Private Member's Business - Protecting Vocational Education and Training
There are 1.9 million Australians looking for more work—1.9 million Australians who are saying very clearly, 'This economy is not working for me.' And all we hear from the Liberal Party is that somehow that's Labor's fault. We deserve a higher-quality debate than that. Particularly, young Australians who are struggling to get a job in 2020 deserve a hell of a lot better than that.
We hear a lot in this place about someone called Scotty from marketing. I don't know who Scotty from marketing is, but I can tell you I'm a huge fan of Scott Cam. I love watching The Block. But as much as I love watching The Block, Channel Nine can pay Mr Cam whatever they like, but I don't know that it was smart money for this government to pay Scotty from The Block $345,000 for 15 months work. The numbers show that, despite his best efforts, the government's policy agenda did not deliver the increase in trainees and apprentices that this country desperately needs. Scotty Cam has done a lot better than me. We know that tradies are some of the best-paid people in Australia. We also know Scotty is an author. He has published a book—something that I have not achieved. His book was called Home Maintenance For Knuckleheads. When you think about training policy, you'd have to think that under this government, it's training policy for knuckleheads, because the Prime Minister has created a tradie crisis. But when you cut $3 billion from TAFE apprenticeships and traineeships, what do you expect?
There are fewer apprentices and trainees today than when the Liberals first came into office. I'll say that again: there are fewer apprentices and fewer trainees today than when the Liberals came to office more than six years ago. In fact, it's not just a few; it's 140,000 fewer apprentices and trainees than there were when they first came to office. In my state of Western Australia alone, it's 30,000. Almost 20 per cent of the drop has happened in Western Australia. That means we now have a shortage of bricklayers, a shortage of plumbers, a shortage of hairdressers, a shortage of bakers, a shortage of electricians, a shortage of mechanics, a shortage of panel beaters and, here in Australia, one of the hottest countries in the world—sadly the temperature is ever-increasing—we have a shortage of air-conditioning mechanics. We have to import air-conditioning mechanics into this country because we're not training enough of our own. I hope that this government does more on climate change and I hope that they start to take it seriously, but I think we're going to need air-conditioning mechanics for a few more years. Maybe it's time that we actually start training up more Australians to do that because, as I said, 1.9 million Australians are looking for work or looking for more work.
I love TAFE. TAFE is one of the great transformational things in our education and training system. In my electorate alone, some 14,566 students go to TAFE on a regular basis: 3,010 students go to Leederville; 1,356 students go to Mount Lawley; 1,221 students go to East Perth; and there are 8,979 enrolments at Northbridge TAFE, the biggest TAFE in Western Australia. Every single person who works at those TAFEs does an amazing job, transforming people, getting them ready to do the jobs of the future and the jobs that we need people to do right now.
But not everyone has the same approach when it comes to TAFE and making TAFE more accessible. Someone who would like to be Premier of Western Australia, Liza Harvey, the Liberal leader in Western Australia—her singular achievement, after five years in office as a minister, was to send TAFE fees up 510 per cent for some courses. That means that young people can't even afford to get the skills they need so they can pay taxes and participate in our economy. In fact the data shows that because of Liza Harvey's policies, along with those of Colin Barnett and the WA Liberal Party, clapped on by many people in this place, there was a 24.5 per cent drop in the number of people going to TAFE—terrible! I want to commend Premier Mark McGowan for his initiative to slash TAFE fees for a range of priority courses. Fees in cybersecurity—slashed. Fees in engineering—slashed. This means that more young people in Western Australia can access the training they desperately need.