ADDRESS TO PARLIAMENT - Free TAFE Bill 2024 - Second Reading

I can tell the member for Adelaide where he'd be were it not for TAFE. He'd probably be floating in the Aegean Sea somewhere off the island of Kastellorizo! He's a good man, and there were some elements to his speech which I wholeheartedly agree with, like when he said that the government was delivering. Yes, they are delivering. They are delivering on the coalition's AUKUS proposal, the coalition's AUKUS idea. When he talked about the 30,000 jobs needed for the submarine build, that's important, and it's going to very much rely on those valuable trades and those imperative skills.

The senior economist at the Housing Industry Association, Matt King, recently stated:

The HIA Trades Availability Index for the September Qtr 2024 revealed a worsening of the national skilled trades shortage scenario…

In the media release issued on 22 October, he had this further to say:

"The residential building industry currently employs approximately 278,000 tradies across the twelve key trade occupations required for home building. The trades workforce needs to grow by at least 30 per cent to meet a 1.2 million home target over the next 5 years. That is over 83,000 additional tradies.

He continued:

"The most acute shortages of skilled tradespeople remain in bricklaying, tiling, plastering and carpentry.

"This means a significant boost is needed in a variety of trade occupations to get these much-needed homes completed.

"Despite concerted efforts to boost the domestic trades workforce, significant challenges remain. Creating career opportunities for the local workforce must be the priority, however this alone will not solve the tradie shortage.

Labor has itself in a bit of a pickle, because Labor did promise to build 1.2 million homes. Under Labor's watch, we have migration which is way exceeding in a month what we once took in over a 12-month period during the Howard years of government. This immigration policy is indeed alarming because we have people coming here at a rate we cannot sustain, certainly not in the housing industry.

Then we have a Victorian government that seems averse to having a timber industry. We've got a Victorian state government which doesn't want any new homes to have gas appliances. When you're trying to stymie the industry as far as how you are going to power homes, when you are trying to stall the industry as to what you're going to build those homes with—that is, timber—it is a one-way street to disaster.

Labor are on this one-way street to disaster, and then they bring in policies such as this. The coalition is perturbed, because people should see this for what it truly is. After uncovering that Labor's commitment to make free TAFE permanent is unfunded, it's incumbent upon us to call it out for what it is. Australian students deserve better than fake pledges on skills and training. I appreciate that the member for Adelaide is a graduate of TAFE, as am I. I hold near and dear those lessons I learnt at the technical and further education campus at Wagga Wagga. But the coalition opposes this free TAFE legislation because it is unfunded. Not just that, it has the potential to increase the Commonwealth's spending by $500 million a year. Labor can't just keep throwing money out there and pretending that it's all costed, it's all in the budget, it's all in the forward estimates, because it is creating a debt situation.

I appreciate that the Treasurer often goes to that dispatch box just over there and talks about the trillion dollars worth of Liberal Party debt that Labor inherited. Let's unpack that for a bit. It was nowhere near a trillion dollars and, if it is a trillion dollars now, it's on his watch. It's on his head. It was nowhere near a trillion dollars. He seems to forget that the Liberals were in government with the Nationals, but, worse than that and more than that, he doesn't ever qualify his remarks by saying that the coalition was dealing with a global pandemic which had the biggest economic downturn in this nation—Labor will say it was since the global financial crisis, but it was since the Great Depression of the late twenties and early thirties.

He was not around that table—I was—when the Chief Health Officer for this nation and the Chief of the Defence Force gave the alarming news about how terrible COVID was, could be and, indeed, had we not acted, would have been. The Johns Hopkins Coronavirus Resource Center, which assesses how well nations do as far as preparedness and also what nations did as far as recovery and economic activity during the actual global pandemic of COVID-19, showed that Australia was ranked second in the world. That is because, yes, we spent a lot of money. We spent a lot of money through JobKeeper. We spent a lot of money through vaccines. We spent a lot of money saving jobs and protecting people's lives. The Treasurer is being disingenuous when he doesn't refer to that, because, but for that spend—but for that money that went out the Treasury doors—there would be a lot of people who would not be in a job, there would be a lot of businesses which would now be bankrupt and there would be a lot of people who, quite frankly, would not be alive. We saved their lives. The first order of government is to protect its people, and we did just that.

Indeed, 1.1 million jobs were created since the pandemic hit. This was the last term of the Morrison government. Seven hundred thousand jobs were saved through JobKeeper. One that I'm particularly proud of is 220,000 trade apprentices. That was a record high for Australia and that came under our economic stewardship. That came in our government. Indeed, that is proof positive of just what we did during the pandemic to cope with COVID-19 and to make sure that our country was economically on a good footing and that lives were being saved.

And yet now we have a government that, irresponsibly, is just throwing money like there was no tomorrow. With any luck, for this government, there will be no tomorrow, because people will be wise as to what this government offers—or, indeed, what it does not offer—and, at the next election, will vote for a Liberal-Nationals return. That is very much needed.

This legislation permanently commits the Commonwealth to fund free TAFE before it's reviewed. Senate estimates confirmed that there's been no review conducted into this proposal, into this expenditure. You could be seeing anywhere up to a billion dollars being spent on a program which is just there for Labor largesse.

I've always said that a TAFE certificate is just as valuable as a university degree, if not more so. You might think I would say that. I have any number of TAFE certificates and I do not have a university degree. I know that piece of paper is every bit as valuable as a tertiary degree for those TAFE students, because it opens doors to a better future. Australia needs to continue to support and encourage our young people, as well as anyone of any age seeking to upskill, to pursue an education through TAFE. After all, it's the men and women with the skilled trades—builders, plumbers, electricians, mechanics, agriculture workers and many more—who keep our country running. They do.

We have the Greens political party, who will be preferencing Labor, and vice versa, at the next election. But they don't understand that it's those tradies who keep the lights on, who keep the taps working and, indeed, who build the infrastructure which sustains modern civil society. Too often, these inner-city types have no understanding or appreciation of the work involved to sustain their quality of life. I stand adamantly alongside and with tradies and workers and the efforts to train more. And so does the coalition. The coalition government allocated $2.1 billion to give Australians the opportunity to upskill. I mentioned the statistics before. The work we were doing, the funding we were investing went to the heart of what we needed to make sure that we had the right number of apprentices, the right number of people in the right programs in the right places.

Here we have a Labor government, which has made all sorts of promises about building homes, not reining its states in when it had the opportunity. We well remember when it was wall-to-wall Labor on mainland Australia. Thankfully, the Northern Territory has returned to a Country Liberal Party government, and also thankfully Queensland has returned to a Liberal National Party government. But Labor did have the opportunity, when it was wall-to-wall red across mainland Australia, to rein those states in and to help them on that ambitious program of building more homes, but they did nothing and they said nothing. Do you know why? It was because they were too focused on a divisive referendum called the Voice.

That was the first and only priority that Labor did in its first months and months of office. It took the Australian people to say no to that. Then what happened? Presto, the next day, all of a sudden, the cost of living became the government's focus. They hadn't addressed the cost-of-living issue. They hadn't addressed the homes crisis. They still haven't addressed either of those. Worse still, we are still getting a flood of people into this nation each and every month. We heard today in question time a new person comes in every 44 seconds. Yet Labor's saying: 'Nothing to see here. It's all okay.' Well, it's not all okay.

We need to get back to the basics. We need to ensure that, yes, we have a viable, operational TAFE. This bill, this legislation, this proposal, is purely symbolic. It's typical tokenistic behaviour by Labor. Sadly, people see it for what it is. So many of Labor's endeavours are just that—they are media opportunities that have no substance and they haven't been thought through. We heard from the HIA; they're ringing the bell on what's going wrong. They are a good organisation. They can see what is happening. Labor needs to address this crisis. Unfortunately, they won't. They still have their heads in the wrong issues, and they're taking Australians and the nation over the cliff with them.

A footnote in the legislation states that an FT place may not be free of all fees and the fees covered will depend on the terms and conditions of the relevant FT agreement. How interesting! How many people will still have to pay for their TAFE course? It's a good question. It's no surprise from a government that thrives on trying to—I would say deceive, but I'll be kinder and just say pull the wool over the eyes of the Australian people and taxpayers. But it is a bit of deceit, and it gets worse. Labor is asking the Australian people to accept the bill when they haven't done the proper and due process before it comes into this place. That is so typical of Labor. They don't consult stakeholders; they don't properly cost things; they don't properly look through things and see what are the unintended consequences. Instead, they come here with a bill that is going to put additional funding on the budget without doing all the due process. It's typical of Labor. The opposition will not support this bill.

Mikelli Garratt