Julia Gillard (Lalor, Australian Labor Party, Deputy Prime Minister) Share this | Hansard source

I thank the member for Braddon for his question. Mr Speaker, it was my pleasure earlier today to ‘try a trade’ in front of Parliament House with my colleagues Minister Wong, Minister Arbib, Minister Combet and Parliamentary Secretary Jason Clare. Now, I will let the parliament in on something that probably would be fairly obvious: we were not particularly good. In particular, I was not very good at the bricklaying that I was asked to do.

I thank WorldSkills Australia for bringing ‘Try a Trade’ to Parliament House. Try a Trade is a program to interest young people in apprenticeships to make sure that they get the skills they need for the future. Through WorldSkills Australia our young people compete internationally, showing their trade skills to the world. Last time we did that as a nation we ranked fifth in the world, which was a tremendous achievement, and many of those young people came back from showing their skills to the world with gold medals, silver medals and bronze medals.

As we were trying a trade today we had a discussion that we have had on many occasions with those who work in training, and that is they are already embracing the future. They are already training young Australians for jobs in a low-carbon economy. Of course, some of those jobs are jobs that we find it hard to imagine today, jobs that will evolve in a low-carbon economy. But many of the things we need to do to train Australians for a low-carbon future are in the very traditional trades—in plumbing, in electrical trades, in the way in which we design and construct buildings—

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