Karen Grogan (SA, Australian Labor Party) Share this | Link to this | Hansard source

We're experiencing a skills shortage in industries that are vital to the wellbeing of Australia. We have a situation where industries that everyone across this chamber will agree are vital, such as aged care, early childhood education, teaching, nursing and other industries, simply cannot find enough staff. Australia's skills shortage is one that's been simmering away for years. This is not a surprise. There has not been a clear plan, and, without proper investment, when we hit the pandemic it boiled over into a crisis.

We saw our aged-care workers forced to work in multiple facilities, sometimes unsafely, simply because that was the only way of providing enough staff to cover the care needs. We saw our nurses pulling hours that were well beyond what anybody would say is safe, just to ensure that our COVID wards were safely and appropriately staffed. This left so many of them in such a dire situation. We simply did not have enough people with the skills required when we needed them. And, when we did have workers with the skills we so desperately needed, we didn't have a system to ensure that their wages kept pace, that they had enough money to put food on the table and that they were keeping up with skyrocketing rents and increased transport costs. We did not have a system that protected our most vulnerable and most vital workers.

Jobs and Skills Australia will be an incredible tool to actually start to address this. It will act in partnership with unions, employers, education providers and state and territory governments, and it will take immediate action on our skills shortage. Jobs and Skills Australia will provide advice on current, emerging and future workforce skills issues, and it will help keep Australians in work by having that long-term view and having that long-term perspective. As industries change, so will our training, to ensure that there are jobs available for people who need them. Jobs and Skills Australia will work to ensure that there is a shared understanding of the issues facing Australia through a balanced approach to working in multiple industries.

In February of this year, 17 per cent of businesses reported that they did not have enough employees, and the recruitment difficulty rate for higher skilled occupants was sitting at 67 per cent. In my home state of South Australia, we felt the impacts of skills shortages particularly in our youth unemployment rates and in our regional workforce shortages. In Australia, the youth unemployment rate is currently sitting at 7.9 per cent, and this youth unemployment rate is being deeply felt in South Australia. The younger members of our workforce are having to face the consequences of a government that refused to prioritise education and refused to invest in skills, even though we've all been talking about the shifts in our economy and in our industry base for so many years. It would seem a no-brainer to connect that high youth unemployment rate to the skills shortage, to build pathways for those young people to be sufficiently skilled up to take the available jobs, and to address that issue with a resource that we have right in front of us.

I've had the great fortune of working in the tertiary education sector and particularly on pathways for students from more disadvantaged backgrounds into university and vocational education, and I can assure you that there are a great many young people out there who would love the opportunity of a pathway into a career in some of those areas where we have desperate skills shortages. Vocational education, providing alternative pathways for school leavers into trades and different kinds of skilled workforces, allowing young people to match their dreams with the needs of our economy—these are the things that we should be looking towards. But not enough was done over the last nine years under the former government to prioritise this type of education, to prioritise vocational pathways and actually build a system that understood what our available resources were and where our industries needed those skilled workers.

So we need a plan. The vocational education and training sector trains four million people annually in Australia, and this is a central element of our education system. Action is required to match the training participation, the skill sets and the demand. Jobs and Skills Australia is the vehicle that is going to deliver this. It will produce independent data and analysis so that we can understand the costs involved in delivering the vocational education and training courses to students and what the impacts are going to be across government, training organisations and industry. It will recommend funding, based on genuine needs, to help us address youth unemployment and the other great scourge in South Australia, which is regional skills shortages. Jobs and Skills Australia will undertake specific plans for targeted groups, such as the regions and youth—obviously, in other parts of the country there are other priorities also—and it will provide the targeted data that directly informs policy development and program delivery so that we can provide the match between what is needed and how we go about getting there. This will all be complemented by the Albanese Labor government's commitment to creating 465,000 fee-free TAFE places that are focused on areas of skills gap.

In South Australia we have been facing mass nursing and aged-care workforce shortages, and the training that's being provided in many areas is insufficient, particularly when we're talking about aged care and disability care. We've heard today through much of the debate around the aged care bill about the inaction of the former government in not addressing issues within the aged-care sector. We've known this is a growing area of skills shortage for some considerable time, and yet nothing has been done to address it. As a result, aged-care workers are having to overwork themselves and not provide the care they want to. It is thanks largely to workforce shortages and the skills crisis. Throughout the regional towns of Whyalla, Port Pirie, Port Augusta, Mount Gambier and Port Lincoln, the aged-care sector's skills shortage is an immediate issue. Prior to the election, I did a range of forums out through those regional areas, talking about aged care and the broader health workforce, and the stories were alarmingly similar everywhere I went: there were shortages; there weren't enough staff; people were overworked and they didn't believe they were able to provide the care, because they didn't have the time and they didn't have the staff.

That is why Jobs and Skills Australia is so essential, and why the Jobs and Skills Summit in September is so important in bringing together the critical areas, the critical stakeholders; understanding what that's going to look like into the future; and building a plan—a short-term plan for immediate relief, a medium-range plan and then the longer-term plan about where the industries in this country are growing and where they are shrinking, and building a plan accordingly. The Albanese Labor Government has got big plans also across manufacturing and in the renewable energy sector, and being able to plan for what that skilled workforce looks like is critical to being able to deliver on it. There is no point building an industry if you can't then provide the relevant staff with the relevant technical knowledge and experience to fill those gaps.

So, as we recover from the pandemic economically, now is the time to pull together and think very strategically about what our economy will need, going forward, in the short term, medium term and long term. We know we need to care. We know we need to teach. We know we need to build things. To do that, we have to understand what that future looks like. We have to understand how we are going to put the right people in the right jobs to build the future that we know that we can build across Australia, so that we can deliver well-paid and decent jobs and help people deal with the rising cost of living through multiple ranges of policies, ensuring that people can put food on the table, they can afford their transport costs and they can have pride in the job they are doing to build the economy.

Senate adjourned at 20:22