Senator LUNDY (1:43 PM) —What gall: the Liberal Party making out that they somehow have a monopoly on support for trade training. In the same breath, they disparage and damn with faint praise the prospects and aspiration of university study. The reality is that for the last nine long years the Howard government have been the government that has systematically undermined the TAFE and trade-training system. They have continued to attack the trade unions, which have always been an integral part of promoting the needs and the forecasts for apprenticeship training. The unions have been completely disenfranchised under this Howard Liberal government. The Howard government have also ignored the pleas of business on the looming skills crisis. Why is that? Why is this government being so irresponsible?

Today we are considering the Australian Technical Colleges (Flexibility in Achieving Australia’s Skills Needs) Bill 2005. And what a corker it is! To fully understand the nature of this ham-fisted legislation, we need to go back to the genesis of this policy. Where did this idea of the Howard government taking a direct role in the provision of vocational training to schoolchildren begin? Was it after a long and considered analysis by eminently qualified people with extended knowledge and experience in this field? Was it after extensive consultation with the states and territories? Was it after the federal Department of Education, Science and Training had identified a gap in the provision of training across the nation? After having identified this need, did the department perhaps undertake some analysis before formulating some solutions and presenting a number of options? Did they reflect on the impact of the chronic underfunding of TAFEs? Of these options, did the Minister for Vocational and Technical Education decide the technical colleges option would be the best method of serving the training needs of school students? And was the technical colleges option then fully costed, in consultation with the Department of Finance and Administration, and provision made for those colleges in the next budget?

The answer to all of those questions is no. None of this happened in the preparation of this policy. The whole concept was cooked up during the election campaign. The sole aim of the policy was as a sop to critics of the government’s failure to train skilled workers to address the skills crisis. There was no consultation, no analysis, no eminent people consulted, no departmental study, no options paper, no consideration—nothing at all. It just seemed like an expedient idea on the campaign trail to fill up a gap that they saw emerging in their polling. Problem: skill shortages. Solution: secondary technical colleges. They thought: ‘Will it work? Who cares!’ Imagine the dialogue between government and their advisers. ‘What about the states and territories?’ ‘Oh, don’t worry about them; forget them.’ ‘How much will it cost?’ ‘We’ll work that out after the election.’ ‘How many do we need?’ ‘We’ve got to look serious: 20 or so.’ It was completely pulled out of the air.

Once the so-called geniuses in the Liberal campaign headquarters came up with the concept, the next step was to work out where to put them. One can imagine Mr Howard, the Prime Minister, and his chief of staff cooking up the list on the back of an envelope while in the VIP jet. Even a cursory look at the list of regions earmarked for technical colleges reveals that they are in large proportion situated in seats that the government hoped to win or retain in the 2004 election. Let us review the list that was announced in the campaign. Queanbeyan is in the seat of Eden-Monaro—a bellwether marginal seat in recent times that has always gone to the party that forms government. The college announcement was there to help shore it up. The Bairnsdale-Sale area is in the seat of Gippsland, where the sitting member, Mr McGauran, was reputed to be under pressure due to a redistribution. It was notionally Labor. A new college was mooted to help Mr McGauran get across the line. Lismore-Ballina is in the seat of Page, one of those troublesome New South Wales North Coast sea-changer seats that The Nationals needed to hang on to. But this announcement did not save poor Mr Anthony in nearby Richmond, I am pleased to say.

Townsville is in the seat of Herbert, one of those must-retain sugar seats in Queensland, which was on a 1.5 per cent margin. They had another one of those troublesome redistributions—surprise, surprise! Mr Lindsay obviously needed help so they gave him a college too! Gladstone is in the seat of Hinkler, a marginal National seat, and Mr Neville was screaming out for help. Port Macquarie is in the seat of Lyne. Mr Vaile was rumoured to be threatened by a high-profile Independent, Mr Oakeshott. A college announcement showed who could deliver the pork. In the Pilbara, in the seat of Kalgoorlie, Mr Haase was in trouble after a couple of indiscretions, and a strong Labor candidate was making him worried. Mr Graeme Campbell had thrown his hat into the ring as an Independent. The result? Mr Haase got a college announcement. In northern Tasmania, there was no specific location but it was no secret that the government was targeting the seats of Braddon and Bass.

Senator Ian Macdonald —And who won? We did.

Senator LUNDY —Despite the result of the election—and Senator Macdonald correctly points out that in fact the Liberal government did win the election—what we saw here occurred prior to the election when the government did not know what the result was going to be. So they were using these technical colleges as pork in the 2004 election, as they used many other policies, like regional rorts—which I am sure Senator Macdonald knows all about.

Do my colleagues notice a trend emerging? Amazingly, most of these technical colleges are slated for politically sensitive seats. The coalition’s election announcement was nothing short of an outrageous bribe to the voters in those seats. How true to the form of the Howard government! They are masters of the art of providing the pork and worrying about the detail later. My understanding is that the original list stood at 20 proposed colleges until there was a change of mind and four more were added, which I assume to be the non politically sensitive seats, as a bit of a smokescreen, because even the coalition government, masters of pork that they are, baulked at the outrageousness of the original list.

Do senators notice something missing in the policy formulation of the government’s election commitment so far? No analysis had been done as to the real skills training needs of the students or industries in the targeted regions. The regions were given a college—because it was about pork—whether they needed one or not. The real training needs were the furthest thing from the minds of the Howard government in election mode. The general mood would have been to say, ‘We’ll work that out later; we’ll worry about the details later,’ because who sorts out all the details when pork-barrelling before an election?

So, lo and behold, after the election win by the Howard government we had the appointment of a new minister, Mr Hardgrave, to oversee the implementation of this policy-on-the-run, back-of-the-envelope election commitment. One would expect that Mr Hardgrave’s first inquiry or request to the Department of Education, Science and Training would have been: ‘Quick! Get me some fast facts to help me justify where these colleges are going to go.’ So began the great propaganda campaign to say that these colleges were situated in the top 24 regions in Australia for skills shortages and youth unemployment. The government tried to pretend that the technical colleges have been located in the announced 24 regions using a number of youth and training criteria, not the actual ‘seats we want to win or retain’ criterion. Admittedly, there may be a happy coincidence and some of the 24 regions may need institutions of this kind, but I put it to the Senate that this is dumb luck on the government’s part, not design. It was never part of their design.

The announced locations were said to represent the top 24 regions for skills shortages and youth unemployment. I would be very interested in finding out the 25th and 26th regions on the list—the ones that just missed out; the regions that were a couple of statistical percentage points out in sharing in this $343 million government windfall. I am guessing that we will never know, because we have seen the way this policy was formulated on the run—there was simply no analysis of regions other than those that were announced by the coalition during the election campaign. My bet is that the sole aim of the department’s post-election analysis was to justify the regions that had already been announced in politically sensitive seats during an election campaign, and not to find deserving regions of Australia that had missed out. We may very well have a number of other more deserving regions, but we will never know because the government does not want us to know.

Armed with a quickly cobbled together justification for the selection of the locations of the colleges, Minister Hardgrave travelled the country to sell the idea to hostile state and territory governments and to a wary business and industry sector—and a hard sell it has been. Someone must have come up with some rough costings for the proposal. It was deemed that $343 million would be enough to get the whole show up and running. This must be a ballpark figure because it was announced before the closing date for proposals was reached. Before the scantest detail of the individual needs of any of the 24 proposed colleges was known, $343 million was deemed to be an adequate amount to establish and run 24 colleges over five years. At best, this figure must have been an educated guess, and it will be very interesting to see in future budgets just how accurate this guess was. I wonder if we will see a ‘Technical colleges cost blow-out’ headline somewhere in the near future.

One reason for a potential cost blow-out is the haste with which this initiative has been implemented. The government has stated right from the word go that the first colleges will be up and running at the start of 2006. It seems a very quick implementation for a whole new concept in secondary education, but I have to say that I have never founded and run a brand-new education institution in under six months—maybe people are doing it all the time! Was this start date proposed after careful consideration of the logistics necessary for the founding of 24 new training and education institutions, or was it more to do with the fact that the government had an eye on the electoral cycle? Maybe it wants to have the first technical college graduates appearing around the time of the expected federal election at the end of 2007. Think of all those graduation ceremonies the minister will be able to appear at just before or during an election campaign. A cynic might suggest that the Howard government was trying to impact on two elections with the same policy initiative.

If that 2006 start date seems a bit ambitious, it begins to look foolhardy when you learn that, of the 24 proposed regions, successful consortia have been announced so far in only 13 regions, and it is nearly 2006. There are only a few months to go—it is already October. The minister’s web site airily refers to further announcements later in the year. They had better get a wriggle on, because most students have already made plans for next year, and that will delay it all by another year.

The minister has been challenged on a number of occasions on why the ACT has not been selected for a technical college. Initially the minister brushed the question aside, saying that the ACT does not have the same needs as other areas of Australia. However, when pressed, the minister’s invariable answer was that ACT students can go over the border to the proposed Queanbeyan college. Leaving aside the fact that no agreement has yet been reached for a college in Queanbeyan, I would be very interested to know how this arrangement would work. How would ACT residents be able to study interstate? How would training at a New South Wales technical college be integrated with the rest of a student’s ACT curriculum? Like so much of this proposal, this detail will be worked out later. Thus we see that the whole technical colleges charade is yet another example of coalition policy on the run—it is not in the least bit considered, it is not in the least bit thorough and it is not able to solve the main problems it purports to solve.

Skills shortages in Australian industry have been consistently growing under the Howard government and will continue to grow if the technical colleges initiative is an example of this government’s so-called innovative solutions. Recent media reports quote a senior CEO in the Australian building and construction industry predicting that 100,000 skilled workers will leave the industry in the next five years. The CEO estimated that in that time 40,000 skilled workers would become available to fill the void. That would be a shortfall of 60,000 workers in the building and construction industry alone.

Here we have one of the major industry sectors with an expected shortfall of 60,000 skilled workers. What is the Howard government’s answer to this crisis? What we have seen is the founding of 24 technical colleges that at any time will have no more than 7,200 students. These students will be undertaking training across a broad range of trades, from bricklaying to commercial cookery. Assuming that at some stage in the future all 24 technical colleges are up and running—I know with the current pace of implementation of this it seems hard to foresee, but we need to at least anticipate that at some point they will be up and running—with 7,200 students spread across years 11 and 12, and thus only half that number graduating each year, a grand total of 3,600 technical college graduates per annum will be entering the work force.

Let us go back to the building and construction industry. Remember that they need 100,000 skilled workers over the next five years to replace the departures in that industry. The assumption is that all 24 of the technical colleges will start operating at the beginning of 2006, when in reality they will not. The assumption is that all students who begin their training will complete the course, when in reality they will not. The assumption is that all the students who complete their training will go on to work in that field, when in reality they will not. And the assumption is that students will undertake training relevant to the building industry, when in reality they will not. So, making all of those very generous assumptions that will not be reflected in reality, the maximum number of new skilled workers that will be produced over the next five years is 18,000. In reality, I suggest that a figure well under half of that is more likely.

The building and construction industry alone requires 100,000 new skilled workers. Even in the best possible scenario, these calculations show that the overall contribution of technical colleges to solve this crisis will be pathetic. It will not be enough. The entire technical colleges initiative reflects the Howard government’s pinprick response to skills shortages across the board. The government’s overall response has been ill-conceived, developed without any consultation or analysis, inadequately costed, developed on the run and in the end is nowhere near enough. In the end, Labor will support this proposal because the skills crisis is so serious that even eating half-baked pork is better than starving. I seek leave to continue my remarks.

Leave granted; debate adjourned.