Woods Megan: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeWoods Megan: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17249. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]Dr MEGAN WOODS (Labour—Wigram): I think that Labour actually agreed with the previous speaker Dr Cam Calder when he summed up at the end of his speech that this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is very much part of National’s education agenda. I will talk more on that as I go through this speech. Before I get on to that I do want to acknowledge the work of the Education and Science Committee. I want to acknowledge the work of the chair of the select committee that went through this bill Dr Cam Calder. But I also want to reiterate what my colleague Grant Robertson said—that it was a deeply disappointing process for us that for the submitters who came to the committee and who put forward very strong arguments around aspects of this bill those words fell on deaf ears. These were not ideas that the Government members of the committee were willing to even countenance.I think that it is right in this third reading of the bill for us to say that it is a disappointment for us that we cannot vote for this legislation. There are elements in this bill that we would like to support. Dr Calder in his speech talked about one of those elements and that is the evolution of the resurrected apprenticeship training scheme in New Zealand that Labour put in place in the 1990s being extended out to beyond young people. So it is with a great deal of disappointment that we are voting against the bill. I think it should be noted that Labour has supported measures that this Government has brought in that we genuinely believe are going to improve industry training in this country. But it is fair to say that we simply cannot support the fundamental measures in this bill because we know that they are going to be to the detriment of industry training in this country.For Labour industry training is absolutely central to its vision for New Zealand in the 21st century. We know that in order for people to have higher-paying jobs and for people to get out of poverty cycles skills training and apprenticeships are vitally important. We know that if we are going to lift ourselves beyond being a commodity-producing nation if we really are going to be the innovative country that people talk about then we have to have a skilled workforce. The reason that Labour cannot support this bill is that it does not deliver that for New Zealand and for New Zealanders. It is with a heavy heart that we are doing that.I think that if we have a look at the history of Labour with apprenticeships there has been a lot of myth-making attempted by Government members on this bill about the great rescue job that they had to do around apprenticeship training in this country. But let us have a look at the facts of that history. When Labour came back into power in 1999 it had to deal with an absolutely decimated apprenticeship training scheme in this country. It had to put back in place some form or way of making sure that our young people were getting the skills training they needed. The scheme that was put in—and my colleague Grant Robertson talked about this—was limited to young people. So we would have liked to vote today for a scheme that extends that out but we are not. It is a scheme that did need some fixes. We acknowledge that and we voted for them. But the myth-making of this Government—for these Government members to stand there and say that they are the saviours of apprenticeship training in this country—is actually just laughable. It absolutely belies the history of this country and what we lost out on as a nation.National members are good at the big talk around apprenticeships and skills training. We saw it in 2011 post the Canterbury earthquakes. We had John Key talking the big game about the need for skills training in Christchurch and the fact that his Governmentwas going to back it. Labour foreshadowed that even before John Key started talking about it. We knew. It was not rocket science. Buildings and houses were falling down. People were going to have to rebuild them. We lacked the skilled workforce to build those buildings and to rebuild the horizontal infrastructure we needed to train our young people then and there. But did we take that opportunity? No we did not.Steven Joyce can stand in this House today and talk about the success of his apprenticeships reboot scheme and his need to expand it. Well Mr Joyce should have got on to it 2 years earlier because for 2 years the money allocated for the Skills for Canterbury training sat unspent. It sat unspent while Minister Joyce came to the select committee and sat there and said that he was not willing to frogmarch young New Zealanders into skills training. Perhaps some encouragement perhaps some incentives and perhaps some energy in terms of getting our young people into that skills training would have been preferable because we saw none of that from the Minister. It is an opportunity of a generation that this Government has missed. It has let young people down by not acting. And to stand in this House and gloat about the Government’s record in skills training in relation to the needs of the Canterbury rebuild is shameful. It is an area that this Government has absolutely failed in.We came up with creative solutions around it. We said: “Let’s look at innovative ways. Let’s not just pay young people the dole. Let’s actually make that a payment to help employers take on more young people into apprenticeship training while we wait for the work stream to come on board.” But did the Government take any of this on? No it did not. We could now have people 3½ years into their training instead of us having to look overseas rather than employing New Zealanders. That is sad. It is a policy that Labour knows would have worked and will still work. It is a policy that I have as a member’s bill in my name one that I very much hope gets pulled out of the ballot before the general election because it is very much needed.The chair of the Education and Science Committee in the speech he has just given told us that changes were needed and that we needed to have an industry training scheme that was well connected to industry and with high employer buy-in. I thought that was a particularly interesting comment from the chair of that committee given that what we had was employers coming to the select committee and telling us that they did not want the bill. I do not know how he thinks this is buy-in. I do not know how he thinks it is well connected to industry when we had industry coming to the select committee and telling us that it would not work that it was not the way for us to do skills and apprenticeship training in New Zealand and that it just was not going to benefit the system. The words we are hearing in this House today are hollow. They absolutely belie what happened in that committee room and what Government members know they heard from the submitters who came to the committee. My colleague Grant Robertson talked about the very lukewarm support that the one supporter of this proposal Phil O’Reilly would give it—that it was damning with faint praise. As Mr Robertson said it was code for “Please don’t do this. It’s wrong. It’s not going to work.”But perhaps one of the biggest concerns for us in this legislation is the ability for non - industry training organisations to take on a role that has previously been something for industry good. One of the submitters came to us and told us that if this legislation goes through we can no longer call it industry training. I think that was one of the most telling comments I heard in that select committee. This is not a piece of legislation that is about helping industry; this is a piece of legislation that is about helping big business. Steven Joyce talked about that in his speech actually. He thought he was giving us reassurances when he wanted to highlight the fact that it was only employers with 40-plus employees who could be open to the provision of taking on the funding and takingover the function of industry training organisations. This is legislation for the big end of town. This is not about helping small and medium sized enterprises in terms of their skills and training needs.For us on this side of the House for us in Labour we know that if we are going to transform our economy we need to be doing everything we can to back our small and medium sized enterprises with the kind of skilled workforce that they are going to need for the 21st century. But no what is happening under this legislation is that already we are having mates of the Government tendering to get in on the funding. This is for business good now not for industry good. It is a sad day for New Zealand industry when we have a Government that is willing to look after the big end of town and its corporate mates rather than thinking about what the strategic needs of industry are and the kind of skilled workforce that we are going to need to drive it.Labour is opposing this bill. We wish we did not have to because industry training is so important to this country but this bill simply will not deliver industry training.