Sam Birrell (Nicholls, National Party) | Hansard source

Thank you for the opportunity to contribute to this debate on the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Amendment (Strengthening Quality and Integrity in Vocational Education and Training No. 1) Bill 2024. I am a firm believer in the positive power of education. After school, I went and worked on a farm for a while and then was able to go and complete a Bachelor of Applied Science and Agriculture degree at a university which had a regional campus very close to the place where I was living. Later on, when I wanted to do an MBA, that was available in a regional location too. So university was my pathway to education, but I have a lot of mates in my electorate who went down the apprenticeship and vocational education route, and they have done very well. Some of them went straight out of school and some of them went back to it later on. The local firms, building companies and manufacturers, such as Furphy, have a strong record of shepherding apprentices through, with the assistance of vocational education providers such as GOTAFE in my area.

This bill will amend the National Vocational Education and Training Regulator Act to give the National VET Regulator stronger powers. It will provide for automatic lapsing of regulated training organisations' registration with the Australian Skills and Quality Agency where the provider has not delivered training or assessments for 12 consecutive months from 1 January 2023. Further, it will prevent RTOs from changing the courses they are registered to deliver to students in the first two years of registration. A new legislative instrument will allow the minister to pause the ASQA registration either for a specific class of applicants or for all applicants. It's not a power we are totally opposed to, but it's a power we think needs greater transparency. The coalition will put forward several amendments to improve that and also restrict the amount of time a pause can be put in force. Any extension would then require further engagement with the ministerial council. We don't want these powers to be used to manipulate the market and drive students to preferred course providers—those provided by the government. This government has a track record of putting government run training providers first, instead of students and their outcomes.

Finally, the bill increases the civil penalties for false and misleading representations by operators. We are supportive of that. We don't want junk VET courses. We've seen junk VET courses out there before. I must say, when Labor were last in government they demonstrated a lack of skill when it came to skills training. Apprenticeship numbers plummeted. When Labor left office, the apprentice and trainee numbers had fallen by 22 per cent.

Then there was the disaster of VET FEE-HELP. This scheme sent the reputation of the Australian skills system to rock bottom. There are much better examples around the world that I'll talk about later. These poor Australians were loaded up with debt for doing courses that were never going to land them a job. The scheme, established by the Labor government in 2008 and expanded in 2012, suffered systemic rorting. Students who wanted nothing more than to improve their knowledge and skills were at the mercy of dodgy providers exploiting loose rules and charging students substantial fees for training they never undertook or benefited from.

I'll give an anecdote. At the time, I was working in a high-tech agricultural firm—I won't mention any names. This high-tech agricultural firm was provided with government funded sales training. This was in the Rudd-Gillard years. We were all sitting around there. This was very high-tech stuff. The sales we had involved explaining the benefits of certain agricultural technology to customers. We had this guy from a sales company that got taxpayer funds come in and talk to us. It was basically a lesson on how to be a telemarketer: 'These are the soothsaying words you should use for a potential customer. "That's the easiest part of my day." "Can I help you with this?" "Would you like fries with that?"' It wasn't really what we were doing. Yet there was no departmental or government oversight to say, 'This is an RTO that should not get government funding to do what they're doing.' The people from the company didn't benefit from that. The RTO got paid, but they weren't delivering something of substantial benefit to the Australian economy. We don't want to see that happen again. I think that in the Rudd-Gillard years things got a bit lost, taxpayers' money was taken for granted and things like that were happening. We don't want to see that again.

I do worry that we are going to have a few problems in the future. Trade apprentices in training hit record highs in the final months of the coalition government. As of June 2022, there were 429,000 apprentices and trainees in training, 20 per cent more than at the same time in 2021. Things had been improving. But, after just one year of the new government, the number has now fallen to 377,645. I'm worried about that because we need more apprentices. In my electorate of Nicholls, the drop in apprentices and trainees under this government is 11.75 per cent. My businesses are struggling to find workers. We need to pump-prime the economy with skilled, trained workers—not with junk VET degrees, diplomas and qualifications but with real skills training.

I identified this as an issue because it has been an issue for a long time. It's not just the current government's fault, although things seem to be getting worse. I identified this as an issue in my electorate a number of years ago, and, before coming to this place, I was awarded a Churchill Fellowship to study the European approach to vocational education and training and the encouragement of young people in schools to undertake vocational education and training so that they could then land a productive job in the workforce. Because of COVID, I couldn't do it straightaway, so I ended up taking some time during the midwinter break to go to the United Kingdom, Germany, Sweden and Finland to look at how they do vocational education and training.

One of the things that was most stark for me was, firstly, the cultural difference. Here, we have a bit of a 'if you're a smart kid, you go to uni, and everyone else goes and gets an apprenticeship' situation. In Germany, Sweden and Finland particularly, university education and vocational education are held in the same esteem. I think that's something that we all should be working towards, because the students who graduate from the vocational education and training systems are as important, if not more important, to our economy—notwithstanding all the people, whom I much respect, who've got degrees in law or engineering. They're very important, but these electricians, these plumbers, these people with these trades and vocational education are so important to our economy.

I think we've all got work to do to make sure that, when schools talk to young people about careers, we've got vocational education and training and university on the same level. That's something I saw in Germany and Finland. When I was in Germany I was in Stuttgart and I went to Mercedes-Benz. Mercedes-Benz go into schools in the Stuttgart and the towns around there. They try to talk to kids in their version of our years 7 and 8, trying to find the kids who've got an aptitude for mechanics and engineering and also the ones who have a bit of a future focus. That's IT. They try to encourage these kids to consider a career at Mercedes-Benz. The German system means that, if that kid says, 'Yes, a career at Mercedes-Benz sounds good to me,' they go to Mercedes-Benz and do what's called dual vocational education and training. They'll probably spend three days a week at Mercedes. I saw these young people working away. They'll spend either two or three days a week at a vocational education and training school or a tech school.

These tech schools in Germany look a lot different from our TAFE schools. They're a lot more high tech, and the companies and the tech schools are working together to make sure that what the kids are learning both practically but also in the theory around, say, mechatronics or electronic engineering is completely relevant to what's going on with Mercedes-Benz's strategic direction. That works really well. When I come back to Australia, I don't see it working as well.

In this discussion, this debate that we're having over vocational education and training, I think we all want the same outcomes. We want high-tech industries with kids coming out of school and finding apprenticeships. We want those apprenticeships and training systems to be completely relevant to what's going on out there in the world of industry. We want those kids to turn into very-high-skilled technicians in industry and we want them to drive the Australian economy forward.

So here's an opportunity. We'll have a bit of a crack at each other over what we did and what you are doing, and I think that's healthy. That's part of the debate. But we want the same outcome, which is a high-tech workforce. I went over and had a look at it. I single out Germany and Finland because that's where I saw an approach that is different from us but I think is working better. I understand that there are cultural differences between, for example, Finland and Australia, but, to give you an example of a place that is perhaps more culturally aligned with us: the United Kingdom is moving in this direction too. They're realising that university is not the be-all and end-all. They're realising that they need to improve the vocational education and training systems. We talk a lot about a green energy or low-emissions-energy future. It's interesting that, when I was in Sweden, they were talking about a future powered by renewables. Now they're talking about a low-emissions future because they've realised that they need to ramp up their nuclear industry to get to where they want to get with their emissions reduction, and I think that's the conversation we've got to have. The UK have decided that they've got to ramp up nuclear as well. The skills and the technicians required to do that mean they need to lift the game from what they had in vocational education and training and perhaps look more at what Finland and Germany are doing. I pose the question: are we training the employees of the future? I think it's a question we've all got to ask ourselves. When Labor's in government or the coalition's in government, we've all got to strive towards making sure that our vocational education and training system is fit for purpose and that that money's not being wasted on RTOs that are just trying to get a bit of government money to go and give some training that doesn't mean anything or on people that are trying to exploit students, who might get some qualifications that are never going to help them land a job. Instead, we need to focus in on what we really need as an economy. Sure, we need lawyers—I've just seen another one come into the room, a great contributor as well—but vocational education and training is critical to our country's future.

I don't think we're doing it as well as we need to. I think we need to be in schools, saying: 'Apprenticeships are just as good, and you can earn just as much if you're a good operator. Here's the pathway for you with a really good RTO that's going to work with industry to deliver relevant training and skills.' That is a partnership. The partnership is between the training organisations, government and industry. I've seen it work well overseas. In small patches, I've seen it work well here in Australia, but I think we've got a long way to go. My commitment, while I've got some time in this place, is to work constructively with all members to see if we can get this one right.

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