Robertson Grant: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central):It would appear you have only one option Mr Chair.The CHAIRPERSON (Eric Roy): I’m looking forward to it.GRANT ROBERTSON: Thank you; so am I. I want to pick up from where my colleague Megan Woods was although perhaps not in the spectacular water display that we just saw over here and talk about the two main concerns that the Labour Party has about Part 1 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. In order to do that it is important for those watching to remind ourselves what the purpose of industry training is and why the Government funds it. Essentially industry training organisations since they have been developed have had three main roles. Those roles have been to set the standards for industry training to organise industry training and administer industry training and to ensure that the skills leadership function that is so desperately required in our workforce planning is undertaken.What does skills leadership mean? What skills leadership means is working to identify where the skills needs are in a particular industry and ensuring that we have programmes and courses that match up with those skills needs. Under this piece of legislation that third of those industry training jobs has been taken away from industry training organisations. It was a remarkable thing in the Education and Science Committee to be presented with a sort of nihilistic view of the world—some sort of anarcho-syndicalist view of the world—that skills leadership would just happen that it would just occur and that no one would need to be in charge of it; it would just magically happen and some Government agencies would do some things and other industry groups would step up to the plate. That was one of the things we heard.Well that is just nonsense. From my point of view and from the Labour Party’s point of view industry training organisations are the peak bodies of industry. This is the place where we can learn the most about what is required in the future in terms of skills. Yes by all means Government departments have a role in making sure that they are feeding into that exercise of saying what the next wave of skills are that are needed in industry but the leadership role in that surely must come from the industry itself.It was as my colleague Dr Woods said very odd for us on the Labour Party side to be told by the National Party members that the Government should pick this up when we were saying no no actually this is where industry should be leading. Industry knows best what is needed in terms of those skills. So we are very disappointed to see that in Part 1 of this bill the skills leadership function disappears from the role of industry training organisations.We are disappointed that we cannot support this bill because there is no doubt that there was and has been a need for industry training organisations to recalibrate themselves. Over a period of time a number of them had grown to such an extent that they perhaps were not servicing the exact needs of their industries were not servicing the needs of the businesses within the industries and certainly were not always servicing the needs of trainees. People were complaining that they were seeing a lot of flash cars being driven by industry training organisation staff but not the outcomes on the ground in terms of delivery of training. We accept that there was a need for some rationalisation of industry training organisations and that has happened. Businesses have now bought back into the model so it seems very odd to bring a piece of legislation to the House we believe that breaks that up. Just as things are getting better the Government comes along and makes some quite fundamental changes that are contained here in Part 1.On the Labour Party side of the Chamber we strongly support industry training. It is so critical as part of the lifelong learning and the build-up of skills that make for a productive economy that we have as many workers as possible engaged in industry training and a system that organises that in a way that meets the skills needs and allows people to develop their own skills and get transferable skills that can take them from one business to another and be recognised for that with qualifications. All of that is good. All of that is in the bill but then it is broken apart by the two key clauses here: the removal of the skills leadership function and the opening up of funding for industry training to non - industry training organisations. Those two clauses are the reason why the Labour Party cannot support this bill.When we look at the regulatory impact statement that has been provided for this bill it is quite instructive. It talks about why the Government funds industry training. It says: “The availability of common transferable qualifications and a training organisation considering the needs of the industry as a whole is akin to a ‘public good’ which is unlikely to emerge without government intervention particularly in industries with a high proportion of small firms.” That is the nub of the matter. That is the reason why industry training is funded by the Government—not because an individual business needs to train its workers to do the particular jobs. That is the responsibility of an individual business and it will—and in most cases does—go about doing that. What industry training says is that we want a broadly skilled workforce that can move from one business to another and from one industry to another with recognised qualifications and skills that are transferable.That is actually what the regulatory impact statement says yet the Government in new section 11A opens up the funding of industry training to non - industry training organisations effectively to individual businesses. It says to them that they can go off and do this. Every single submitter bar one which I will come back to said that they did not believe that this was the way to go. We had the remarkable situation of the Contractors Federation sitting down at the table—in fact I think the speakers were still standing up when they said it. They said that they agreed with everything that the Council of Trade Unions had just said. What the Council of Trade Unions had just said was: “Do not do this. Do not break up industry training. Do not effectively privatise industry training because getting those transferable skills those skills that are for an industry not a specific business is important to our future productivity. It will also fundamentally undermine the industry training organisations themselves.”In that quote from the regulatory impact statement I mentioned the reference to the fact that need for Government intervention is “particularly in industries with a high proportion of small firms.” It is the small firms that will miss out under this process because it is the small firms that will be left behind.Dr David Clark: Why does National hate small businesses?GRANT ROBERTSON: A big firm goes off and decides to run its own industry training but small businesses will be left with increased costs to keep their industry training organisations going and there will be further burdens on them as small businesses. My colleague Dr Clark knows from his travels around the country talking to small-business people that they are already struggling and here will be an additional burden. Here will be an additional cost. That is another problem. Not only will we end up with training that is not industry wide but business specific but it will also undermine small businesses and increase their costs.There is already flexibility for employers to move from one industry training organisation to another. They are not stuck in the industry training organisation they are in now and we have seen quite a bit of that in recent times. The argument that this opening up of industry training under new section 11A somehow or other will lead to increased flexibility is just plain wrong. The flexibility is in the system already.The only organisation that came to the select committee and said “Yes we think this might be OK.” was Business New Zealand but it would be fair to say that Business New Zealand’s endorsement was a little on the lukewarm side. It in fact told the committee that it was not opposed to the idea. It said that it was “cautiously supportive” but it wanted to make sure that the approach was “independently evaluated to ensure that it results in learning outcomes linked to industry needs”. That is what it said. Business New Zealand was worried that this opening up of industry training to individual businesses would mean that we would not have industry-wide skills and qualifications. Business New Zealand does not really like this either. That is the truth. Every other submitter—from the Contractors Federation to the Council of Trade Unions Careerforce the Amalgamated Engineering Printing and Manufacturing Union and the National Council of Women—said there is no justification for opening up industry training to be funded to individual businesses.It is hard to escape the view that it is simply in this bill as part of a wider agenda of privatisation be it charter schools or be it public-private partnerships. It is all in the same direction and it is the wrong direction. We want a strong public education system that delivers skills training and education that is applicable right across the board. That is why the Government should fund these things. We support strong funding for industry training and apprenticeships but under this bill and under this part of the bill that is consistently undermined.It seems remarkable that in trying to consolidate and improve some bits of industry training if this bill passes in the form that it is in now it will fundamentally undermine industry training. I challenge the National Party members on the other side of the Chamber to get up and tell us why industry training funding should be delivered to specific businesses to deliver training that is only relevant to them. Why should we not have a situation where we fund as a Government only skills that go across an industry rather than specific businesses?