Street Maryan: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Bill — In Committee 
Street Maryan: Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Bill — In Committee 
[Volume:635;Page:6676] 
MARYAN STREET (Labour) 
: 
 I would like to endorse some of the comments that the previous speaker has made in her speech on this Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Bill. The select committee treated this bill with a great deal of seriousness but I want to traverse a couple of points in it that were critical to the development of this part. Clearly a number of issues were raised in the course of our hearing the submissions on this bill that were almost beyond the scope of legislation as such but that were issues of real concern. 
We traversed some of these issues in the first reading of this bill when Katherine Rich as chair of the Commerce Committee made reference to exam pass rates somewhere in the order of 11 percent. The issues to do with the relationship between the industry training organisation and the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board were behind a lot of the feeling and the impetus that resulted in this bill. 
The registration and licensing components of this bill have been traversed previously in debate but it is worth noting that the Commerce Committee did take very seriously the concerns that were raised—certainly concerns that some of us by our own research discovered as we proceeded with some of the submissions to this bill. I took the opportunity to look through 10 years’ worth of annual reports of the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board in order to look at pass rates and I discovered that there was certainly something rotten in the State of Denmark in respect of the numbers that entered into apprenticeships and the numbers who exited the other side as qualified plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers. 
This issue was addressed largely by Hazel Armstrong’s report which was commissioned by the Minister for Tertiary Education because of his interest in the provision of education for apprentices through tertiary institutions. As a result we heard a number of things that as I say may not have been specifically within the scope of this bill but they were important and did deserve a respectful hearing. I think that where we got to in terms of registration and licensing was absolutely right and it reflected where we had got to with the electricians and their registration as well. 
So with the combination of these two pieces of legislation we now have a uniform process for the registering—that is the training and the acknowledgment of the completed training—of tradespeople who in this particular case are plumbers gasfitters and drainlayers and for the ongoing licensing of competence of these tradespeople. It was distressing to see how many young people—young men—had chosen to go into these occupations and had not been permitted through some dysfunction between the industry training organisation and the Plumbers Gasfitters and Drainlayers Board to take up a career of their choice. 
I will not speak to subsequent parts of this bill at the moment but when we come to Part 8 I may well take another call to point out the areas where we have corrected those particular issues in this legislation. Suffice it to say right now we have a streamlined and unified registration and licensing process that not only protects the identification of tradespeople as registered tradespeople but also protects the public and workers in respect of ongoing safety issues.