George Campbell (NSW, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Hansard source

I also want to make a contribution in relation to the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Amendment Bill 2006 before the chamber. I must say it is not surprising to hear at least one of the senators on the other side of the chamber get up and make the accusation that the Hawke-Keating government is to blame for our skills crisis. After all, the government have made a feature out of blaming the Hawke and Keating governments for everything that has gone wrong while they have been in government, despite the fact they have been in government for 10 years. If something goes wrong it is still the fault of the Hawke-Keating government. I did not hear Senator Ian Macdonald go back to 1983 and tell us about the contribution the current Prime Minister made to unemployment in this country when he was the Treasurer—11½ per cent unemployed, and with a much smaller labour market than today.

I did not hear Senator Macdonald talk about the contribution the Hawke and Keating governments made in the eighties to structurally changing the nature of our economy and our workforces that made the workforces more productive, created greater flexibility, and provided the opportunity for our manufacturing sector to get into export markets and grow exports of elaborately transformed manufactures from something like about three per cent at the end of the eighties to some 18 per cent in 1996 when this government came to power. I did not hear Senator Macdonald tell us that those ETMs have now dropped back to about 3½ per cent under this government. All of the sacrifice the workforce made in the eighties and nineties to change the nature of the Australian economy has been sacrificed under this government. We have gone back virtually to where we were in the mid-eighties. He was very keen to blame the Hawke and Keating governments for the skills crisis. Anyone with any modicum of commonsense would know that that is absolute nonsense.

The reason we have a skills crisis in this country today is that when this government came to power in 1996 it introduced a series of what can only be described as mickey mouse responses in trying to deal with getting people into apprenticeships. We had traineeships. We had New Apprenticeships. They changed the rules every couple of years or every 18 months. They destroyed the stability of the apprenticeship system over that period of time. We know that you cut funding to TAFEs by some eight per cent and that 300,000 fewer people now are able to access our TAFE system than was the case in 1996. It was a deliberate strategy by the government to cut funding to TAFE when they came to office in 1996 which has resulted in TAFE not being able to accommodate those people.

The reality is that we know we are going to lose something like 150,000 tradespeople out of the industry over the next 10 years, and we know under this current government there will be around only 30,000 new tradespeople trained to replace them. Those are the facts of life. That is the crisis that has been bubbling away in our economy for a considerable period of time. This government sat around on its hands for three or four years knowing this situation was developing and it did nothing to address the issue. Belatedly at the last election we got this proposal for 25 technical colleges, of which I understand only five are up and running. We made the point at the time the announcement was made by the Prime Minister that, even if they got all the colleges up and running in the first year, no tradespeople would come out of them until 2010-11. Even in terms of the proposal before the Senate, the impact on our economy and on the skills shortages will be minimal in the short term.

I understand this bill is to bring forward the funding, to get these colleges up and running much quicker, and the Labor Party has indicated it will support it. In terms of the contribution that these technical colleges are going to make to dealing with our skills crisis, no-one in the Australian economy should hold their breath waiting for it to happen quickly, because it will not. There are plenty of examples around of other facilities that could have been utilised that would have got skills training up and running much more quickly than this proposition that was put before the people by the current Prime Minister.

The reality is we have a skills crisis in this country today which can be sheeted home to this government for its neglect of a critical issue and the deliberate cut to the funding of the TAFE system, which was the best placed of all to deal with the rapid training and skilling-up of young Australians. What have we seen emerging as a result of this? The advent of section 457 visas, supposedly to bring skilled migrants into the country to try and deal with the skills crisis. On this side of the chamber, we have raised numerous issues with the Minister for Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Senator Vanstone, about the fact that many of these migrants are not skilled. They are not being brought in to deal with skills shortages. They are being used as an additional labour force. Many of them are being employed in low-skill jobs and unskilled jobs, despite the fact that we are being told they are here to deal with the skills crisis.

I would be the last one to stand up in this place and oppose migrants coming to this country. I was a migrant myself back in 1965. With the goodwill of the government, they paid the £10 to get me here, so I cannot complain at all. I think they got a reasonable return on their investment over the years! I have nothing against migrants coming in. It is a question about the rules under which they come into the country and how they are processed, and whether they are being used in order to build our society or whether they are being used to supplant people in this country getting access to training, picking up skills and being able to fill those jobs. I suspect it is the latter.

We have already seen the scramble that the minister for immigration is in at the moment over the section 457 visas. They are trying to make policy on the run to deal with the myriad issues that have been raised in relation to the way in which those visas are being exploited by unscrupulous labour hire companies to get cheap labour into this country and to exploit labour from other countries to deal with our skills crisis. That is also denying young Australians the opportunity to get training in the skills area, to get apprenticeships and to get themselves onto a career path that will sustain them in the longer term.

There has been very little or nothing done about developing policies and strategies that will substantially increase the pick-up of young people—and I am talking about young people in the 16- to 20-year age group—into the apprenticeship system and skill them up for jobs in sustainable industries. All the focus again, as is always the case with this government, has been on short-termism. These technical colleges, in my view, will not radically alter those sets of circumstances. And we will again condemn a whole generation of young people to having to operate at the bottom end of the labour market, when they could have had the opportunity of being trained in skills that would have equipped them for much more rewarding, satisfying and higher paying jobs.

The issue of skills is a critical one for our economy. But this government could not even introduce the technical colleges proposal, albeit with the deficiencies it has, without playing politics with it. They had to tag on industrial relations requirements for the staff of those colleges as part of the deal. They had to use the introduction of the colleges to get out there and force their ideological agenda on industrial relations on the poor unfortunates that are going to be employed in those colleges training young people. They could not resist the opportunity to do that. They had to take the opportunity to whack the potential employees of those colleges, in order to try and promote the take-up of their industrial relations system, and turned them into a battleground. Instead of giving primary focus to getting people employed in those colleges, to getting the colleges up and running and to getting our young people trained, the government had to go back and use the process of introducing them as part of the elements driving their industrial relations agenda. That is unfortunate because I think it has, in a number of areas, retarded the ability to get some of those colleges up and running faster than they otherwise would have been.

As I said, the Labor Party have indicated that we will be supporting this bill. But I want to make a number of points about what Labor have said we will do in this area—because we actually have some credibility in the area of training and development of skills. We are committed to creating a modern TAFE system. We are committed to making the TAFE system work and ensuring the system works in the best interests of all those people in our community who need access to that training. Labor’s blueprint will offer some real solutions. We will be offering young people more choice by teaching trades, technology and science in first-class facilities rather than in Dickensian workshop environments. We will be establishing a Trades in Schools scheme to double school based apprenticeships in skills shortage areas. We will be establishing specialist schools for senior years in trades, technology and science. We will be establishing a Trades Taster program for year 9 and 10 students to experience a range of trade options. We will be introducing a trade skills completion bonus to ensure that young people are encouraged not just to enter into the trades but to complete them and to walk away with their papers. And we will be opening up a skills account for them to assist them with their fees, their books and their equipment for the traditional trades.

Labor actually does have policy solutions in hand that will address the skills crisis. Unfortunately, the problem has been allowed to wander on so long that it is not capable of being addressed overnight; it is not capable of being addressed in the short term. It is going to take a considerable amount of resources and energy being put into this sector—first to reverse the trend and then to see the development and growth of skilled workers coming out of that process. This government’s agenda, through the technical colleges, will not go anywhere near addressing those issues. Labor’s program will reverse the trend that is occurring now, will start the process of seeing growth in the development of skilled workers and will eventually resolve the skills crisis that currently faces this country.