Martin Tracey: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17254. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First): Kia ora Mr Deputy Speaker. I find it very interesting that Mr King has risen to his feet and again repeated the amazing statement that all that is wrong with the apprenticeship system can be blamed upon the Labour Party.David Bennett: Well it is.TRACEY MARTIN: The reason why I am so fascinated by it—and Mr Bennett probably does need to actually listen because he is not so young that he cannot remember the 1990s. He is not so young that he cannot remember. All the apprentices who are out there should listen up and go back to have a look at their history books and have a look at who decimated—decimated—the apprenticeship scheme in this country. Have a look at small-town New Zealand and rural New Zealand and at what happened to those companies those small to medium sized enterprises and their ability to actually build on the economic development of their towns and take in apprentices and young people from their towns. I will tell you what happened to it. What happened to it was the 1990s and a National Government. So go and have a quick look. Go and have a look in the history books. It will be there somewhere. The National Party has not got to that part of the curriculum of the school day and has taken that out of the history books.Part of this bill the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is a solution looking for a problem. There is no problem here. The industry did not come and submit in any way shape or form to say: “We need the ability to train apprentices and trainees.” It did not. It never came to the Education and Science Committee. It did not submit in any positive way.The other thing Mr King has done—and it is interesting how members of the National Party every now and then do the Opposition a favour by accidentally uncovering in their speeches information that they did not want us to know. Foodstuffs has never ever been mentioned before with regard to this bill. And all the time sitting on this bill at the select committee nobody ever uncovered the fact that it was Foodstuffs that is supposedly the amalgamated company that wants the ability to train its staff. This is the first time that that has ever been disclosed. Is that not interesting? Is that not interesting? Why did Foodstuffs not come and put in a submission? Why then did Foodstuffs not come and explain to the select committee why it is so vital that it can access really rare education dollars so that it can train employees? Why did Foodstuffs not come and actually explain what is wrong with the current industry training organisations? Why did it not submit on the current system right now? It did not but apparently it has the Government’s ear. How interesting. How interesting that it is only in this House by accident that we find out that Foodstuffs has spoken to theGovernment but did not bother to come and talk to the select committee. I think that is an incredibly interesting piece of information that Mr King has just handed out.Let us focus on this industry subsidy for the training of employees. This is a Government subsidy for industries around the training of their employees. This is a continuation of the shift of cost from the employer to the employee because apprentices do not get a free ride. Apprentices have to pay as they work so do not let us think that this is a gift for them. Apprentices have to participate in the payment for their own training. What we have got now under this clause is industry basically being subsidised by the taxpayer to cover that part of the area that employers should cover—their skin in the game. But will this be available to all industry players? No it will not. No it will not. It will not help any of these small and medium sized businesses inŌpōtiki orŌtorohanga or Warkworth or Wellsford or Mataura or Westport. None of those small and medium sized businesses that are in those towns that would work with the young people in those towns who are looking for apprenticeship opportunities will meet this criterion. You have got to be a large business—we heard it from the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment himself—that can employ 40-something or more workers. Who is that? Obviously it is Foodstuffs. Have a think out there New Zealand. Have a think about who else fits that criterion. It is not the people in small rural towns. It is not those people.Here is another contradiction and an example of how this cost keeps getting taken away from the employer and placed on the employee. A really simple example is barista training. There is a $200 course to learn how to make coffee which only 20 years ago was part of a person going for a job interview. Young people will not know this. They are so used to paying for everything that they do not see how far this has gone and how far large employers are being subsidised by them for them to actually gain employment. Twenty years ago when you showed up at work with a clean record and your curriculum vitae they trained you in the specific skills for the industry. That no longer exists and this legislation is another move down that pathway. That no longer exists so right now the new generation of employees is consistently subsidising large business.I want to also talk about one of the other reasons why business has not been able to take on employees. There are a couple of reasons. The first is the barriers to small and medium sized enterprises. Big business will be able to get this education dollar. For small and medium sized enterprises in small towns there is a financial barrier and a financial cost to them for every year of an apprenticeship for them to participate. For a hairdresser for example it is $500 per apprentice every year they go through their apprenticeship. That is a cost on that employer—the small employer and the medium sized employer. But now we have actually got big employers being able to gain more money.There is another reason why this Government has forced this and it is around the idea that competition is always the answer. Let us have a look at this Government and to some extent the Labour Government before it. When they opened up the borders and decided that competition was everything that there was supposedly a level playing field across the planet and that New Zealand was now going to do that too one of the things that happened was that the margins of New Zealand companies got cut to the bone. I was on a plane recently with an employer who runs a company. He is running two teams down in Christchurch replacing the infrastructure—the lines companies—under the ground. He said that he cannot take on apprentices. He wants to participate just like everybody else in building the next generation of apprentices but he cannot take them on because his margins have been cut to the bone through competition with international companies. So he does not take on young people because although the Government might say that people should have to pay the $500 a year to have skin inthe game small and medium sized businesses already have skin in the game. They have skin in the game. There is a cost for taking on a young person who has no skills and it takes time to upskill them. The Government will argue that time is money and that there is skin that these companies the small and medium sized enterprises have to put into this game. This man cannot take on any apprentices in his industry down in Christchurch because he does not have any fat left in the contract when he has to compete in the international market. That was something that this Government did. That was something that a National Government did. It is not talked about because nobody wants to know about it. That Government does not want to know about it. But that is part of this idea that competition is the answer to every question.The Minister also stood and lauded the $1000 given this year to apprentices and the $1000 given to business. That is great—11000 new apprentices in the field. Brilliant. What about next year? What about next year?Simon O’Connor: Doesn’t that just invalidate your last argument?TRACEY MARTIN: Next year the business will actually have to fund that financial cost Mr O’Connor. The apprentices will have to fund those costs. This Government cut all adult and community education throughout rural New Zealand so there is nowhere for them to get support around their theory. There is nowhere for them to get support around doing the paperwork while they do the practical in their environments. This Government came up with a solution that nobody asked for.So New Zealand First will oppose the bill because it goes nowhere—nowhere—in terms of truly creating the ability in rural New Zealand and small and medium sized businesses for our communities to participate in youth employment which this Government says is a high-priority area for it. Yet it goes and puts another barrier in the way.