Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Batman for his interjection, because he encourages me incredibly to highlight issues in this bill which I am sure he will agree with. As he knows, we need a skilled workforce in this country. In the current climate in Australia we have 4.3 per cent unemployment. With an unemployment rate of 4.3 per cent we need as many skilled people as we can get, because we have a growing economy requiring a growing workforce. We have an economy that requires skilled people to work in jobs which for so long have been considered menial; they are now highly valued. We know that these people are being paid incredible wages for jobs which were essentially called blue-collar jobs before. Now these so-called blue-collar workers are the nouveau riche of this country because they attract enormous salaries in the industries in which they work. For example, it is not uncommon for a plumber to receive $120,000 a year—whether they work for themselves or for somebody else. These are the skilled workers that the Australian technical colleges will produce.

I will not go back over the speech I made in the previous 10 minutes I had in this debate because that would just be repeating myself and I want to move forward. But what I was leading up to when we rose on Thursday was the fact that the Australian Education Union in particular and the unions in general are trying to sink the Australian technical colleges. Why are they trying to do this? It is because these colleges are not their idea. It is because they do not wish to have people in the industry who they did not train and who they cannot control through their unions. This is what is happening in this case. For example, Anne Gisborne from the State School Teachers Union of Western Australia and Pat Byrne—who is from Western Australia but is now the head of the Australian Education Union—are people who do not like the Australian technical colleges.

I will give an example from my own electorate. A constituent, who was a principal of one of the local high schools but who has now retired, came to me and said: ‘Don, I hate to tell you this, but we’ve been told to go slow on these technical colleges because the local office of the education department in Western Australia have told us that they do not want us to help. They actually don’t want us to help these Australian technical colleges get off the ground because they have been told not to by their masters in head office.’ We know who puts the senior bureaucrats in head office in the state education department: it is the union masters. Who does their preselections? Who is coming into this House shortly? Most of the union hacks from all over the country. This place is going to be full of union inspired careerists. So they say, ‘Whatever you do, don’t allow people to go into these Australian technical colleges; they are not things we allowed to go forward because we cannot control them.’

I want to refer to a flyer from a member of the Labor Party. Because I have a certain agreement with this local member I will not mention his name. He has put out a flyer in Western Australia which is obviously generated by Labor Party head office. It says, ‘The local member and Kevin Rudd will build a new trade training centre in local high schools.’ If you turn to the policy side, you see that it says: ‘Australia has a serious skills shortage and skills have become a core economic challenge for the nation. This is particularly the case in the traditional trades.’ Yes, we all agree with that. The flyer continues, ‘That’s why Kevin Rudd and I have plans to give every local secondary school the opportunity to be a first-class provider of technical education.’ It is funny that they have only found this to be an issue in the last year or so before an election. The flyer says, ‘We want every child in X electorate to get the best chance in life.’ And it is signed off, ‘Yours sincerely, your local member.’ It rabbits on. There is a picture of the local member and the Leader of the Opposition. ‘Trades training in every local high school,’ it says. ‘Rudd takes fight to PM on skills crisis,’ it says. ‘Labor pledges $2.5 billion for training,’ it says. Again it says: ‘Australia has a serious skill shortage and skills have become a core economic challenge for the nation. That is why Labor has a plan to give every secondary school the opportunity to be a first-class provider of a technical education.’ I suspect that members opposite have put this flyer out in their own electorates, because it is generated by Sussex Street.

The fact is that you cannot go now to secondary schools and say to them, ‘We’re finally going to do something about putting in place a decent apprenticeship trade skill training regime in your secondary school.’ Until now the state secondary schools have been quite cynical about any training in this area. You had manual arts in schools where kids learned to put a couple of dove tail or tongue-and-groove joints together—or where they did metalwork and learned to make a compass or make something they had turned on the lathe as an exercise. That is not real training for a trade. What the Labor Party are now saying is, ‘We’re going to put a few lathes and a few extra things in schools and try to turn out skilled apprentices.’ It cannot happen because, to start off with, there are no teachers to do this in schools. We have a shortage of trained skilled personnel in secondary schools. Yet the technical colleges that have been established already are staffed with highly competent, trade trained teachers. I will now talk about this in my electorate and the adjoining electorate. In the Perth South area there is a technical college which I, along with the member for Hasluck, worked very hard on securing—and I am sure the member for Hasluck will be in here shortly to talk about the campuses in our area.

In the Maddington campus, for example, there are students studying the auto mechanics and auto electrical trades. In the Armadale campus there are students studying carpentry and joinery, brick and block laying and steel framing. These are real, genuine trades—no flower arranging, no aroma therapy, no transcendental meditation. These are real transportable trades.

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