Alison Byrnes (Cunningham, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I rise to speak to the revitalising national planning and vocational education and training statement that was made in the House yesterday by the Minister for Skills and Training. After a decade of inaction, it has fallen to the Albanese Labor government to rebuild Australia's vocational education and training system, a system that is so vital to our collective effort of remaining a skilled, developed, innovative, prosperous and productive nation—a system, I must point out, that should not have to be rebuilt and should never have been savaged in the first place.

As the minister highlighted in his statement, Australia is facing one of its biggest economic challenges in decades as a result of the shortage of skilled workers across the economy. The shortages are acutely felt an industrial cities such as mine in the Illawarra. OECD data has identified Australia as having the second-highest labour shortage amongst OECD countries, and the Skills Priority List shows that occupations in shortage areas nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, jumping from 153 to 286.

The minister's statement notes that in March 2020 the former National Skills Commission predicted that, over the next five years, nine out of 10 new jobs would require postschool qualifications, with four out of 10 requiring vocational training. Jobs and Skills Australia's quarterly report, released on Tuesday, found that, over the year to May 2023, 91 per cent of total employment growth was in occupations that require postschool qualifications, and this is before we even start preparing for the new skills that we will need in the coming years in industries like renewables.

Labor's skills and training agenda is not only about repairing; it is also about preparing. A great example of this is in Jobs and Skills Australia's clean energy capacity study. The capacity study will provide critical evidence and insights to support workforce planning, policy development and program design, all key elements that are needed to build a strong and vibrant clean energy sector and contribute to the government's Powering Australia plan. The study, which is expected to be released next month, will outline the employment, upskilling and reskilling opportunities that our transforming to a net-zero economy will create.

This is important for my community, particularly following Minister Bowen commencing community consultations last month for the Illawarra offshore wind zone. The proposed zone is close to 1,500 square kilometres in size, with the potential to produce 4.2 gigawatts of electricity. On a side note, I encourage all of my community to get out and have their say before consultations close on 16 October. Some public consultation sessions will kick off next Monday and go through to Thursday. I encourage everyone to visit the department's website and have a look at when those sessions are, to come along and ask all the questions you need to ask to get the information and the facts firsthand, and to have your say and contribute.

To succeed in building our workforce—and we must—in this endeavour we are going to need a skilled and agile workforce. It is estimated that, in the Illawarra, offshore wind zones will be able to deliver up to 2,500 jobs in construction and 1,250 jobs ongoing. Nationally, the job opportunities of an offshore wind industry in Australia range from 3,000 to 8,000 jobs annually. I have not wasted a second in preparing the groundwork for these new jobs, securing a $10 million investment to establish an Energy Futures Skills Centre at the University of Wollongong so we have the skilled workforce to build the grid of the future. I have also secured a $2.5 million investment for a Renewable Energy Training facility at Wollongong TAFE, which will include upgrades to equipment and teaching aids.

The Energy Futures Skills Centre will deliver the education, training and engagement needs for the workforce of the future in partnership with local industry, community and global partners. The centre will aim to utilise our university's broad range of innovative materials and system research to provide a real-world example of how new energy solutions can be adopted and implemented from a workforce and industry perspective, as well as engaging with communities on their energy transformation. We must make sure that we understand the training needs of these new and emerging industries so that we have workers ready to go when we need them.

Two weeks ago, I was lucky enough to be able to visit the Maersk Training centre in Esbjerg, Denmark. The training centre provides training focused on basic safety and technical skills for operational employees in the wind industry. The centre provides specific technical know-how and advanced qualifications for workers. The centre includes a survival pool, a fire ground, a working-at-height tower, helicopter underwater-escape training and escape-chute training. I actually wanted to sign up for the helicopter underwater-escape training, myself. It looked really great. This is a facility that is located close to the port of Esbjerg, which is a leading port in Europe for the handling and shipping out of wind power. It has transformed from a major oil and gas port. One of our local journalists, Connor Pearce, from the Illawarra Mercury, travelled over to Denmark with us and told a great story of a local worker, Jakob Lykke, who has been in the fishing industry, the oil and gas industry and is now working in offshore wind. He has seen his port and his community, and the jobs they have there, transformed three times over his lifetime. It is now one of the major epicentres for offshore wind in Europe. The port has specialised facilities for transporting, pre-assembling, shipping out and servicing wind turbines. Port Esbjerg ships out 80 per cent of Europe's offshore wind capacity.

In my discussion with Maersk, they outlined that they work on the calculation that for every megawatt in an offshore wind project you will need one technician requiring specialised training to work on and around the turbines. On this basis, we are going to need ongoing training for thousands of technicians. Maersk, as a training provider, work in a collaborative manner with other industry players, equipment manufacturers, unions, schools and the Danish equivalent of TAFE to be able to meet the workforce need of their own renewable projects. This is the exact approach that this government has tasked the JSA to undertake when it comes to our own skills and training framework, including 10 new jobs and skills councils, which have been created to provide Australian industry sectors with a stronger and more strategic capacity to ensure that training is relevant to their needs. Both Jobs and Skills Australia and the jobs and skills councils feature tripartism in their design. Tripartism in the governance of Jobs and Skills Australia and jobs and skills councils is a key ingredient to their success.

I note the member for Farrer took issue with this approach in her comments to the House, ridiculing it and making an unfair characterisation that this approach was only about seats at the table for union mates. Over my years working in this building, I have had the absolute pleasure of working with union representatives with years and years of experience in training our workers—people like Pat Forward, Angelo Gavrietalos, Andrew Dettmer, Ian Curry, Mark Burgess, Rob Long, Maxine Sharkey, Arthur Rorris and many other passionate campaigners for the rights of workers to a comprehensive and robust training system that provides workers with portable skills that they can build into lifelong careers, and training that is robust enough to make workers able to go through transitions like Jakob Lykke did in Esbjerg.

At the outset, I want to refute this assertion, as tripartism, at its core, is about bringing industry, business and unions together to get education and training outcomes for workers. Our unions are a vital part of these discussions. Do you know why? It's because they have the interests of workers at heart: the electrician who installs electricity—your lights, your air conditioners, your hot water—the builder who builds your house, and the maritime worker who transports ships in and out of our ports safely and gets goods in and out of the country. Unions work hard to make sure that workers get paid properly and get home safely, and this is especially vital in areas like mine, where we have mining and heavy industry. Unions also work hard to build productivity and prosperity.

A division having been called in the House of Representatives—

Sitting suspended from 10:10 to 10:22

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