Mr HARDGRAVE (Minister for Vocational and Technical Education and Minister Assisting the Prime Minister) (3:49 PM) —I really welcome the opportunity to contribute to this discussion. Far from heaping any personal reflections upon the member opposite—

Ms King —That would be a change.

Mr HARDGRAVE —like she seems to think I did in question time, it is important to note that she cannot have it both ways. She cannot actually get up and use ‘Chinese imported workers’ as a foil to satisfy the AMWU’s attempt to get her to meet her particular commitment to them by raising questions today and indeed this MPI today. At the end of the matter, unlike those opposite, this government does not believe that a gun needs to be put to the head of individual employees or indeed individual employers. We in fact have record amounts—

Ms King —How about an incentive?

Mr HARDGRAVE —She talks about incentives.

Ms King —Where are they?

Mr HARDGRAVE —I actually listened in silence to you, member for Ballarat.

The DEPUTY SPEAKER (Mr Jenkins)—Order! Member for Ballarat!

Mr HARDGRAVE —Mr Deputy Speaker, I do not need protection through the chair, but I make the point that the member for Ballarat wants to moralise and grandstand and put a whole bunch of things on the record, but she will not give me a chance to respond.

Mr Burke interjecting—

Mr HARDGRAVE —The member for Watson wants to talk about a lack of material. The member for Ballarat had four minutes left and she wimped out, mate! We in this country at the moment are in a marvellous set of circumstances, where it is jobs looking for people and not people looking for jobs. We are also in a situation in this country today where we have a greater level of incentive, a greater level of assistance and programs which support the training of Australians.

Mr Edwards —Empty waffle! He doesn’t care about families.

Mr HARDGRAVE —The member for Cowan should be disgraced by his comments. How dare he suggest I know nothing about families. I have a great deal of respect for you, member opposite, but you will not try and suggest to me that I do not care about families.

Mr Edwards interjecting—

The DEPUTY SPEAKER —The honourable member for Cowan will cease interjecting. The minister will ignore the honourable member for Cowan.

Mr HARDGRAVE —I am, on behalf of the government, attempting to put a bit of clarity to the wild accusations made by the member for Ballarat. I do not mind the vigorous contributions from people opposite, but I will not be questioned on my commitment to families. The simple fact is that there was this enormous level of unemployment when those opposite were in power—one million people on the scrap heap—and that that million people represented, just as doctors bury their mistakes, the mistakes of the education and training system. You now have a set of circumstances in Australia where quite the opposite is occurring. We found some fundamental problems with the way our education and training system was geared.

Getting onto the MaxiTRANS matter: nobody who is a skilled worker, a tradesperson, has been sacked by this company, by their own admission. I have not seen a press release, but I have certainly seen the reports in the Age newspaper. I think there are some unfortunate points that the Age tries to make in this article, but it suits the purpose of the member for Ballarat in this argument today. MaxiTRANS have, however, laid off some non-skilled or semiskilled people only. The member for Ballarat in her contribution made the point that many of those were hired by labour hire firms—that they are in fact casuals. They are not the skilled people that are needed by this business to grow this business, to create even more than the 577 jobs which exist in the Ballarat region through MaxiTRANS’s effort. Is this right? Is a labour hire firm involved in this? If so, these people are employed by the labour hire firm, not by MaxiTRANS direct.

This sounds awfully like the example the member for Ballarat gave last year, and she mentioned it again today. The eight apprentices who were put to one side were not fully qualified tradespeople, who MaxiTRANS sought and who, by the member for Ballarat’s own endorsement in this place just moments ago, were needed to grow the business, to get MaxiTRANS working and working strong; they were in fact apprentices. According to the member for Ballarat at that time, these apprentices were sacked, but the truth was that they were employed by a group training company. They were placed in MaxiTRANS. And each one of those eight apprentices was in fact placed with other host employers.

So I am simply saying today that the member for Ballarat is on enormously thin ice of credibility when it comes down to the facts at the core of her argument. In summation, all of her assertions are plainly wrong. At the end of it, we are in this amazing circumstance of jobs looking for people, not people looking for jobs. We are also at a time when the government is spending record amounts of money when it comes to the training of young Australians, and our No. 1 priority is getting Australians trained. But we want to make sure that, for the business community of Australia, who are at the heart of every new person who is put in a position to be trained, it is not about building new buildings at TAFEs, even though we are spending more money on those sorts of things than ever before; it is about supporting the relationships in the training system that satisfy the needs and the expectations of employers, the people who trigger the process of training.

Because those opposite have not asked me a question on this for 266 days, until today, I cannot help but suspect that they really do not have too much interest in the facts when it comes to training. At the end of it, they do not want to understand what the state and territory ministers around this country are reluctantly coming around to, and that is the need to fundamentally reform a supply driven approach where the providers of training—and I am talking in particular about public training providers, and I will name them: TAFEs—dictate the terms and conditions on where, how and when training is delivered.

This sort of thing did not just happen overnight. In fact, some have suggested that, when the member for Brand’s father was the member for Fremantle and a minister in the Whitlam government, he had a lot to do with the way in which this sort of circumstance has evolved. It is worth noting that a generation ago TAFEs were demand driven, which is exactly what we want to see restored in Australia today. A generation ago, people worked for an employer as an apprentice and then, in their own time, sought and gained the technical training to back up the practical experience they got in the workplace. A generation ago, TAFEs were responding to the sort of training that was demanded of business. But since that dreadful period in Australia’s history, the Whitlam era—and, as I said, it was the member for Brand’s father who was the minister at the time and caused part of the change—the change was continued further on, when you think about the snobbish values brought in by the Australian Labor Party to the whole debate. There was a suggestion that if you do not have a university degree you are going to be a dud. You are a failure. And that is the sort of logic that has pervaded Australian society for decades and that this government is in the process of fixing.

Mr Hatton interjecting—

Mr HARDGRAVE —The member for Blaxland says it is hideous. The member for Blaxland is right. The ordinary working men and women of Australia are far more represented by people on this side than by those on the other side, who pretend to be the backers of the workers of Australia but in fact have left them in a ditch. If they are not in organised labour—in other words, about 85 or 90 per cent of Australians—they are not interested in them. If they are not in an organised union structure, they are not interested in them, because that is how those opposite get here. People on this side are listening to the real job creators and understanding the ambition of parents and indeed the students, and we are now seeing record numbers of people taking up a training opportunity.

If those opposite were really serious, they would denounce those Whitlam era circumstances that began the change and that were continued on by the Dawkins reforms that made every corner TAFE a university and created a circumstance which delivered a great deal of reinforcement to the idea of ‘Get a degree or you are a dud’. And then of course the member for Brand himself, in 1993, when he was part of a government that crashed the economy, really did bring home and emphasise the point I continue to make: 30,000 people dropped out of the training system in one year as employers of Australia took their lead from the government of the day and saw the employment of apprentices as a cost their business could not justify, and we lost the benefit of 30,000 people taking on training.

That is the sort of circumstance that is a background to any of the legitimate claims that may have been the minor part of the short contribution from the member for Ballarat: the suggestion that in fact there might be unemployment issues that are alive—and I will take her word for it—in her electorate amongst the young people of Ballarat. This is at a time when you go and talk to people in business around Australia and they are saying: ‘Send me a person. Send me a hot body with two hands who wants to actually work hard at the business of learning a trade.’ That is what businesses in Australia in places like the Pilbara and in the mining regions of Queensland are saying. That is why companies like Thiess are paying 18-year-olds $85,000 a year to keep them in the mines as apprentices in certain trades—to keep those kids there so they are not sucked out to some other opportunity.

We are in an amazing employment market at the moment. Companies like Maxi-TRANS—which the member for Ballarat is now claiming, after I have drawn it to her attention, that she was not trying to attack—an employer of 577 people, has an enormous commitment to training and understands far more about it than the member for Ballarat does from her cursory once-a-year look at the subject.

We have to continue the reforms we are trying to effect. I ask members opposite from the state of New South Wales to put some pressure on their state government to deliver on the COAG reforms that the Premier, Mr Iemma—if there is a dilemma, think of Morris Iemma; it is a great catchcry—has signed up to to bring about school based apprenticeships and a change to licensing regimes—which are basically set in place because of a lack of trust in the training that TAFE delivers. Why don’t you demand of the New South Wales government that it gives training opportunities for school based apprenticeships to young people in New South Wales? What is it about the state of New South Wales and, indeed, the state of Western Australia that fears a set of circumstances relating to school based apprenticeships when states like Queensland and Victoria—

Ms King interjecting—

Mr HARDGRAVE —The member for Ballarat is saying, ‘And Ballarat.’ There were 190 school based apprentices in Ballarat this year. When Labor was last in office there were none. These sorts of initiatives are there to engage with business, to listen to their demands, to understand the way in which the training system needs to be geared so that training is delivered when, how and in the way that business wants and to encourage more businesses to take on training opportunities. Each of those 39 casual part-time people, if in fact they have lost their work—because they are part of a labour hire firm that may not be the case—is probably finding more work right now. I hope that they engage a company that wants to take on training and will give them an opportunity to learn, if they are ambitious to do it.

It is worth saying for the record that, under the government’s program, there is no limit to the number of apprentices who can be employed around Australia. The funding for incentives for apprenticeships is unlimited and the government will support as many apprentices as employers are able to put on, particularly in the trades. In the last financial year, over $539.2 million has been paid to employers under our apprenticeships support scheme.

We found when talking to businesses who were unable to attract anybody in the local community to take on training or who were unable to attract sufficient skilled Australian candidates for the jobs—as MaxiTRANS found when they had an urgent need for experienced welders, despite rounds of advertising and open days at the factory—that they made full use of our skilled migration program. The member for Ballarat’s contribution, short as it was, was also lacking in the detail that I think brings the whole story to the front of this discussion. It is important to note, yet again—

Ms King interjecting—

Mr HARDGRAVE —I welcome the fact that the member for Ballarat is now trying to retract her earlier assertion in this place—

Mr Hockey —Really?

Ms Gillard interjecting—

Mr HARDGRAVE —The member for Lalor says it is not true. Those opposite are completing my sentences for me. It seems to me that the member for Ballarat was trying to retract her assertion that she was not attacking the Chinese workers but was helping to make a home for them. Like their policy confusion on this issue, those opposite are very confused on exactly what the member for Ballarat meant.

At the end of the day, in an environment of record spending, record take-up of apprenticeships and record retention and completion of apprenticeships right across Australia, the government is determined to keep doing the hard work to undo the mess of Labor tradition in this area—a mess which started way back in the horror years of the Whitlam government.