Kim Carr (Victoria, Australian Labor Party, Shadow Minister for Housing and Urban Development) Share this | Hansard source

If ever there was a case where the government had difficulties facing up to the fact that the chickens are now coming home to roost, it is with this issue of skills shortages. Every parrot in every pet shop, as they say, across the land is now announcing we have a skills shortage. It was Judith Sloan, the well-known expert that the Liberal Party called upon to justify their wage-cutting, deskilling policies in the run-up to their first great assault on the labour movement, on workers’ rights and living conditions of working families in this country in 1996, who was called upon to provide advice to this government—and to the cabinet, if I recall rightly from the press reports at the time. She claimed the intellectual basis for assaulting workers’ rights and conditions was the need to reduce wages and conditions in this country and to deregulate the economy, particularly the training regime.

Judith Sloan is now a Productivity Commissioner. She has been rewarded for her dedicated support for the Liberal Party over all these years. However, today she is saying that the real problem is that migration is not a skill formation policy. This is from the same Liberal Party doyen, Professor Judith Sloan. She says:

You really have to think much more broadly in terms of all the incentives for Australian employers and employees to gain skills.

The apprenticeship system we have in this country was essentially created through the work of Dr Kemp. Dr Kemp was the great initiator of the changes in policy the government now applauds. He introduced the New Apprenticeships system, the title of which the government now wants to change to the Australian apprenticeships system.

I am very familiar with these matters. I spent a great deal of time examining the work that was undertaken back in 1996. The truth of the matter is that in that period the first thing the government did was to stop collecting statistics on the traditional trades. It stopped trying to promote the skilling of the traditional trades. It saw the need for employer incentives, which, I understand, is now a program getting close to $570 million per year, to be directed at encouraging employers, particularly in the personal and other services industries—accommodation, cafes and restaurants. We had a grand new scheme costing over $570 million per year—the equivalent in today’s dollars—going to employers to train burger flippers and cappuccino makers.

What do we find? We now cannot find enough boilermakers and engineers and we cannot train enough kids in maths and science in our schools and universities to ensure that we have the underpinnings of a properly educated workforce to cope with the need for innovation in our society. This government thought that the approach to wage cutting and the reduction in working conditions was to train burger flippers and cappuccino makers, and the bulk of their incentives went into those trades.

I am not against the training of people in the hospitality industry. It is extremely important. But the government, as an act of state policy, transferred resources out of the training of workers in the traditional trades—we had to get rid of this description of apprenticeship and get rid of the division between apprenticeships and traineeships—to get this New Apprenticeships model going. As a consequence of that most of the money has gone into the training of people at AQF level III, which of course was not sufficient to provide the training base to pay people decent money to ensure they have the skills base for the opportunities at work, to control the production process, because the government’s policy was about reducing wages and conditions. The government’s whole approach is very simple. It says that, in a free-market capitalist economy when there is a shortage, you put the price up—unless you are a worker. Then only a worker has to be controlled and regulated so that they do not have the capacity to enjoy a decent standard of living. (Time expired)