Julian Hill (Bruce, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

Yes, surprise! There you go. These things happen. There's no doubt about it. There's no point beating around the bush. Our country has a major skills crisis. The context for that—uncomfortable truths for those opposite—is that it comes after a decade of Liberal decay, division and dysfunction. Three billion dollars of cuts to TAFE on their watch. Who knew? When you cut TAFE for years—and they cut courses and closed campuses—then you don't train students and you don't have skilled workers. Trashing the apprenticeship system—who knew? When you do that for years and then in your last year of government you try throwing some money in when the damage is done, then you don't have skilled apprentices, tradies, in the economy.

The skills crisis, of course, is a supply-side constraint to the economy. It's driving inflation. It's driving businesses mad because they can't find suitable trained workers. It's driving unemployed people to despair as they're forced to apply for jobs week after week, month after month and year after year which they're simply not trained to do. The Jobs and Skills Australia Amendment Bill 2023 sets up Jobs and Skills Australia, which is critical to resolving the skills and labour market crisis across the country.

What's the opposition position? We heard it today with a little amendment. After making the mess in their decade in government, they're refusing to work with the government to clean it up. They're moving a silly little amendment so they can vote against the bill. We're not allowed to call them the 'no-alition'. We've been over that, so we won't—but we make the point.

The fact is Australia has the second-highest labour supply shortage across all OECD countries. It's also a fact that three million Australians lack the fundamental skills required to participate in secure training and work. It's also a fact that as of December last year, just a few months ago, the recruitment difficulty rate for occupations was 65 per cent, which meant 65 per cent of recruiting employers had difficulty recruiting staff. It was even worse in the construction industry where 80 per cent of employers had difficulty recruiting staff. Of the top 20 occupations in demand in Australia, seven have a shortage, primarily driven by a lack of people with the required skills. Yet unemployment is at 3.5 per cent, and job advertisements over the 12 months prior to January 2023 increased by 4.5 per cent. We've got a red-hot labour market across most of the country, and yet we have a fundamental and giant mismatch with the skills that the unemployed population, the underemployed population and those looking for a leg-up for a more secure job, for a better paid job, actually have.

It is because, as I said, of a decade of dysfunctional Liberal government that there is this giant mismatch between what skills workers have or don't have and what business needs. An estimated nine out of 10 new jobs will require post-secondary school education, with four of those requiring VET qualifications. Many of the vital industries that rely on VET graduates are facing workforce shortages. But this giant skills mismatch is the key point. It underpins why we need to make this reform for the medium and long term in the context of the former government's failure because the giant skills mismatch is no accident. It doesn't just happen overnight. You don't just wake up and say, 'Oh look, there are millions of people with no skills.' It takes years to degrade our skills training base because of this decade of neglect. As I said, we had $3 billion of cuts to TAFE, courses being slashed and a total lack of care and planning for the TAFE sector and all the talk we had to put up with: the talking points, the press conferences from the former government, the funny little program names. We had JobKeeper, JobSeeker, JobTrainer, JobMaker—JobFaker as it turned out to be—but not actually putting anything in place underneath those announcements so people got the skills that they need.

While they were announcing more programs, they were cutting TAFE and cutting apprenticeships. But it was hardly a surprise. It was the now the Deputy Leader of the Opposition—the genius over there—who referred to fee-free TAFE as, 'wasteful spending'. I hope she's learning something on her national listening tour. She popped up last week in my electorate. I think about 25 people from the Afghan community turned up. She didn't like the questions she got. She was asked whether she'd apologise for refusing to give permanent residence. She was asked if she would apologise, and they complained about the questions because they weren't 'nice'. But thankfully the federal Liberals' colleagues in Tasmania are far more sensible. The state Minister for Skills, Training and Workforce Growth there expressed his excitement to work with the Commonwealth, 'to continue building Tasmania's skilled workforce'. So the Deputy Leader of the Opposition over there says that fee-free TAFE is 'wasteful spending', yet the one Liberal government left in the country says: 'Actually, this is a pretty good idea. Imagine working with the Commonwealth to skill our citizens!' Then there were their years of trashing apprenticeships and years of cuts, and then, in their last year, they threw a bit of money at apprenticeships and made some announcements, but it was too little, too late. The damage had been done after the decade of neglect.

Now, the government is actually taking urgent action to address the skills shortages and to try and match the training participation with the types of skills in demand. We don't need, with respect to the many high school students we ask what they would like to do—'I'd like to be a YouTube blogger.' That's not the kind of training we need to be subsidising. We need to be subsidising the training that local and regional labour markets need.

Skilled migration certainly has a role to play in boosting our national wealth in certain areas, but our priority has to always be on skilling Australians for the jobs that are available now and the jobs in the future. We can't continue to force employers to look overseas for workers because of the Liberal's failure to invest in skills. That's why, as of yesterday with the budget, the Labor government is creating 300,000 fee-free TAFE places to train Australians in critical and emerging sectors, like clean energy and care, sectors that need workers now with those skills. Who knew? You can train people by incentivising them to go into that training!

We're introducing a redesigned Commonwealth foundation skills program for Australians seeking to develop their language, literacy, numeracy and digital skills, and we're providing more than $54 million in targeted support to apprentice support services to increase apprenticeship completion rates and the diversity of the apprenticeship workforce, to further support particularly women in what are historically male dominated fields.

That's the context of the bill—their failure and the impacts on the real economy and the degradation of the human capital of our country because of the failure for a decade to invest in skills, to prepare people for the labour market that we have right now, which is red-hot and crying out for workers. Jobs and Skills Australia is critical to actually revolving that skills and labour market crisis and building the future workforce that we need. It will operate, as the bill says, as a genuinely tripartite organisation. Now, here's a trigger warning for those opposite: I'm going to say the word 'unions'. They get a bit upset. That's their little amendment. The only thing they want to do to this bill is get rid of the unions. 'We don't like the unions; we don't like the workers.' That's their amendment; that's the change they want to make to the bill. We say tripartite: unions, employers and state and territory governments that run the vocational training system. How's that for an idea? Bringing together people so that they can work together as partners!

The advice provided by JSA, the independent authoritative source of advice, will be independent. Whilst the minister may request advice from JSA, she or he will not give direction about the content of any advice. The government is determined to turn around the trend towards insecure, low-paid and unskilled work in Australia. The proportion of households where the main breadwinner is on casual, gig-economy, insecure work has continued to rise over the last decade. So JSA will provide the government with data and analysis to build an evidence base by analysing the experiences of affected Australians—old-fashioned, I know! Public policy should be based on evidence and facts. JSA will improve identification of labour imbalances across the economy and analyse the supply and demand of skills. The advice will consider tertiary qualifications to ensure there are flexible pathways in place to develop the skills and knowledge needed to resolve those labour imbalances.

The bill also expands JSA's function. We set it up on a very interim basis to get it up and running late last year after the election. This is the bill to put the flesh on the bones, if you like. It will expand the functions to undertake studies to improve the analysis and understanding of Australians experiencing disadvantage and exclusion in the labour market. People aged over 55, people living with disabilities, migrants, young people, First Nations people are the cohorts that show up in the data. The Labor government's core focus is to create more opportunities for Australians and to build our human capital, to build the skills in the workforce now and in the future. In order to do this—I'll say it again—you need data and evidence regarding our human capital, and that's exactly what the JSA will provide.

The final point I make is that this advice will go to government and to the training sector right across the country. They'll be able to produce regionalised data because the labour markets are entirely different in different parts of the country. I'm currently chairing a House select committee inquiring into Workforce Australia employment services; it's a first principles inquiry. There are a lot of curious and very peculiar aspects to Australia's employment services system. It's based on a flawed theory, I might observe, that we've had for a couple of decades—that unemployment is always an individual choice, an individual failing, and if we push the individual somehow they'll magically get a job. In some cases that's true but in many cases it's not, because of the structural factors, because of the labour market you live in, because of your physical disabilities, because of your health, mental health, family circumstances or caring circumstances, or because of the fact you've never been able to invest in skills or had society invest in you.

We've designed a system around the very worst people in society, the ones who cheat the system, and the very worst providers, the ones who try and rip off the government. That's how we've designed the system, and everyone else is put in that paradigm. I think we can do better. We've designed the system around an incredibly narrow set of objectives. When you look globally at all the things a publicly funded employment service system could do—labour market exchange, human capital development, addressing skills shortages, helping business and industry—we've designed it around a work test and put all our eggs in that basket. The system is strangely divorced from demand and skills.

I close on this point: Jobs and Skills Australia can become a key coordinator and collaborator, and have authoritative input into the employment services system. The authoritative input will be developed in collaboration with unions—I said it again!—state and territory governments and employers, with advice on labour markets needs and skills needs to inform the skills training system, the higher education system and our employment services system. I commend the bill to the House, and I suggest the opposition withdraw their silly amendment. We can all go out, say it together, hold hands and say, 'Unions represent workers,' and then they can vote for the bill.

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