Chris Hayes (Werriwa, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

It is telling that the Prime Minister has recognised his recent contribution to the skills crisis and categorises it as better late than never. That is a pretty good summation of how the Prime Minister has considered the skills debate in this country for the last decade that he has been in office. The government’s record on training can only be characterised as appalling. It has long neglected the need to adequately fund training courses, and Australia is now suffering. The government’s denial of the crisis, its willingness to try to paper over the cracks, has only allowed the training system to deteriorate. Its unwillingness to look beyond to the national interest means that, quite frankly, people in this country, young people, have missed out.

A number of government members have contributed to this debate so far, and many of them have focused on job creation. They have all marched into this place and sprouted the government’s line about how many jobs the government has created and how many more apprenticeships there are. What they have not been gloating about is how many young people have been turned away from TAFE in the last decade. They have not been saying anything about the fact that, under this government’s watch, over 300,000 young Australians have been turned away from TAFE, while 270,000 skilled workers have been imported to work in this country.

Also, they have not been crowing about the OECD’s Education at a glance report, which shows that since 1995 Australia is one of the only countries that has reduced its public sector investment in education. While other countries have increased their investment by an average of 48 per cent over that period, this country has cut spending in that regard by an average of seven per cent. As a result, teenage unemployment in some areas is at a level that, quite frankly, has not been seen for a lot of years. In particular, in my region of Werriwa—but let us talk a little more broadly and take in Macarthur as well—figures released in September this year indicate that teenage unemployment is now at 27.9 per cent, the highest it has been since April 2002.

In the Liverpool-Fairfield area, the figures show that nearly one in four teenagers is unemployed. When we look further afield, we see that teenage unemployment in the Illawarra is at a staggering 41 per cent. These are people who need to be invested in. While I hope that some residents in the south-west of Sydney will be able to take advantage of the 30,000 vouchers that the government proposes in its statement, I fear there are many people who will simply be left behind. Many people will not have the opportunity to gain further skills to assist them in finding secure, long-term employment. While the actions of the government will be welcomed by some, I know that there will be far too many people who will remain out in the cold.

I was interested to hear the Prime Minister hold firm to his commitment of 25 Australian technical colleges in his announcement about his commitment to training in this country. It is on the record that I have spoken out against these technical colleges in the past and I have been of the very clear view that these technical colleges are nothing but a poor facsimile of the existing TAFE system. I know they are a poor facsimile because they are the same, for all intents and purposes, as TAFE, the biggest difference being the requirement for teachers and staff of the Australian technical colleges to be engaged on Australian workplace agreements.

As members on both sides of the House realise, the government introduced the Australian technical colleges solely as a means of driving forward their industrial relations agenda. It was not about training opportunities for the young; it was about making sure that the tentacles of their extreme industrial relations laws extended as far as they possibly could. They had no inhibition about hooking onto everything from universities to the Australian TAFE system if it would further the interest of their industrial agenda.

It seems that the tentacles are not extending quite as far as the government would like, particularly in Western Sydney. Recent reports indicate that the Australian Technical College Western Sydney is in real doubt at the moment. On 16 October this year the ABC’s AM program reported:

The Federal Government’s plan for a network of technical colleges for teenagers to finish school while completing apprenticeships is in trouble.

The Western Sydney College, which was supposed to begin operating next year, now says it won’t be taking students, and there’s a question mark over whether it will start up at all.

That means that training opportunities for Western Sydney people are in real jeopardy. That is of considerable concern as there are plenty of people in the western suburbs of Sydney who would like nothing more than a chance to get into training, get a trade and target secure and permanent employment. Of course, the Western Sydney college is not the only technical college that is struggling to get off the ground at the moment. As AM reported: ‘Only five of the colleges are operating.’

If this is the commitment of this government to training—if this is the level of commitment they will bring to introducing their Skills for the Future package—then, quite frankly, they should not have bothered. The government’s ‘better late than never’ and ‘she’ll be right’ attitude to skills has got us where we are today. Australia is suffering from a skills shortage because of this government’s inactivity in looking to the future and training young Australians.

So far under the Australian technical colleges program we have spent $18 million on 281 students. Those students must be getting some really good training because that works out at $64,000 each. The most glaring oversight in the Prime Minister’s statement is that there is nothing to help young people who want to get into training and use that training to get a job. There is nothing in his statement which will address rising levels of teenage unemployment in the south-west of Sydney. Once again, the government has abandoned the needs of the people and the businesses of Western Sydney. What makes matters worse is that it has tried to simply paper over the cracks which it has allowed to appear in its system, and the young people of south-west Sydney are paying a huge price.

Labor has plans for skills, and unlike the government’s plan, you will not have to wait until you are over 25 to participate and take advantage. Labor has responded to the need to promote economic growth and secure prosperity into the future by investing in its people. We have been talking for a long time on our side of the House about the need to invest in the future of our young people and in the economic growth of this country. For some time now we have known that there are not going to be enough people to fill the demand for skilled labour into the future. We recognise the problem. We realise there is going to be a handbrake on growth because we have a shortage of skilled labour.

Our plans are trying to develop that and making provisions to assist economic growth through the training and education of our kids as they attempt to enter the workforce. Labor realises that it is about time that the trend of taking money away from education is reversed. Every other advanced economy in the OECD knows that to be the case. Simply investing in kids is not something we should be doing on the basis of seeking an immediate return in the next budget period. This is all about investing in generational growth and long-term economic security. That is why we have set up a program for investing in education right through from skills to higher education in this country—the very things that this government, 10 years ago, set about reversing once it got involved. This government set us on the path of reversing the trend that had occurred—that it had inherited from the Hawke-Keating government.

We know that it is important to invest in our children while they are at school and to fast-track them through apprenticeships. We outlined that in the skills blueprint in September. I have had some personal experience in this. One of my sons was able to be fast-tracked through trade training through his education while he was at school. He was able to achieve the first year of a trade apprentice training while he attended college. It took one whole year off his TAFE training as an electrician once he left school and I think it reduced his actual apprenticeship by a further six months. We know we can do these things, but we do not need to leave it to a school to do in isolation. This is something that we can actually plan to do in such a way that all kids are able to participate, not simply the lucky ones who have a headmaster who is sufficiently farsighted to think that this is a good way to assist people into vocational education.

Labor has announced that when in government it will address the fundamental skills issues: to get people back into traditional trades; to encourage them to see their apprenticeships through to the end, and to do that through a trade completion bonus; to scrap TAFE fees for traditional trades; and to get school students, like my son, to look at trades as a viable option while they are still at school. This is something that we on our side of the House are committed to, Mr Deputy Speaker Jenkins, as you are well aware. This is our policy. It is what our country needs if we are serious about addressing skills shortages into the future and if we are serious about productivity growth in our economy.

It is not enough to stand in this place, announce some big spending proposals and forget about everyone who is not 25 years and over. This government has consistently sneered at the public contribution to education. Its approach to cutting rather than contributing began in 1997 when it implemented massive budget cuts to TAFEs and universities. And that has continued ever since. In 1998, this government actually abolished the national skills shortage strategy. Just today we saw a report by Monash University that indicated that, unless the government acts on university education, gaps are set to emerge among managers, professionals and associate professionals—now and into the future. One of the authors, Professor Bob Birrell, is reported as having said today:

There’s been a decade of neglect of higher education on the part of the Coalition, and this is now showing up in serious shortages in the output of graduates from the higher education system ...

Now in a mad rush and flurry to spend—including, of course, for the obligatory advertising that is attached to this—we have a government that is out there simply attempting to cover up its 10 years of neglect of education, higher education and vocational training. (Time expired)

Paul Neville (Hinkler, National Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I would very much like to speak on this ministerial statement, because the $837 million Skills for the Future package will give Australians the opportunity to gain new work skills and develop a far more entrepreneurial and forward-looking workforce. Gone are the days when an individual could complete a trade after leaving school and safely stay in that line of work through the whole of their working life. These days people know that they need to continuously upgrade their work skills to suit the workplace, their life situations and the needs of their families.

Take, for example, the case of electronics. Electronics in their modern form probably have not been with us for more than 30 years. If we continued to study electronics at the level that they were at 30 years ago, how would we be today with broadband, the internet, 3G and all those sorts of things? Obviously the people in those fields have to upgrade their skills. Think of the old PMG techs—the ones who stayed on. If they wanted to be part of the new generation they had to upgrade their skills—and so it will be in many occupations in years to come. So it is not simply, as some of the opposition have suggested, a matter of creating new classes at TAFE; it is a matter of targeting the areas where new skills are going to be needed.

The government’s Skills for the Future package focuses on improving the basic skills of Australians, and I am pleased to say it will be especially helpful to adults to improve their literacy and numeracy skills as well. That is another problem. We find that, as the world becomes more technical and more advanced in the presentation of its material, literacy and numeracy become even more important. The package also focuses on trade apprenticeships, which means that workers looking to take up midcareer apprenticeships will be eligible for financial assistance, while apprentices in traditional trades can receive the necessary support to take them one further step in establishing and running their own businesses.

The package also makes a substantial new investment in Australia’s future engineering skills by funding more university places and offering extra employer incentives so that Australians can gain higher levels of technical skills, right up to diploma and advanced diploma levels. From 1 January next year, people aged 25 and over who have not completed year 12 or an equivalent qualification will be eligible for vouchers of up to $3,000 to help with the cost of study to year 12 or an equivalent level, or for courses of a vocational and technical nature to a certificate II level. Up to 30,000 of these vouchers will be available each year, and they can be used at public, private or community training provider establishments.

From the second half of next year there will be financial support for people who are part-way through their working lives and who want to take up an apprenticeship in an occupation of high demand—and we all know about this great shortage of skilled labour, especially along the Queensland and New South Wales coastline. A lot of young people today are seduced by the extraordinarily well paid jobs that have developed in the coalfields. While I do not for a minute make any disparaging remarks about their hard work—they are certainly earning tremendous money—I wonder what happens at the end of this cycle and whether some of them will have qualifications when they come back into the coastal workforce again.

Many of the adults who would be prepared to fill those gaps find it difficult to go into an apprenticeship because they have family commitments. They are paying off a house, they are paying off a car and they have kids at school, and an apprenticeship wage just will not keep them. So under this new scheme they will be able to be subsidised with a weekly payment of $150 in their first year of an apprenticeship and $100 per week in the second year. I think that will be very handy for people. A lot of people come into my office with tremendous acquired skills but without qualifications or they have been overseas and their qualification is not accepted in Australia. I think this part of the scheme will really help those people.

I think this presents a fantastic opportunity for people who may already be on a work site, on a mining site, in a labouring role or in some other position and who want to take up the new challenge of having a profession. From 1 January 2008, the government will provide an extra 500 Commonwealth supported engineering places at universities to make up for a projected shortfall in engineering graduates. Of course, this is another problem. The problem we have experienced with doctors, dentists and some sections of teaching, of getting people to go into country areas, is now swinging over on to engineers and so extra Commonwealth places supporting engineering will be most welcome.

This is a comprehensive package which will help existing workers upgrade their skills while offering a firm foundation for those needing to consolidate their basic education qualifications. The initiative also ties in neatly with the government’s existing plan for Australian technical colleges. My electorate is fortunate in having one of the Australian technical colleges. It is located at Gladstone. The Gladstone Australian Technical College is being run by a consortium made up of Gladstone Area Group Apprentice Ltd, the Gladstone Engineering Alliance, Commerce Queensland, Eagle Crane and Rigging and the Central Queensland Ports Authority. The college opened its doors in January and operates out of five state schools—Gladstone, Toolooa, Tannum, Moura and Biloela high schools and two non-government schools, Chanel College and St Stephen’s Lutheran College.

The community partnerships which have been forged in Gladstone between business, training and education and local government put the city and the wider region in a very good position to take full advantage of the framework that is offered under the ATC initiative. This particular college was targeted by the opposition this year for having only one student enrolled. I am happy to report that Gladstone’s enrolment currently stands at 29. The college aims to have 65 local students on its books in the metal and engineering trades, the automotive trades and electrotechnology. By 2009, it is hoped the enrolments will be at the 135 mark and the syllabus will be expanded to include building, construction, mining and process plant operations.

I think this should be seen against the backdrop of what is already happening in Gladstone. It was probably a bit harder to get an ATC started in Gladstone because it in a way had become the forerunner of the school to work transition. Arguably the Toolooa State High School in Gladstone was the first that took up the idea of school to work transition. Even before the official government framework had been put together, they had started a model. They give their classes in the lecture theatres of the NRG powerhouse, where the young people work in an industrial environment. They do three or four academic subjects and then for two years—years 11 and 12—they also do their trade subjects. But this is not just theory in school; it is in a real, live workplace.

A number of students last year, I think it was 90 per cent, had their apprenticeships ready when they came out of that course. About 45 per cent of the year 11s, 18 months out from finishing school, already had their apprenticeships teed up. That is a marvellous result.

Overlaying that, we will have the formal ATC model. There is yet another model at Gladstone, at Tannum Sands State High School—one of my favourites. This school tried unsuccessfully under the old ANTA arrangements to get a business-type college associated with the school for years 11 and 12. The idea of that was to again have the students’ work in the Boyne smelter, in a proper work environment, where they would see real, live work on a day-to-day basis. On top of that, it was hoped to get the kids to levels II and III of their certificates in both computer science and business studies. You can imagine someone coming out with a year 12 certificate, a certificate in computer science and another certificate in office management; they are a long way along the way. And for them to be able to say to an employer, ‘I have had some real, live training in a workplace,’ is even better. That is yet another one in the Gladstone area.

Between 1996 and 2006 there has been an increase of 104 per cent in the number of apprentices in Hinkler; it has more than doubled. This gives the lie to the remarks of some in the opposition who are trying to denigrate the traineeships. I am not saying traineeships are the same academic or skills level as a full four- or three-year apprenticeship. No-one has ever said that. But the traineeship is pitched to the level of expertise required for a particular trade, and that is important.

In Hinkler, 138 per cent of the increase in the number of apprenticeships has been completed in certificates III and IV—in other words, in the top end of the skills—but if what the opposition said was correct, you would have expected them at the lower level. That has not been the case. I suspect what is happening in Hinkler would be reflected in other seats around us, such as Capricornia, Wide Bay, Dawson, Herbert and the like.

Another coalition initiative which complements this is the Tools for Your Trade program, which provides $800 for tool kits for Australian apprentices who commenced in registered skills shortage trades from 1 July 2005. As of 18 September this year, there were 989 apprentices in Hinkler who were eligible for these tool kits. There is near enough to 1,000 kids with tool kits as well.

My colleague the member for Cowper made an interesting point when he spoke on this matter. He said, ‘The opposition has never had to worry about skills shortage because of its own inability to create jobs’—a bit harsh, but if the cap fits. As I said, this is no longer the case in Gladstone or the wider Central Queensland region.

This is also reflected in the fact that in June 2001 there were 13,800 unemployed people in the Central Queensland region—that is, Mackay, Fitzroy and the central west. I am proud to say that, five years on, that 13,800 has been reduced to 5,500; more than halved. I am also pleased to say that the number of people employed has increased from 143,000 to 194,000; that is by over 50,000. If you divide that by five, you find that is about a 35 per cent increase overall, about seven per cent per year.

In Gladstone—where I also monitor the Centrelink figures very closely, because they represent real live flesh and blood people who need assistance from government—in the 10 years we have been in government the figure has dropped from 1,838 to 805, so more than half. You can see from that that these new initiatives—which we put in place in the earlier part of our term of government and which we have in place for the continuing term of the government—have placed the people of Central Queensland in a very advantageous position.

Ms Anna Burke (Chisholm, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

While I rise to recognise and take note of Skills for the future, I would like to note that even in the Prime Minister’s own address to the House he said:

While it is clear that claims about a skills crisis are exaggerated, Australia does face real skills challenges arising from an ageing population, rapid technological change and an increasingly competitive global economy.

What the Prime Minister failed to recognise was that over the last 10 years of his government he neglected the area of skills. That is the greatest cause of the skills crisis that we are having at the moment. If we are having an ‘exaggerated’ skills crisis, it is interesting that he is throwing $837 million to boost vocational training. On the one hand we do not have a crisis but on the other hand we are going to have a large package to assist people who are obviously in areas of skill shortage.

Whilst the Prime Minister can probably take some heart from the fact that there is a healthy and dynamic labour market that has ensured that the need for workers is growing rapidly every day and that there is a need for workers in very skilled areas, he cannot take heart from the fact that for over 10 years he has done nothing about it. He has done nothing to address the shortfalls in chronic areas. They have known about them. The issue has been emphasised by leading business groups, the Reserve Bank and all of the senior modellers of the economy. They have all been saying that there are two great impediments to the economy continuing to grow as rapidly as it has: skills and infrastructure. For 10 years we have had this booming economy. They could have done something; instead they have not.

We have the only government in the OECD that is actually investing less in education and training. The OECD’s Education at a glance report showed that Australia is the only advanced economy that has reduced its public sector investment in education since 1995. It is the only one in the world. Whilst other nations have increased their spend by about 48 per cent, Australia has cut its spend by seven per cent. It does not matter how much the Prime Minister or the minister for education get up and down and quote numbers, the raw statistics show it all. The OECD report demonstrates quite dramatically that there has been a massive cut in spending on education and training, particularly in higher education and in TAFE training.

While the Prime Minister and his various ministers for education have moaned that Labor has no interest in TAFE training, they have not talked about the fact that 300,000 people have been turned away from TAFE over the last 10 years. On the one hand we have this skills crisis while on the other we have had 300,000 people who have wanted to take a real live apprenticeship that takes three to four years to do and is not a traineeship—they are actually ‘rinky dinky didge’ going to get a TAFE certificate at the end of it and come out as a skilled tradesperson. Yet these people have been turned away from the TAFE system.

In my electorate we have some phenomenal educational institutions. We have the Box Hill Institute of TAFE, one of Australia’s leading TAFE institutions. Incidentally, I met with the CEO of the Box Hill TAFE at Sydney airport the other day and I asked where he was off to. He said: ‘I am off to China to sign a deal. We will be training people through various large hotel chains throughout China. We will be training them through the Box Hill TAFE in all areas of service delivery from child care, hospitality, service and maintenance to engineering.’ Here is my little TAFE in downtown Box Hill off to sign another international agreement. They currently have 12 or 15 such agreements with countries around the world.

Whilst we do have an Australian technical college set up, it is not in my electorate of Chisholm but in the electorate next door, Deakin. Money has gone into duplicating—and this is the absolute irony of this system—the wonderful system we have in the TAFE. The college is set up in a school environment at two schools in Ringwood. Instead of giving that money back to the TAFE sector—back to the educational sector—we try to duplicate and replicate it and try to retrofit a very bad model that is meant to be led by business. A lot of the businesses have said, ‘This is too complicated; we don’t want to do it,’ and a lot of the TAFEs have said, ‘We do not want to get involved in this because we are actually stealing from our own supply of students by getting involved in these things that are way too complicated.’

So the Prime Minister’s statement on skills misses the mark. Whilst we welcome the package—because it has ripped off a lot of Labor initiatives—it has missed the mark and it fails to recognise the government’s 10 years of neglect. Box Hill TAFE could have taken the money that has gone to set up the Ringwood ATC. It could have absorbed it and continued to run its phenomenal programs. For the last couple of years, it has had the Victorian Apprentice of the Year. Its output is phenomenal. It is a world-recognised educational institution.

Down the road from Box Hill TAFE is the Box Hill Senior Secondary College. It runs a Year 11 and 12 program. It runs a vast range of programs. I was there a couple of weeks back after a fire had come through and, sadly, gutted half the school, but it is managing to continue. It runs a phenomenal range of programs particularly catered to individuals who do not want to do mainstream academia and who want to do hands-on skilled work. Again, member for Hinkler, this school runs a program where the students come for a couple of days and also go into the workforce for a couple of days, so when they get to a job they can say, ‘Yes, I understand, when you say I have to be here at 7 o’clock in the morning, that I have to be here at 7 o’clock in the morning and that my mum should not still be yelling at me to get out of bed.’ They understand the notion of being at work for the whole day—that when they feel like a snack at about 11 o’clock they cannot just wander off. They have notions about what being work ready is.

The school runs that program. It has found it incredibly successful. Box Hill TAFE have said time and time again that if you want an apprentice to finish their four years, give them a pre-apprenticeship program, then they understand what is going to be involved. It is not something where they think, ‘Gee, I would like to be a sparky or a plumber and I’ll get to hang out with my dog and run around in the ute,’ or something like that. There are actually fairly rigorous requirements. If they do the pre-apprenticeship training, they understand what is going to be involved, and they understand the rigorous educational side that they are also taking on. But these things have been allowed to slide. The pre-apprenticeship program run through TAFE was defunded. They had to go to the state government to get additional funding to run that. They did not want to lose it because they found that it was the most appropriate way of ensuring that a young person was ready to go into the workforce and that the employer they were going to knew that that individual understood what work readiness was all about.

In the Prime Minister’s statement he talked about the challenges for people who had left school early and who had not been back in the education environment for a while and that we needed to cater for these people—some of whom, as the Prime Minister said, do not have fond memories of school. Again, the Box Hill TAFE has run a very successful program of short courses. People might come in and do something totally unrelated to a career opportunity, but they are going back into the TAFE environment. They are going back into the educational sector so that they can re-understand what it is like to be educated, what it is like to be in these places, that they are not the only person over 30 there and that they will be able to deal with it.

The previous minister for education, Brendan Nelson, used to bag these courses quite mercilessly. He got up in the parliament on numerous occasions and had a go at Box Hill TAFE for running a belly-dancing course. What he never mentioned about this belly-dancing course was that it was a full fee course. It was a short course and it was run probably for a bit of fun for a lot of people, but it also gave people the notion that they could learn and that they could go back into an educational environment. A lot of these short courses then had a very good spin-off effect, where these older people thought: ‘This is not too scary. I can now retrain, regroup and go back into the TAFE sector.’

So, again, we have all these instances of a good package in some respects. A lot of initiatives that the government has announced in the $837 million spend are Labor party policy. But it has taken too long. It has taken 10 years of neglect. You did not need to listen to us. The Governor of the Reserve Bank has been going on and on about this. The August 2006 statement on monetary policy said:

Over the year to the June quarter, employment growth was strongest in the mining and electricity, gas & water industries—

but there has been a lack of skills in that area. It continued:

Survey-based indicators and vacancy data mostly suggest that demand for labour is still strong and that the labour market will remain tight. The ABS measure of job vacancies increased in the June quarter, to show a nationwide vacancy rate of 1.5 per cent, the highest level in over thirty years ... Private-sector measures of vacancies also show robust annual growth in job vacancies. ...

Continued strength in labour demand has led to ongoing labour shortages. Business surveys report that firms are experiencing difficulty finding suitable labour, and employers note that this remains a key factor constraining their output. Feedback from the Bank’s liaison program indicates that labour shortages are broad-based across industries and skill levels. However, shortages are most pronounced for skilled workers in the non-residential construction and resources sectors, and in much of the business services sector.

The Reserve Bank has been highlighting it.

I was recently in Karratha. It is an interesting and very dusty place, but it is a ‘boom city’ and they cannot get skilled workers. They cannot even entice them in on the massive wages they are paying to these young people, because there is no need for them to go there. One of the businesses in the area said that the hardest people to employ nowadays are people in fast-food outlets. Why work in McDonald’s for a couple of dollars an hour when you can go out to a mine or somewhere else and earn $20 or $30 an hour? These issues have been known for a long time and I think something should have been done about them. But we have been living with myth instead of reality.

The report released today by Bob Birrell, from the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Monash University, which is also in my electorate, and requested by the Dusseldorf Skills Forum, which does fantastic work in the area of youth employment and youth skills and training, says that there have been too many myths put out by this government. Australia is the beneficiary of great economic times, but the report asks if this is delivering the education and training dividend that the country needs. The report states:

Recent Australian Government higher education and training policy has been misguided, having apparently fallen for several popular myths:

Myth 1: There has been too much emphasis on university education

Myth 2: There is inherent conflict between expanding trade training and maintaining or increasing university education

Myth 3: In future years there will be declining numbers of young people entering the workforce.

In respect of myth 1, the report indicates:

The fastest growing areas of the workforce are in managerial, professional and associate professional occupations, most of which rely on workers with knowledge and skills derived from tertiary qualifications. However over the period 1996 to 2005 there has only been a marginal increase in university commencements by domestic students—

I repeat: domestic students—

During the Coalition’s decade in office the potential of the higher education sector to contribute to Australia’s workforce demands appears to have been neglected. There has been plenty of sectoral reform to universities but little improvement in access or opportunity.

Indeed, we have seen that there has been a decrease in access and opportunity with massive HECS fees and increases in up-front fees being more and more prominent. Regarding myth 2, that a choice must be made between trade training and university education, the report continues:

Training at the higher education and trade level should not be seen in opposition. We can and should be expanding participation in both. There are far too many young Australians ill equipped to provide the skills needed in a labour market where most of the growth is in jobs requiring technical, analytical and managerial skills. In 2005, 46 percent of school-leavers were not enrolled in any post-school education. There were large numbers of young adults not working or studying full-time: 21 percent of 20 year-old men and 33 percent of 20 year-old women, for example.

So we have this huge number of people who will take up no education or training at all. This means the skills crisis and skills divide will continue. On myth 3, that there will be declining numbers of young people entering the workforce, the report says:

Australia is not running out of young people. The total labour force will increase from an estimated 10.54m in 2006 to an estimated 13.61m in 2051, mainly due to migration. Despite this, the annual rate of growth of the labour force is estimated to fall from about 1.6 percent currently to less than half this rate by 2051. This is largely because of the waves of baby boomer retirements due to occur in coming years. The number of 15-19 year olds will increase from an estimated 1.4m in 2006 to an estimated 1.58m in 2051. National wealth will rely on productivity growth and increasing the skills of the Australian workforce. Migration and re-skilling of older workers are valid policy choices to help address this. However skilling young Australians offers both the greatest potential source of additional skilled workers, and is the most efficient and productive policy approach.

Australia’s future prospects will depend on the near universal engagement of young Australians in education and training. Not coercively but in ways that:

• sharply increase the number of funded university places for domestic students
• improve accessibility to university campuses
• offer financial support for students from families of modest income.

So instead of having this debate that it is either/or—it is either trade or university—we actually need both.

There is a fantastic book that I would recommend to anybody in this chamber, called Wittgenstein’s Poker. Both Wittgenstein and Popper, who are two of the 20th century’s greatest philosophers, undertook trade training. One was a cabinet-maker and one was a plumber. They both said that they probably learned more from their masters who trained them in their trade than they ever learnt at university. It is not an either/or. We need to ensure that education is for everyone and that young people are taking it up now. (Time expired)

Debate (on motion by Mr Wilkie) adjourned.