Mr LINDSAY (8:25 PM) —I am pleased to have the opportunity to contribute to the debate on the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005 this evening. Much has been said about Australian workplace agreements being part of the Australian technical colleges bill before the parliament tonight. I would like to inform the parliament that, two weeks ago, I was in the Pilbara at the West Angeles iron ore mine, which is a very large operation. There was not a single unionist in sight. The staff are all on AWAs. I have to say that it is an extraordinarily happy workplace. The No. 1 priority in that workplace is safety. It is the mantra of everybody on site, from the lowest paid to the highest paid employee. People there take safety seriously. The employees are happy with their jobs. The truck drivers on the site are being paid $120,000 a year to drive trucks at the mine. Yet the opposition continually paints AWAs as being somehow evil, that workers are disadvantaged and that things are not right in the workplace. But things are right. My experience at this iron ore mine brought home to me just how well AWAs can operate in all sorts of workplaces, and they can operate in that way in the proposed Australian technical colleges.

In his contribution a moment ago, the member for Lyons said that people have to be on guard for their jobs because they may lose them under an AWA. I would point out a couple of things to the member for Lyons. The first thing is that employers do not lightly, if ever, try to terminate employees who are good workers. Particularly in an environment of very low unemployment, an employer cannot afford to terminate an employee for no good reason. So there is an inbuilt protection in relation to that. Certainly as a past employer of many years I always understood that staff were your best asset and that you did not just lightly terminate a staff member.

The skills shortages that we see around the country exist just as much in Townsville and Thuringowa as they do anywhere else in the land. The emergence of skills shortages are a result of a complex set of factors and circumstances, including sustained economic growth under the Howard government, the globalisation of the economy, an ageing work force, a decline in fertility rates, a shift in labour market patterns, a poor image of the traditional trades and the low uptake of traditional trades by people historically not interested in the trades.

Traditionally, a business cycle goes through a period of growth of approximately eight years, with a subsequent period of contraction, followed by another wave of growth. However, since the early 1990s, Australia’s economy has experienced continued growth. Under the Howard government, that growth has built up pressure on the demand for skilled labour. Whilst Australia has been experiencing a continuing period of growth, the globalisation of economies has also occurred. This has resulted in global competition for professional, paraprofessional and skilled trades employees. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that some one million Australians now work overseas, which represents a significant net loss of skilled and professional workers for the Australian economy.

In addition, during the 1990s, more than 250,000 young people were leaving school annually to join the work force or to undertake further education. It is expected that this will decline to 150,000 by 2010. Since the 1960s, fertility rates have also declined from average fertility rates of 3.5 babies per woman in 1961 to less than 1.9 in 1985 and to 1.7 in 2004.

The contemporary trends embraced by government agencies and large businesses to maximise short-term returns with a focus on downsizing, outsourcing and corporatisation has led to a significant decline in investment in training by those agencies and businesses. Consequently, there has been a dramatic reduction in the number of apprenticeships being sponsored by these organisations. As Toner in 2003 suggested, the public sector accounts for around one-third of the decline in the intake of apprentices over the past 10 years. Similarly, the rapid growth of labour hire firms in response to these measures has resulted in Australia having the highest percentage of casualised workers in the industrialised world.

It has long been acknowledged that the New Apprenticeships program has been successful in increasing participation in structured training and in opening up new and more flexible opportunities across occupations and industries that have not had a history of structured training. However, the recent evaluation of the New Apprenticeships scheme by the Department of Education, Science and Training, entitled Skills at work, recommended that further examination be undertaken on how growth in apprenticeships has related to the demand for skills in the economy.

While there has been a recent increase in the uptake of trades by older workers, employers have tended to focus on young people, particularly school leavers, as their primary source of potential apprenticeship trainees. With the declining number of young people and the complexity of career pathways available, I believe that insufficient attention has been paid to attracting women, people with a disability, and Indigenous and older workers to the trades.

All these are reasons why the Australian technical colleges will help fix the skills shortage in the economy, as I have outlined today. I certainly welcome a technical college in Townsville. I want to pay tribute to the Townsville Australian technical college consortium, who have put in a very good bid in the request for tender. This group was originally under the leadership of the Thuringowa City Council. I also pay tribute to Mayor Les Tyrrell and CEO Lyn Russell for their vision in strongly backing this opportunity provided by the government to have an Australian technical college in Australia’s largest tropical city.

A very keen and hardworking executive group, chaired by Philip Begley, was formed as an interim steering committee to direct the participation of the request for proposal and tender and the business plan for the college. The Townsville Chamber of Commerce, engineering clusters, Catholic education, the Yalga-binbi—the Indigenous group for community development—the Housing Industry Association, the North Queensland region of councils and commerce, which is a very powerful group representing the sectors of the economy that the government was interested in attracting, all want to be part of this. There is now a nominated consortium membership, which includes FINPAC financial advisers, United Goninan, SunMetals, TAFE, Angus Knight, Queensland Nickel, James Cook University, Girvan Engineering and the Townsville Regional Group Apprentices Scheme.

I am very pleased as the local member that such a powerful group has been assembled and has worked so very hard in putting forward to the government an outstanding bid. In the days and months ahead, all of those bids from around the Commonwealth will be assessed by Minister Gary Hardgrave, who has also done an outstanding job in steering this new proposal through the parliament to fruition. I know that Minister Hardgrave will be very proud when we see the first Australian technical college open early next year.

The colleges will further strengthen Australia’s vocational and technical education system and provide pride and excellence in the acquisition of trade skills. They will become centres of excellence in trade training, attracting capable and competent students who want to begin training for a career in the trades and who will also be completing their senior secondary education. In that sense, I report to the parliament that a number of state high schools in my electorate in Townsville very keenly embraced this concept. They want to be part of it. They want to see their students participating. They want them to get through years 11 and 12, but at the same time they want them to establish the fundamentals for a trade that they will be going into when they finish high school. I thank all school principals in Townsville and Thuringowa who have warmly welcomed and participated in the establishment of an Australian technical college in Townsville. I have been constrained by others in terms of how long I might speak. As there is another speaker, I will end my comments there. I commend the bill to the House.