Clendon David: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeClendon David: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14371. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]DAVID CLENDON (Green): I think it is fair to say that this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill has come to the House not a moment too soon. The primary legislation that it seeks to amend dates back to 1989 1992 and the year 2000.The point has been made by Labour colleagues that it was blindingly obvious a number of years ago that we were looking down the barrel of a serious skills shortage—a trades shortage—in this country. It has taken rather a long time for this endeavour to improve that situation to come to the fore. Having said that we do see that it is timely to take a fresh look and to the extent that this bill endeavours to do that we are able to support this legislation albeit with a few reservations. We are particularly interested in the select committee process as indeed we always are with new legislation. We think that there are a number of key stakeholders in this who will have interests opinions and positions to offer that almost certainly will enable us to make this adequate piece of legislation a better piece of legislation as we go through the process.I think that part of our problem has been that over recent years—and it might be heretical from someone who has both studied and taught in a university situation—we have perhaps oversold the value of university education at the expense of advocating for trades and vocational training. I think we need to reverse that and to give our young people a much broader and deeper picture of the value of not only university education. I think we do need to look very hard at the messages that young people in particular are receiving about the value and importance of trades and vocational training more generally.The bill prescribes a number of functions and responsibilities to various agencies including the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment the Minister’s office the Tertiary Education Commission the New Zealand Qualifications Authority and the industry training organisations themselves—those currently existing and any that might be appointed or accredited in the future.I think it is possible to feel some unease at how quickly the various provisions—particularly those provisions that prescribe certain processes in this legislation—could very easily degenerate into a sort of tick box mentality where as long as people jump through the correct hoops in the right order then all will be deemed to be OK. I am thinking in terms of things like the criteria for accreditation the quality assurance requirements and the measuring of the capability and capacity of the industry training organisations to fulfil their functions and their roles. These are all important considerations but my experience in the tertiary sector and elsewhere leads me to have some concern that these things very quickly become bureaucratised. They simply become little hurdles to jump over on the way. They lose their value their richness and their quality.I would hope that there would be sufficient goodwill to ensure that there is a very robust a very transparent and an ongoing engagement between the key stakeholders. Obviously they will be the regulatory authorities the Government agencies the industry training organisations themselves and the providers of education and training but not forgetting of course the apprentices and the trainees who will enter into the various programmes that will emerge from this legislation under the conditions that it prescribes.I think it is important that we do have a genuine and ongoing dialogue within and between those groups to ensure that we achieve the right balance. We want to make sure that influence and responsibility for the ongoing delivery of industry and vocational training sheets home to the appropriate level and in the appropriate time and place so that we can look with some confidence to a system and to a model that will produce the tradespeople that we want and need going into the future.The point has already been made but I think it is worth repeating that we are desperately short of tradespeople in New Zealand right across all of the trades I think. Construction tends to get the spotlight if you like for very obvious reasons but equally in engineering and elsewhere we are short of people. Things as simple asmotor mechanics electronics electrical trades—we are short of skilled people in all of these to the point that we are importing tradespeople while also sitting on historically high levels of youth unemployment. There is an obvious disjuncture there. One would hope that some of the provisions of this bill might offer some way to resolve that.I think that a point that is often overlooked too is that historically the public sector—the much-maligned public service—contributed a regular and reliable supply of tradespeople into the private economy as well as into the public economy. We had the railway workshops the Post Office as it was then and the defence forces which provided us with fitters with turners with welders with diesel mechanics with air frame fitters with pilots and with boat builders. If you look at the New Zealand superyacht industry you will find an awful lot of people there who trained in the navy. I think that is something that we have thrown out. One of the babies we have thrown out with the bathwater in terms of driving down the capacity of the public service is that we have lost that important supply of trades. Now it is coming back on to the education providers and on to industry to try to plug the gap that has emerged over time.Again the point has been made that the legislation requires industry training organisations in the future to have particular regard to the needs of Māori and other population groups. Of course that begs the question of who is being talked about here. We can look to the education strategy that focuses particularly on Māori and Pasifika as does this bill and it talks about youth to some extent. But I think that is a little bit lazy. I think we need to drill in a bit more and perhaps even highlight what the priority groups are that we are talking about. I think we need to identity them. Carol Beaumont has offered one compelling suggestion which is that women need to be included in that. But I do think that the overall strategy will be weakened if we do not think a bit harder a bit more seriously and with a bit more detail about whom we are talking about in terms of priority groups and what the primary needs are. I think it is obvious that young people in the regions and in the provincial areas who could very well miss out on some of this if they have not got ready access to one of the key providers should be treated as a priority group. I do think we need to be a little bit more definitive in terms of whom we are talking about there.The bill makes it clear that industry training organisations may not own or be beneficial owners of registered private training establishments. I think that is a good provision. The industry training organisations themselves may have an opinion on that and it will be interesting to hear from them if they have any major concerns with that. But on the face of it it seems an obvious division to make—that industry training organisations ought not to be directly involved in ownership or be beneficiaries of a private provider.I mentioned earlier the quality assurance improvement provisions in this legislation. One of those will allow the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to impose some compliance measures in the face of poor educational outcomes. Again I think we need to be a bit careful about some of that language because yes if trainees and apprentices are failing to complete and if the skills are not coming through there are some obvious failures that can occur in any training or educative programme. But around the margins we have seen recently for example an attempt to use very crude numbers about completion of courses as indicators of the failure of the institutions providing those courses. That is a very crude and unsatisfactory measure and I would hope that we would not resort to such inadequate measures when we are measuring educational outcomes. They need to be much more textured much more layered and much more sophisticated than that. It is one example where we do have to make sure that we do not simply resort to the lowest common denominator in terms of filling in the blanks that legislation inevitably prescribes.I think my final comment—and I will no doubt return to this point again in the future—would be the question of industry training organisations being obliged to offer appropriate pastoral care and support for apprentices having regard to age and experience. It is actually not a trivial matter for industry training organisations to undertake to accept that responsibility. Obviously a mature person somebody going into a second career an older person may—in fact most certainly would—require less pastoral care but what is an appropriate level of pastoral care for young people who might be from a provincial or a regional environment and are coming to a city to study? At what point is it enough too much or not enough? I look forward to the ongoing debate around this bill. Thank you.