Don Randall (Canning, Liberal Party, Shadow Parliamentary Secretary for Local Government) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

I am raising the matter of skilled workers in the resources industry and the skills shortage because I am so concerned about the people who should be getting a job and who are not. This issue particularly affects Western Australia and the electorate of Canning, which has the second highest number of fly-in fly-out and drive-in drive-out workers out of any Western Australian metropolitan electorate.

The Labor Party and Prime Minister Gillard have yet again made a debacle of another policy—this time the enterprise migration agreements and the recent Roy Hill announcement. The coalition supports filling job shortages and knows this can be done through a temporary migration system with integrity, when necessary, and when Australian residents cannot be found to fulfil available jobs. This is sound economic practice. But following the Roy Hill announcement, the Labor Government has rushed the Jobs Board through, simply to appease the union bosses.

Last Friday, a search of the Jobs Board website in my office returned some interesting results. We used the region of the Pilbara in Western Australia as a job search area. We looked at the jobs areas of machinery operators and drivers; technicians and trade workers; and labourers. If you want a job as a casual mystery shopper in Port Hedland, you are fine. The rest of the results were disappointing for someone really wanting to get into the mining sector. What we really need to see are training programs being put in place to get Australians job ready—people such as older age workers and those who have not got skills but who are not getting the mentoring or training they need to get them into a specific role. They need support.

Last Friday I received a visit from one of my constituents, Kathy Webster. She knows two local people who are hard workers, who have families to support and who want to work in the mining industry but just cannot get a job. One is a forklift driver and the other can drive road trains. Both are willing to undertake on-the-job training and upskill. But where do they go to get this help? What is this Labor government doing to get people job ready in the mining sector?

There needs to be more programs like at Newmont Boddington goldmine in my electorate. This company has about 50 to 100 job vacancies at any one time. These vacancies are usually for positions requiring significant experience or technical skills such as engineers, surveyors, mechanics, welders and fitters et cetera. Occasionally, they are calling for equipment operators as well. They tend not to take on people with zero experience; however, they do have a program which is an initiative of the company where they take on people with no experience and provide training through a volunteer system. This is only a token gesture in the scheme of things, but perhaps there needs to be government funding to put in place to create more tailored programs to get those with some skills so that they are job ready and trained specifically for these mining jobs that are in short supply.

The programs could provide certification through industry-recognised training programs. Instead, the government has wound back the funding for trades training centres in the schools. It is a sign of the government admitting that the skill levels in some of these courses offered was not enough to fill certain shortages. This is in comparison to the Australian technical colleges introduced by the Howard government and formed to be centres of excellence and to train people to the highest possible standards. Labor canned these colleges, but fortunately the ATC in Armadale in my electorate has been privately funded and has been able to remain operational.

The Labor government has also facilitated a wages blow-out in the resources sector that is being exacerbated by the union-controlled Trades Recognition Australia, TRA. By TRA getting a say in who comes to this workforce and which jobs they will operate in if their qualifications are sufficient, they have control over the supply of workers. By making mining sector workers so in demand, they have pushed up the wages and also the prices.

The mining boom did not start yesterday. We have been aware of the impending skills shortage in Australia for many years. Identifying this need for workers was something that was done back in 2007 when I chaired the Joint Standing Committee on Migration. One of the key recommendations of this report was protecting employment and training opportunities for Australian workers. Perhaps the recruitment agencies could do more; perhaps the Labor government could support this motion.

One thing in my last few moments is the problem with human resource people at the front desk of these resource companies. They are often young girls with no job experience but they are the gatekeepers stopping people trying to get a job. They are box tickers and they do not have much life experience or know the real needs of workers. The sooner we get some understanding of our workers and their real needs in the workplaces, these skills— (Time expired)