Michelle Ananda-Rajah (Higgins, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

It gives me great pleasure to talk about one of my favourite topics, which is, of course, education. Education is the most powerful weapon we have against disadvantage. It is what confers the skills that enable people, particularly young people, to achieve social mobility, and economic and financial security. Skills are the bedrock on which we build our lives. They are what make us useful to others and to our community. Skills are foundational to a competitive economy.

We, on this side of the house, understand that. We are acutely aware of it because, when we came to government, we discovered we had inherited a chasm when it came to skills—a void. Australia was languishing at the bottom of the OECD league table with the second-lowest skills shortages, just ahead of Canada. In addition to this, we found yawning gaps in our skills mix, with 85,000 fewer vocational training places in 2021 compared to 2013. Why? It was because successive Liberal governments failed to invest in our most important asset: our people. We also found that the Skills Priority List for occupation shortage had nearly doubled from 2021 to 2022, from 153 listed to 286. All of this was evident in shopping strips, in hospitals, in schools and in businesses right across our economy. We didn't need any of this data to tell us what we already knew—that is, there are trailing shortages right across the economy, particularly in child care, aged care, health care, IT and construction. Everywhere you go, you will still find shortages due to the long tail of a lack of investment over a long period of time.

This was evident at the Jobs and Skills Summit we convened in September last year. It was one of the first things we did, and it was a very public demonstration of our commitment to kickstarting our economy on a much stronger footing by bringing together diverse voices. I had the opportunity to attend one of those days, and it was striking to see a room full not only of the captains of industry but of young people, of neurodiverse people, of people with disability and lived experience, of all our government ministers—the frontbench were there, the Prime Minister was there—and of my colleagues from right across the country and across the chamber. We had several representatives from the crossbench, but, sadly, I don't recall any Liberal members attending, even though they were invited—which, again, speaks volumes.

The Jobs and Skills Summit provided a blueprint for a better way. The work from that is now feeding into related portfolios that are working on overhauling our broken migration system, and there will be a migration review that will land towards the end of this year. There is our employment white paper and the Intergenerational report, which came out a few weeks ago and clearly shows that as we age we are going to need more and more skilled workers in the care and support economy as well as future focused industries—particularly renewable energy, manufacturing, IT and just about everything else. In order to create that better future, we need to invest in our people—our most valuable asset.

We've been really busy. We came to government with an election promise of fee-free TAFE. We had 180,000 places in our first allocation. This has been a roaring success. It has been oversubscribed and exhausted in its first six months. We have had 215,000 people, both young and old, who have jumped on board. The priority sectors we identified included agriculture, the care sector, construction, defence, early childhood education, hospitality and tourism, sovereign capability, technology and digital. We have found that 51,000 of these places have been allocated to the care economy and nearly 17,000 to IT, and there have been 21,000 enrolments in the construction sector. That is absolute music to my ears.

In the chamber right now, the Housing Australia Future Fund Bill has been returned from the Senate. It has passed the Senate and we are basically tying off loose ends now. This is a historic day for our nation. The Housing Australia Future Fund is an investment vehicle—and, yes, in the next five years it will deliver 30,000 social and affordable homes. But the key here is that this investment vehicle will stand in perpetuity and will accrue over time. It will allow successive governments, whether Labor or Liberal, to tip money into this fund going forward so that homes can be built forever; it will never be retired. We chose this model, which was introduced by the Howard government many years ago—in 2006, I believe—because it is basically bulletproof. The future fund model is managed by the Future Fund Board of Guardians, and they have returned into the fund 9.1 per cent per year over the last decade. The returns have been strong, despite fluctuations in economic headwinds over that period of time.

The real success story of our investment in skills is in the detail. The devil is always in the detail. The detail clearly shows that, of that cohort of 215,000 people who jumped on board and adopted these spots, 51,000 were jobseekers, 15,000 were people with a disability and 7,000 were First Nations Australians. That screams out that creating a pathway is so much better than giving a hand out. Indeed, when you remove the cost barriers to skills acquisition, this is exactly what happens—people are eager to improve their lives. That speaks deeply to aspiration. They do so by looking through a suite of programs that are available, and, without those cost barriers, they find their passion. It is absolutely fantastic to see this many jobseekers doing that. They can see that we have a tight labour market and businesses and industries desperate for workers. They can also see what is coming down the pipeline. We are investing in our energy transformation. A country that has been a climate laggard is now moving to become a climate leader, and we seize that opportunity with two hands.

In just over a year, Australia has already got the runs on the board. We've gone from 33 per cent renewable energy last year to 40 per cent this year as we push hard towards 82 per cent by 2030. In order to achieve that goal, we need people with the right skills to build those offshore windfarms, to rewire our nation with the $20 billion we've allocated to modernise the grid down the east coast and to invest in green hydrogen, where there will be multiple jobs in that sector. We've also pumped millions into solar thermal and geothermal. To get to that better future, we need Australians to stop privileging universities above TAFE and vocational training. As far as I am concerned, and as far as our government is concerned, we see these as equivalent. At the end of the day, it is important to acquire a skill, to find your passion and to get some hands-on, practical experience so that you can go on to become employable and contribute to society. Not only is it incredibly worthwhile to the individual; our country will be eternally grateful to our young people and older people looking for new career options.

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