Zali Steggall (Warringah, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak on the member for Braddon's motion. The report of the independent review of Australia's vocational education and training, the Joyce review, was delivered in March this year, and the government responded to the report with its Delivering Skills for Today and Tomorrow package just prior to the May election.

Whilst I welcome all the government's efforts, including the recent announcement of Scott Cam as a TV personality, in relation to vocational education and training and improvement of youth employment the flipside is that we have a long way to go to achieve a better future for young people. By 2020, 99,000 jobs will be created, and just 70,000 will only require a senior secondary level education. Many schools spend less than a cup of coffee on career guidance per student. By the age of 24, only 59 per cent of young Australians from disadvantaged backgrounds are in education, training or work compared to 83 per cent of those from high socioeconomic backgrounds. And, although the programs the government has announced are an important step in the right direction, there are questions that need to be asked.

In the 2017 budget, the government announced $1.5 billion in funding for the Skilling Australians Fund. The government estimated the fund would assist an additional 300,000 apprentices, trainees and higher-level skilled Australians over four years. Since then, at least $400 million has been redirected from the Skilling Australians Fund, and the fund ends in 2022, so there is no ongoing commitment. And, in the 2019 budget announcement of $525 million over five years to upgrade the VET sector, there is no single mention of TAFE. In my electorate of Warringah, many young people are not aware of their options and many find it very difficult to get to job locations. Some young people travel for over three hours each way to get to an apprenticeship scheme. Others talk about the difficulty they have navigating the system itself, struggling to figure out what they can do because of all the red tape. I think we all agree that the various education and employment schemes need to work for young people. Removing barriers to get young people into work means working with young people to design the responses, looking at the future of work and planning training courses appropriately. In Warringah, local businesses have said to me that they often find it hard to find apprentices.

The Business Education Network, which helps youth in Warringah transition through school to education, training and active community participation through vocational programs, mentoring, personal development resources, and case worker support, has said that the focus should be about getting young people to understand where opportunities lie. There is a big assumption that young people know what they are going to do. As a mother of teenagers, I can guarantee you, they do not all know what they are going to do. When you don't have career advisers in schools, you don't have the capacity to link students with opportunities.

Package incentives should take into account apprentices' living costs and transport, so that the package can support them through their traineeship. The government's approach should be about helping businesses to retain and support apprentices. This should include a tiered level of information sharing for local output, as it was under Career Advice Australia, which had national industry career specialists who would identify, at the national level, the need of large industries and developments in that space. This would then feed down to regional industry career advisers, who would then feed down to local facilitators to develop local connections. This approach was more holistic, but the program, sadly, was stopped five years ago.

Under federal funding, there used to be professional development of teachers, for example. The BEN used to take teachers to visit organisations to understand their employment approaches and bring that back to school in order to build a pathway for students. We need to be focused on creating opportunity for our youth, to make sure they have those choices—whether it is entering into trades or pursuing their education—but it needs to be done in a holistic way. There is a correlation between business and vocational training, so there needs to be a focus on educating our young people, while they are at school, about the possibilities and opportunities outside school and what pathways they can take. It's important to support apprentice trainees through the incentives so that they are keen to work in particular professions and stay in those professions in the long term. We need to make sure that it is affordable to become an apprentice.

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