Christopher Back (WA, Liberal Party) Share this | Hansard source

The point I want to make to you, Mr Acting Deputy President, is this—well, two points. First of all, I only went underground because my grandfather had been a miner underground on the Golden Mile in Boulder in the 1920s. I have to say to you I had no desire to go underground, Senator Farrell; nevertheless, I did. Secondly, it was interesting talking to the young mine manager—and I had a keen interest in his sense of occupational health, safety and wellbeing; it was principally my wellbeing that I was most interested in! We were talking about this very issue of skills development in the mining industry. And we would say with pride—of course, from Western Australia—that we are at this time enjoying an opportunity to support the wealth of our nation. I asked this young man, 'How are you going for trained staff?' He said, 'We can't get any.' I asked, 'Why is it that you can't get them—with Coolgardie, Kalgoorlie, the school of mines?' He said, 'We can't get people out of the city; and, if we can get them out of the city, they've got no skills that are employable in this mine.' I said, 'If you actually had these people, could you employ them?' He said, 'We could employ them tomorrow.' I said, 'Where does the fault lie?' He said, 'It lies in skills and trade training.' This is a young fellow with no axe to grind—I don't know what his politics are; I don't care what they are—but he simply said to me that that was the case. I said to him, 'What's the overwhelming nationality of employees on this mine?' He said: 'New Zealanders. We have people from all countries of the world.' I said, 'How many Australians? He said, 'Not many; principally New Zealanders.' I said, 'How do they get a job?' He described to me the situation of people who are actually outside the mine site, seeking work day after day, but because they do not have the necessary, basic skills to be employable, they are not getting this work.

I heard Senator Pratt, a Western Australian senator, also speaking of the need to get these people skilled up.

Senator Polley interjecting—

But why is it, Senator Polley—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—that we do not have a circumstance where our young people can be skilled up so that they can be employed? In fact, Senator Polley—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—they spoke to me of a one-armed truck driver, who was very keen to work on the mine. He felt discriminated against because, as a one-armed truck driver, they could not employ him underground. It was not for his inability to drive a large truck underground; it was the fact that, when they took him underground, and they showed him the shaft—about 1½ metres wide, going up in 25-metre levels some 600 metres—and they said to him, 'Could you ascend those steps in the event of an emergency?' and he himself said, 'No, I could not.' So they employed him above ground, and some five to six years later that same person is still employed.

The point I want to make is that we have failed—we have failed the skilled sector, we have failed the technical sector and we are continuing to fail; and this piece of legislation is not going to address that one little bit. Last week I was in Karratha, in the Pilbara, right beside Dampier, right in the middle of our offshore oil and gas, and our burgeoning iron-ore industry, asking the same question: how are we addressing the need for these wide gaps between skills that are needed and skills that are available? And here, sitting in Canberra tonight, we are not putting policies into place that will actually make these people employable. Is it a disappointment to me that young eastern Australians do not want to leave the east coast to come and take up these jobs? Of course it is. Are the policies right that allow young people who are fit and able and single to travel from where they live to places where they could be employed? No, and it is wrong that those policies are not in place. If a person is married with a family, I can understand that they cannot shift. I had to move, as a kid of 17, to Western Australia from Queensland to go to veterinary school, because I had that engagement, I had the opportunity and I had that ambition. I had to go to Tasmania, Senator Polley—through you, Mr Acting Deputy President—and I left a wife and three children in Western Australia, because I could see the opportunity for work. And if we do not inculcate into our young people the need to work, the desire to work, the pleasure of the ambition of work, of building up skills, then we simply are disinheriting a population of young people into the future. That is why I feel so passionate, that the sorts of issues we are addressing are not going be those that are going to solve these problems.

I was also in the town of Geraldton last week, on our mid-west coast. It is just north of Geraldton that the Oakajee port will be constructed, and it will open up the mid-west of Western Australia to a new type of iron ore, being magnetite, whereas it is hematite that has been the driving force of the iron-ore industry in the Pilbara region. As soon as Oakajee is opened up—as soon as that port is built—we are going to see a wonderful expansion of that whole mid west region. But once again we are going to come back to the sorts of arguments that have torn the Labor Party apart in the last few weeks, arguments based in the tension between employing Australians and having to bring in overseas workers simply because we are not putting the right fundamentals into place to ensure that our young people can gain these skills.

I wish to make another point in relation to this. I made the observation at the beginning that 15-year-old and 16-year-old boys particularly do not often see the benefit of higher education. They are not as mature as girls at the same age. But my own experience in agribusiness and agricultural education from the 1970s through to the 1990s tells me that if you can put in the face of these young people the interest in and the desire for higher education as they develop their own skills they will redevelop the love of learning that was lost in primary school and secondary school and become the most wonderful assets. People who start out at the VET level—the technical skills area—can very quickly, if they have that level of interest, progress through to higher technical and professional level education. Look at the wealth of experience that they will gain from working on the shopfloor right through as they gain those skills.

That is what came out in the engineering skills inquiry that was run by my associate Senator Marshall as the deputy chair and my other colleagues on the Senate Education, Employment and Workplace Relations Committee. That is what we need to be developing in this country. That is the vision that we need for young people in this country. We do not want them sitting around in places where there is no employment. We do not want them sitting around feeling sorry for themselves. We do not want them sitting around because earlier generations of their own family did not work. We have to set the vision for them in a country where there is every opportunity. We have to say to these people, 'This is your future, and you have to be part of the future rather than being part of the problem.'

I do not want to dwell, as others have done and as we all could do all night, on the challenges that we face in this country to get rid of the debt, to pay down the deficit and to start benefitting from the boom. That boom will not be there long into the future. Any of us who get out there and talk with industry and who engage with companies that are working in Australia and other countries of the world—working in Africa, working in South America and other places—have been told that they are positioning themselves very well. Unfortunately, if we do not increase our productivity and our competitiveness, we will be left behind and be a laughingstock; we will be the Europe of the middle of this century; it will be said of us that we let an opportunity slip through our fingers. The Skills Australia Amendment (Australian Workforce and Productivity Agency Bill) 2012 is just a grain of sand on the beach. That beach ought to be the coastline for the future of this country. Regrettably, this bill is not going to turn us into the learning and productive nation that we need to be.