Amanda Vanstone (SA, Liberal Party, Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs) Share this | Hansard source

Thank you. I have said enough, I think, about the well-known fact that the previous Labor government cut funding to apprenticeships and traineeships. Let us move on to this government coming into power and us experiencing some 10 years of economic growth, which of course means that your businesses are not only surviving in the economy at the time, but they have the capacity to be able to grow. For a business to be able to grow, it is not rocket science: most need to take on more skilled people. In order to get skilled people, you have to have them in the pipeline. This is the pipeline that Labor turned off, so what we are doing is using the immigration system to assist Australian businesses to grow and develop.

I was particularly interested to go back and look at a clipping in January this year where apparently the union movement were discussing with an employment agency whether it would be of interest to the union movement to bring in workers from, for example, the Philippines, and pay them at half the rate Australians are paid. Guess where the other half of the money would go? Into a union training fund! The union movement would have been able to skim some $20 million out of this fund.

As I recall, I have seen a comment by one of the senior union officials saying this was a genuine attempt to address a skills shortage in Australia. We have the union movement looking at bringing in—looking at, not agreeing to—people to work at half the going rate in Australia, and—guess what?—to take the other half into a union training fund. That is what we have the union movement doing: wanting to build a $20 million administrative fund for training to give people like Senator Wong and other union officials jobs.