Judith Troeth (Victoria, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

I actually feel very sorry for Senator Wong in trying to put forward the Labor Party’s view on this topic, because she just does not understand. On almost every statistic and every aspect of this debate that she has mentioned, I have an answer. If we can gauge that her ideas are the ideas or policies of her leader, Mr Beazley, could I point out the attitude of Mr Beazley, which he evidenced in 1993, when he had responsibility for education and training. In his biography, which was published in 1999, he said:

… I had sort of finally got to accept that I would never be Defence Minister again, so I lost a lot of ambition and I stopped straining. … I thought that there was less capacity to achieve in that portfolio—

that is, the education portfolio—

than just about any I have had.

What damning words they are, and most of the Labor policies since that time bear out that comment. I would remind you, Mr Deputy President, that that comment was made at a time when Australia had between 10 and 11 per cent unemployment. What capacity did the then Labor government have to ensure that students were trained, whether they went to university or to TAFE, in order to fit them for the years ahead? Those years under the coalition government have seen not only a boom in the economy, maintained for 10 years now, but also a boom in the money and the attention that is devoted to apprentices and in the amount of funding that is put towards training. When Mr Beazley was minister for education—when he finally, we assume reluctantly, took up that portfolio—the number of apprentices in training was 122,600. Today, under the coalition, there are more than 403,000 Australian apprentices in training—