Country Labor

Last week was National Skills Week, and we should have seen the Assistant Minister for Vocational Education and Skills, Karen Andrews, MP to press the case for a bigger national vocational training effort.

However, we did not hear a word about skills and apprenticeships as a driver for improving the living standards of all Australians and to give apprentices the mobility to move to better paid jobs through training in both practical and theoretical skills, that is, the combination of on-the-job practical training and off-the-job technical training.

The fundamentals of a developed economy rely to a large degree on the skills of tradespeople, and the way in which those skills are passed from one generation to the next.

What we do know is that everything that underpins our standard of living relies on the skills of our workers. These skills drive the incremental changes that are constantly improving our industries and economic performance.

That is why I am so concerned the Turnbull government will capitulate to the small but vocal group of employers who want to change our entire skills and apprenticeships system for their own benefit, to the detriment of apprentices.

TheTAFE apprenticeship training system has been stable and effective, while ‘for profit’ providers rort the system to the tune of billions of dollars and offer online courses with no workshop or hands on experience.

Now the Turnbull government is making matters worse. After stripping $1b from the apprenticeships system in their first term and overseeing a collapse in apprenticeship numbers, the government’s first decision post-election was to spend $9.2m on ill-defined pilot programs that the minister, Simon Birmingham himself describes as “slight adaptations of the apprenticeship model”.

There is a real danger this will lead to a system where low-paid trainees work at a company for a short period and learn narrow skills that a particular company needs. These workers can become captive to the success or failure of the enterprise as their skills are not transferable. Some employers want the taxpayer to foot the bill for these trainees, by dressing them up as ‘apprenticeships’.

This money would be better spent providing increased support to our TAFE system and on helping apprentices through policies such as Labor’s Tools for your Trade program, scrapped by Abbott and Turnbull.

We need a system based on stable institutions like TAFE and a cooperative relationship among government, employers and unions. While unions are seen as the enemy by the Turnbull government, its most senior ministers can be heard at times praising the reforms of the Hawke and Keating governments; reforms that were a product of a joint approach to training involving government, workers and business working cooperatively.

We need better analysis of why business is shifting the cost of training to government, and how we can address the reduced business expenditure on training and the need to develop the skills required for advanced production methods and new technology.

I am not arguing there should be no improvement to our apprenticeships systems, but we have to start from the principles of what works, and that is a real employment contract for apprentices and the learning of industry-wide skills.

We must build on the best legacies of the apprenticeship training system that preceded the free market experimentation that has so clearly failed. In doing so we are more likely to find a way to meet the challenges we face.

Subsidising businesses to churn through trainees or interns, and leaving them with significant debt, is not the answer. A cooperative approach where apprentices learn real skills in a secure job will benefit the entire community.