Walker Holly: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWalker Holly: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17261. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]HOLLY WALKER (Green): Well like many of the speakers in this debate so far I want to start by acknowledging the crucial importance of industry training and apprenticeships to our future workforce and to our future economy in New Zealand. The Green Party like our colleagues in the Labour Party was hopeful with the introduction of this legislation the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill that we might see some changes that would take us in a better direction following—as has been referred to in the debate—the decimation of apprenticeships that occurred in the 1990s and that we have taken a long time to recover from in this country. So we supported the bill at its first reading but we find ourselves unable to continue to support it following the select committee process. That is for two major reasons which we have also heard about during this debate.The first reason is that this bill contains as we have heard the de facto privatisation of industry training. By allowing organisations other than recognised industry training organisation providers to be directly funded for the purposes of skills training we are going to see what is in effect the privatisation of industry training for the benefit of specific businesses. They will be able to get Government subsidies for the training that they should be paying for anyway. It is telling that nobody from the unions to the industry peak bodies to the Employers and Manufacturers Association who submitted on this bill to the Education and Science Committee had anything good to say about this particular provision. As we have heard the only organisation that gave it even mild support was Business New Zealand and for that it was very lukewarm support indeed.We have a bizarre situation where every submitter to the select committee on this point raised concerns and said that they did not think that this was necessary. These are the organisations that are working directly in industry training every day that have the expertise and the knowledge of how the system works and whose expertise the select committee should be taking seriously and Parliament should be listening to. None of those organisations wanted to see this change happen yet it persists in the bill. The only explanation that we can think of for why that is the case is ideological stubbornness on the part of the Government.As has been pointed out the whole purpose of industry training is to equip workers with industry-wide skills that will be transferable and applicable as they move throughout different workplaces and throughout different experiences in their careers and allowing individual businesses to access the subsidy for industry skills training essentially means that they will simply be able to train people for their specific workplace and their specific job. The skills will be less transferable and the only beneficiaries will be the private businesses that take this funding and use it to pay for the training that they should otherwise be paying for themselves for their workers. We fear that the Government will end up funding training that would and should be done by the business itself. It is simply another example of this Government trying to throw subsidies to its mates in the business sector and using the publicly funded education system and industry training system to do it. It is very disappointing.The other significant area of concern that we have is the proposal to remove skills leadership from the purposes of industry training organisations. We were told that having this for only one part of the industry meant that others would not be involved. Essentially what it boils down to is that the Government is hoping that leadership will just emerge in the sector. It is not going to mandate anyone to take that skills leadership role. It is taking a very hands-off approach and just hoping that it will magically emerge. That is not good enough because skills leadership is a very important component in ensuring that the future skills sets of the industry are identified and factored into the provision of training. Unless we nominate where that leadership is going to come from we cannot just hope that it is going to come from somewhere.By contrast the Green Party would like to see a very different vision for industry training in New Zealand. We want to see a smart green innovative economy. We want to lead the world ingreentech and sustainability. We want a highly skilled workforce. We want to focus on value-added industries where we have skilled workers and opportunities for apprenticeships and training for all young people. We want a vibrant manufacturing sector. We want a thriving small and medium enterprise sector that has the skills that it needs. We want gender to be taken into account too and considered so that women can enjoy skills training opportunities to the same extent as men. Sadly none of these are provided in this bill.