is here and his passion for Qantas, our national carrier, to bring those people in is very well known in this place—is that we as a nation are not actually going to be able to live up to the expectations that we have created in our tourist marketing, because one of the key elements of meeting those expectations that is missing is the failure to properly invest in our people. To leave it all to chance—to leave it to the backpackers, the entry level job seekers and, as the member for Shortland rightly observed, the people who get a job in tourism or hospitality before a real job comes along—and to leave it to just those people to underpin the way in which our tourism and hospitality industry operates is an enormous folly.

We have a sector that is small and medium business in the most. There is not a Sofitel and a Hilton in every country town. Those Hiltons and Sofitels do have a huge impact on the professional standards—there is no doubt about it. In every country town you may well find that well-meaning, superannuated people are taking on the business investment of their lifetime, hopefully turning their retirement dreams into some sort of success for themselves, and are struggling to find staff. Kate Lamont, who provides enormous high-level advice for Tourism Western Australia and who put Margaret River on the map through her abilities as an entrepreneur in building up a business case for Margaret River wineries, said to the committee at the Perth hearings that she is back to changing sheets in her hotel rooms. This is an extraordinary problem for the sector; you have someone who you want to be entrepreneurial and to give good advice to government and industry doing the close work of tightening up the sheets around the beds they let at night.

We have a problem in this sector. Some of it is built around the failure to pay adequately but, to be fair, a lot of it is built around the failure of this industry to be collaborative enough to put pressure on the government and to make sure that, if you move from one hotel or caravan park to a hotel thousands of kilometres away, the experience you gained at one place counts for something. The national training system does not kick in and recognise the in-house training as well as it should. That conflict has to be put to bed because, if we want to give people a chance to grow their wage and a long-term career, and if we want this industry to meet all of the expectations of people coming to this country, we have to give people a career path.

In the recommendations put forward, the committee has provided some ways to achieve this. It asked, ‘Why don’t we have a portable long-service scheme?’ If it is agreed that you have been working and that you have been involved in the industry in one place and moved to another, let that all count in understanding, appreciating and respecting the experience you have gained in those different places; and let that be recognised by the industry. As the member for Shortland asked, ‘Why don’t we accept that a lot of the places are seasonal?’ We have to make sure that if you get 12 weeks work at the ski fields, which might well be 18 weeks given that the snow fell fairly early this year—I know nothing about skiing, but I heard that on television—why don’t those 12 or 18 weeks work count towards a long-term understanding and credentials to give you a nationally recognised training outcome? That prior experience and learning should count towards something so that you can invest in yourself with further training and know that, even if you do not have a piece of paper, your experience is being recognised. That does not exist in Australia today.

We are sending all the wrong messages to people, saying: ‘There’s a little bit here and a little bit there. Take your CV, tout it around and hope people understand what you have written down.’ We need to put a better stamp of approval across the efforts that individual workers make and we need to make sure that individual employers are working in a collaborative way to reward people with those sorts of skills and experiences.

This report set out to put forward a number of suggestions for the recognition of people’s competency and the training and experience they have. We also explained what I think is a fundamental failure of the migration occupations in demand list, the MODL, which requires that people have at least three years of postsecondary training in a particular profession for that professional skill or trade to be recognised as worthy of importing to Australia. That is a huge failure when you are looking for front-of-house staff and cannot find them. It is a real problem if you cannot find enough people to make the beds in your hotel rooms. The skills required to make a bed properly, to maintain a room properly and to serve wine and food properly—let alone the high-level standards of maitre d’s in restaurants—are not recognised by the migration occupations in demand list, because the criteria are too restrictive.

The committee has honed in on this and said there is something absolutely daft about a skills shortage in certain parts of Australia so pronounced that we are told some hotels in capital cities around this country are shutting down entire floors, saying, ‘Don’t rent a room on floor 14 because we can’t make the bed.’ The Crown Casino in Melbourne preserved two-thirds of its restaurant during Chinese New Year because they did not have enough waitstaff. The committee is saying to think about the cost to the economy of keeping alive this restrictive practice on the migration occupations in demand list.

So I think we have put forward a bit of food for thought. I hope that the government takes our observations seriously. I hope the industry takes it seriously, because there is a bit of challenge in this to the industry—to get organised and to get on with the job. But I still say, as I always said when I was the minister responsible for training in Australia, the message is clear in the tourism sector: the best investment you can make in your business is in your people. If you want to train them and invest in them, you will keep them. If you don’t, you will be short of them. (Time expired)

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