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

Firstly, around three million Australians participate in vocational education and training annually—around double the number in our university sector. It is crucial to ensure that those students get the highest quality of training available. Secondly, because our vocational education and training sector provides the type of skills mix necessary for an innovative and agile economy, I say to those opposite that our vocational education and training sector is a critical complement to our university sector and to our overall skills and training mix. That is why, since coming to government, we have made sure that the investment is available—a record sum of around $6 billion in different funding streams that flow from the Commonwealth to vocational education and training this year. It is why we have made sure that we have strengthened and enhanced the link between employers and the operation of the vocational education and training system. It is incredibly important that training is structured in a way to give employers the types of employees with skills that are relevant to the needs of their workplace, and to make sure that, of course, the VET system does what it is designed to do—that is, to train people for real jobs that really exist.

We have enhanced the opportunity and support, especially for apprentices, in providing the trade support loans, which are now supporting more than 16,000 apprentices with additional assistance to help them complete their apprenticeship. In doing so, we have enhanced support overall for apprenticeship arrangements to make sure there is support for completion of apprenticeships and to drive up the unacceptably low completion rates that have historically existed.