Simon Birmingham (SA, Liberal Party, Assistant Minister for Education and Training) Share this | Hansard source

Of the training places approved to date, 72 per cent have gone to micro and small businesses, demonstrating the creation of opportunity for those small businesses to grow themselves and to grow export markets for Australia into the future. Already just in the first couple of months of this program 115 businesses are benefiting from the training opportunities. In contrast, as I said before, Labor wasted billions of dollars on programs that failed to deliver training that actually connected with real job outcomes. A review into Labor's failed $4.1 billion Productivity Places Program found it was impossible to tell who had even been trained, it was impossible to estimate how many people had been trained and it was difficult to determine who had even been awarded contracts to deliver the training. By contrast, this program under the coalition connects training with jobs and real employers. (Time expired)