Dai Le (Fowler, Independent) Share this | Hansard source

I held a forum recently with various stakeholders in my Fowler electorate, from childcare providers and workers to vocational education and training providers, teachers and social workers—just to name a few—to gauge and to understand what challenges they were facing. One of the key issues they raised was skills and workforce shortages and the fact that our system actually impedes rather than assists them in unblocking the skills and workforce pipeline. I want to provide some insights from my community of Fowler so that we can hear how the Jobs and Skills Australia board, a system that the government is setting up, need to make sure they're not another layer of bureaucracy that would really create another blockage in this pipeline.

One of our local school principals, Lachlan Erskine from Cabramatta High School, shared with me some of the demand for VET courses, vocational education and training courses, at the school. Unlike many other high schools in Fowler, Cabramatta High offers six VET courses. This VET opportunity is a fantastic pathway for many of our students, the majority from refugee and migrant backgrounds. Yet teachers in schools are constantly asked to upskill and attend training for up to five to 15 days, which is a very long time for a teacher to be away from school. Teachers who, for example, are teaching hospitality and have taught hospitality for over 20 years still need to attend yearly training. What has really changed in hospitality so much that there is a constant need to send VET teachers to training annually? There is a need to streamline compliance for VET teachers, and this is an issue that needs to be addressed straightaway by the JSA board in setting up their scope on how they can be a vehicle to unblock this skills shortage and workforce shortage pipeline.

We have seen governing bodies like ASQA, who assess regulations for RTO and VET courses, and SkillsIQ, for child care, constantly changing the course and skill set requirements in these sectors. I have no doubt there are good intentions of ensuring we have exceptional quality and performance when delivering in these sectors, but surely there are opportunities to refine the system so that it doesn't put immense pressure on trainers and assessors and people working in the sector to be constantly retrained, causing the sector so much administrative burden, cost and loss of time.

Recognition of prior learning is also important. Some VET teachers are asked to undergo training on things which, as teachers, they are already required to know—for example, administration skills and digital literacy skills. This puts a huge administrative burden on VET teachers in schools, who have to upload evidence for each student so they can be assessed. They are already teachers, and they have the skills to do this. Surely this must be eliminated so that teachers can teach VET courses in the school environment to enable and nurture those students to get the skills required so that they can enter the workforce to help plug the skills gap.

I have no doubt that what I have just painted is just a small picture of how our system and bureaucracy can cause such a bottleneck in our ability to release the skills and workforce shortages in our economy. My community of Fowler—and, I have no doubt, communities across the country—are currently facing and feeling the pain of the cost of living, from the skill shortages, rising rents, rising interest rates, costs of food and fuel and costs of forcing businesses and community to transition to zero emissions to the impact of migration on housing, the environment, jobs and small business. I can't help but feel somewhat cynical when organisations rebrand, as that would only add to the cost of delivering outcomes. That said, I would urge the newly rebranded Jobs and Skills Australia board to really ensure that they will not be another governing body that will add layers of bureaucracy stifling the ability to kickstart our economic engine.

In Fowler, manufacturing is our largest employer. Almost 40 per cent of our population is employed in the manufacturing sector, compared to 5.9 per cent of Australia's workforce. I would like to remind the House that we have seen the grit and resilience of my community in Fowler and their potential and capabilities in powering this state and this country through the COVID lockdown. They were the construction workers, they were the factory workers packaging goods and foods, they were the truck drivers and deliverers, and they were the nurses, the childcare workers and the aged-care workers, just to name a few. Our community is unlike any other that you'll find in Australia, with more than 170,000 people from over 70 different ethnicities. We most certainly have the human capacity here in Fowler. We in Fowler and south-west Sydney are the economic engine of Australia.

If we want to grow manufacturing in this country, for instance, we need to invest in local manufacturing and encourage our local manufacturers to take risks, to build their businesses here, especially in areas like Fowler, where there's a large manufacturing region. To ensure we have a thriving and productive manufacturing sector to support workers, we must have the manufacturing skills required to do this. That means investing in young people, those who don't see a future in tertiary education but need a pathway to tap into their skills to contribute back to building our society. It is therefore critical that Jobs and Skills Australia's board work with TAFE and other local educational institutions to empower young people to learn the skills to produce and make products.

I have spoken with local representatives from TAFE in my area as well, and they have told me that they are plagued constantly with enrolment issues—processes and procedures at the administrative level that are failing and causing problems for students, especially in areas with high migrant and English-as-a-second-language populations. There's no point in creating boards if we aren't addressing the problems at a grassroots level. Our kids need a pathway to be able to enrol into TAFE courses.

And it's not just for our youth but also for those adults who want to upskill or those migrants whose overseas qualifications do not get the recognition they deserve in Australia. These highly skilled individuals can surely be tapped into, enabling their skills to be transferred, so that they can have dignity in building their lives here in this new country. If these people can't enrol in TAFE and we are providing hundreds and hundreds of free TAFE courses, then how are they going to access these courses? How will the Jobs and Skills Australia board help them? We have to also consider the vocational training sector, which has been outsourced to RTOs and which are needed to lodge an apprenticeship. Nothing happens from there. If RTOs are needed to lodge and organise an apprenticeship or placement, this service should see the process from start to finish, not part of the way. What are we paying an RTO for if they cannot even enrol the student in TAFE to complete the process of becoming an apprentice? It seems that the system lacks the staff motivation to get things going. I don't see this behaviour in the private sector, and, frankly, it should not be tolerated.

As we talk about the increasing number of free TAFE courses, which both the state government and the federal government have announced in the budget—which is great—I really urge our government to look at how these free courses can be accessed so that people in an electorate like Fowler, where English is a second language, can actually access them, not to just promote free courses that we can't access. We need to make training resources easier for students and employers and those needing them and not introduce complex processes that are just time wasting. Jobs and Skills Australia must respond to the current jobs and skills crisis. It must have a plan to get Australians working, to get them skilled, trained and empowered to build a society that is connected, knowledgeable and ready to seize opportunities and face challenges. The plan must have measures and take the community along. While we are below average in adult literacy in my electorate of Fowler, I'm encouraged that many of our young students, with the dedication and commitment from our local teachers, are building on their digital literacy skills as well as their knowledge of STEM. It goes without saying, for a diverse community like Fowler, that we need the right support and advice that speak to people from multicultural, diverse and migrant communities.

I imagine a future Australia where my community in Fowler is the global leader in many areas—manufacturing, digital literacy, technology—a proud producer of Australian-made goods and a changemaker in the digital and STEM space. So I think it's important that the Jobs and Skills Australia board represents the diversity of my community while representing the challenges and opportunities we face every single day. I would ask the Jobs and Skills Australia board, once it has been formed and established, to visit me in Fowler and see how unique our community is, see that there are skills there, and, with a high unemployment rate of 10 per cent, which is three times the national average, see if there is something that we can do to address the unemployment rate and bring it down. I will welcome the opportunity to have the Jobs and Skills Australia board members and, of course, the minister come out and look at our area so that we can actually get solutions from the community. From my experience, speaking to our local community at the grassroots level is a key important thing that we need to do to get the solutions to address the jobs and skills shortages here in our country.

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