Anne McEwen (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also rise to speak on the motion to take note of answers given by Senator Vanstone, representing the Minister for Vocational and Technical Education. I note that Senator Parry has spent five minutes trying to bury the problem of the skills shortages in Australia, a problem that has been exposed by the questions asked today by Senator O’Brien and others on this side of the chamber. It is a problem that has also been brought to our attention by many respected organisations including, as Senator O’Brien said, the South Australian Freight Council, the Reserve Bank, the Australian Industry Group, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and numerous economists and academics who, for many years, have been ringing the bells about the skills crisis facing the country.

Now we have a government which thinks that spending $24 million of taxpayers’ money on a new logo and a new name for the New Apprenticeship scheme is going to solve the problems we are facing. You have to ask how a $24 million name is change going to do anything except waste more money and line the pockets of the advertisers and consultants that the government likes to fritter away money on. We saw $55 million spent on advertising to try and promote the Work Choices legislation. Well, that fell flat and we can be certain that $24 million to change the name of the New Apprenticeship scheme will also fall flat.

It will fall as flat as the introduction of the Australian technical colleges that Senator Parry was banging on about just then. Let us be clear about this: so far four colleges have been set up and they have enrolments of fewer than 300 people between them. If we are lucky those colleges will deliver 100 extra qualified tradespeople by 2010, when Peter Hendy of the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry says that the nation will need 100,000 extra qualified tradespeople. Of the ATC budget of $185 million the government so far has spent a lousy $18 million. Do not come in here and say that it has been a success—it has not been and it will not be.

Neither will the temporary, quick-fix solution that the government is using to try and solve the skills crisis by importing more than a quarter of a million migrants, as Senator O’Brien said, mainly from Asia to do the jobs that should be being done by Australians, who should have been trained by this government to do those jobs be a success. So instead we have 270,000 migrants in this country doing work that needs to be done because the government has failed to train Australians to do that work. Every day we read in the paper about how these migrants are being put in terrible situations like the workers in New South Wales we heard about today. They are being put in terrible situations, when they come over here, they can barely speak English, they have to rely on people to interpret for them and as a result they put themselves in a situation where they cannot observe the occupational health and safety rules of the workplace that they are in. What an appalling way to treat people! I will not even go into the situation of them being underpaid, which has been raised many times before.

We could reflect on the other things that the government has not done to fix the skills crisis. We could reflect on the reduction in the number of students commencing university under this government’s watch—down from 284,416 in 2003 to 279,168 last year. We know one of the reasons that people are not going to university is because of the huge disincentive of the HECS debt that they incur when they go there. The HECS fees under this government’s watch have doubled. Medical students are now paying $30,000 more for their degrees than they were under the previous government, and engineering students—we are desperate for engineers—are paying $16,000 extra a year to get a degree. The number of Australians in new apprenticeships is declining. It has declined over the last three years from 393,500 in 2003 to 389,000 in 2005.

What the government is doing is not successful. It has taken its eye off the game. All it has done is spend 10 long years plotting, planning and scheming to implement the tired old industrial relations agenda of a tired old prime minister at the expense of Australia’s youth and Australian industry, because we do not have the people in this country trained to the jobs that need to be done. (Time expired)

Question agreed to.