Lisa Chesters (Bendigo, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I'm pleased to rise to say a few words in relation to National Skills Week. My electorate of Bendigo is one of great diversity. We are home to Bendigo TAFE, to thriving businesses and to a university. We are growing when it comes to the need for local skills. Our unemployment rate is officially under three per cent. On a weekly basis, I meet employers and businesses who are saying that they struggle to attract people with the skills that they need.

That is where our government is making a difference. We are turning things around through our investment in TAFE, our investment in businesses and our investment in giving people opportunities: giving young people the opportunity to choose a career path that suits them, and giving people who wish to make a career change—many of whom didn't take up their passion when they left school because of poor advice or because there simply wasn't the opportunity—the opportunity to do so.

At a federal level, we are investing in making more pathways open for Australians to complete training and enter the workforce—or re-enter the workforce in many cases. We are delivering $10,000 to apprentices to become the carpenters, plumbers and sparkies that we need for construction. We are also making free TAFE permanent and creating paid prac placements for our nurses, as well as many other professions that are associated with higher education.

This year's National Skills Week theme is 'Explore All the Options', encouraging all Australians to think about a trade, to think about a new career or something that is more in the vocational space. It's important for us to acknowledge in this place that somewhere in the eighties or nineties we discouraged young people from thinking about a trade. Far too many of my schoolmates were encouraged to go to university because they were told they were bright—'too bright for a trade'. We now know that this thinking, this rhetoric, was wrong. Not only was it wrong for the young apprentices who went into the skills and trades; it was also wrong for those young people whose love of using their hands was denied, and they went into careers or into university quite often to drop out because it wasn't their thing.

Whilst our thinking has changed in schools and in communities, there's still a lot of work to do to encourage young people to consider a trade. In regional areas like mine, for many who are going into trades it's because they had a significant male role model in their life who was already in the trade. Far too often we hear about people going into a trade because it's their uncle's or their father's profession. This is great, and we do encourage it. But what about the young woman or the young male who doesn't have that significant male figure in their life? How do we encourage them to think about the trades?

We are starting to see a shift locally in that thinking, and I want to acknowledge Bendigo TAFE and the free TAFE course they are running in Castlemaine. It is for women and gender diverse people. It is the only course of its kind, and it is full. It is encouraging women of all ages to consider a career in construction. It is focused on the basic skills, cert II, but there are women in the course who are thinking about taking that next step into an apprenticeship. One particular woman I know dropped out of school because there wasn't a pathway for her to pursue a construction trade apprenticeship. We shouldn't have this in 2025. I'm so relieved that she could find a pathway through Bendigo TAFE, through this free TAFE course that's been run from Castlemaine.

We want to offer this kind of innovation, this kind of opportunity, to all women who might wish to change career or to think about a career in the trades—having that safe space where their teacher is a woman, their classmates are women and they're able to ask questions without feeling out of place; they are learning and will contribute towards meeting the skills requirements that we have.

National Skills Week is an opportunity for us to celebrate this, but it's also an opportunity to celebrate the success stories of VET and vocational education. It's an opportunity for us to recognise that nine out of 10 new jobs in the next decade will require a post-secondary qualification, with four of those requiring a VET qualification. It's also an opportunity for people like me to talk about the need to expand the VET in Schools program. In my part of the world we have one of the original trades training centres that were built under the former Rudd-Gillard government, but some of the equipment at Bendigo Senior Secondary is out of date. We've had significant advancements in technology since it was first built under the Rudd-Gillard government. It needs to be updated.

There's an opportunity for us at the federal level to partner with the state governments to ensure that these trade training centres have the equipment we need today. There's also an opportunity to expand into the health and community sectors with the VET in Schools program. We are finding that universities are looking to the students who have that VET qualification, that cert II that they achieved at school as part of their pathway and part of their resume, as well as their ATAR score.

At La Trobe's Bendigo campus we have the largest rural school of health in Australia for allied health. We have dentistry, physio, OT—all of the allied health professions. Only a few weeks ago, I was at the opening of the new dental school, which is the largest of its kind in Australia. It was opened by our premier, Jacinta Allan. For a number of the students that we met and spoke to, while they did achieve an ATAR, what also helped them with their early acceptance was the fact that they were able to pursue some vocational education certificates and training. They could demonstrate to the university that they had the skills but also the fundamentals, the bedside manner and the experience in a cert II that they achieved in health. Students who were going for placement in the medical and biomedicines fields were able to demonstrate that they could already do the basics of health care through the certificates that they had received at school. There's an opportunity through VET in school to encourage young people to think about a career in university or through TAFE which might not be a family occupation already. So let's think about how we can capture those young people who don't have that significant parent or relative in health or in trades encouraging them to think about a career.

Labor is delivering on skills and training, and this gives me a quick opportunity to talk about the pathways that we have established through TAFE and university. I was privileged to have the Minister for Skills and Training, the honourable Andrew Giles, in Bendigo to announce that nursing students would receive part of the Commonwealth prac placement payment. Students studying enrolled nursing not just at Bendigo TAFE but all around the country may qualify for this payment if they're required to do compulsory prac placement. The students that we met are astonishing. All of them identified themselves as early school leavers and were now at a point in their careers where they had chosen to go into nursing, men and women, who said to us quite boldly that they would not be at TAFE if it weren't for free TAFE. Now, with this prac placement payment on the table, they are now able to do their placement without fear of being able to put food on the table.

However, all these students identified that they were not going to stop at the end of their enrolled nursing course. All of them wanted to go on to become registered nurses and midwives and were on their pathway to study at La Trobe University just up the road. It's a demonstration of how we can have that alternative pathway into university, and it's working. National Skills Week is an opportunity to celebrate the successes but encourage that next generation of tradies and that next generation of health workers to think about a skill and to think about TAFE.

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