The Apprentice
Bill Shorten has conjured up a policy about vocational training that merely repairs the damage Labor did. By James Mathias.
Anybody listening to Bill Shorten defend TAFE in his Budget reply on Thursday could be forgiven for thinking he had always been a passionate advocate for young workers acquiring “the skills that industries are crying out for”.
But in truth his proposal to scrap upfront fees for 100,000 TAFE students (at a cost of $708 million over the medium term) is merely a token correction for the previous Labor government having butchered our vocational training and apprenticeship system and locking the Abbott-Turnbull government into cuts that have devastated the sector and cost young people hundreds of thousands of jobs.
Shorten was minister for employment for part of that Labor government, so his confected outrage on Thursday night would have been particularly galling for the 253,000 young workers who missed out on apprenticeships as a result of his government’s policies.
Bill Shorten was the minister for employment when Australia recorded its largest ever annual decline in the number of apprentices – 110,000 or 22 per cent in just one year (2012-13).
Bill Shorten was also the education minister who signed off on a $245 million cut to the incentives paid to employers who take on an apprentice. Over the life of the previous Labor government, they made nine successive cuts to the Australian Apprenticeships Incentives Program totalling $1.2 billion.
The vocational education and training (VET) sector, often overlooked and misunderstood, is the most important pillar of the Australian education system because of the outcomes it achieves. Some 92 percent of workers who complete an apprenticeship go straight into employment and often have a long and rewarding career. The same goes for the 84 percent of non-trade apprentices who find employment within three months of completing their studies.
On 13 April 2012, the Gillard government signed the National Partnership Agreement on Skills Reform (NPASR), a co-funding agreement with the states and territories worth $1.75 billion over five years.
NPASR tied that funding to outcomes such as target numbers, indigenous training and so on. However, clause 48 of the deal allowed the states and territories to easily renege on their commitments without losing any of the federal government’s funding, which they did. As Paul Keating once said, “Never get between a premier and a bucket of money.”
The Productivity Commission reported recently that for the life the deal the federal government increased its funding for VET by 7.5 per cent per year. Over the same period, the states and territories decreased their contribution by a total of 34 per cent.
As a result, there are now 253,000 fewer Australians in apprenticeships than there were in 2012 and TAFE’s share of the VET market has dropped from 57 per cent to 52 per cent.
When it was elected in 2013, the Coalition tried to renegotiate NPASR to force the states and territories to honour their commitments, but failed. NPASR thankfully finally expired last year.
The results are now plain to see in a sector that is so important to producing the workforce that the economy needs. Of the 38 occupations listed on the official Department of Employment 2016-17 Australian Skill Shortage list, 26 are occupations that require an apprenticeship pathway and we as a nation are filling these spots by bringing in foreign workers.
One of these occupations is chefs, and we are projected to need another 19,200 of them by 2021, an increase of 23 per cent.
Taken literally, this means that because of Labor’s failed agreement we can’t even train Australians here to fill the current skills shortages and this is only projected to get worse.
Last year, the Government announced the introduction of the new Skilling Australians Fund, which proposes to train 300,000 new Australian apprentices over the next four years in the areas of skills shortages. It will establish budget benchmarks for the states and territories so that they can no longer withdraw funding to the VET sector and force them to meet their targets.
These requirements all seem logical but the (mostly Labor) states and territories, having grown accustomed to free VET money, declined to sign. The deal remains in limbo, but the real losers are young Australians who can’t find the apprenticeship of their dreams.