Moroney Sue: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMoroney Sue: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]SUE MORONEY (Labour):Thank you for the opportunity to take a call in the Committee stage to talk about clauses 1 and 2 of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. I particularly want to start my contribution by talking about the commencement date of when this Government is planning to do something about industry training and apprenticeships. The sad indictment on this particular Government is that we have got in front of this country right now the example of this Government’s appalling track record on taking industry training and apprenticeships seriously because right now Christchurch is largely being rebuilt by immigrant labour.David Bennett: Oh what a lie!The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! The member cannot say that.SUE MORONEY: Well David Bennett does not seem to have visited Christchurch to see for himself but it is largely being rebuilt by immigrant labour. Many of them are Irish. You know I have got nothing against the Irish—I am of Irish ancestry myself—but actually those should have been jobs being held by all of those New Zealanders who are sitting on the scrap heap of the dole queue instead. [Interruption]Well here we go. The Government has finally woken up. It has finally woken up 3 years too late. It had 3 years to actually be training New Zealanders to rebuild Christchurch. That is the opportunity that was missed. It is an absolute indictment on the lack of strategy from this Government for having a thorough industry training and apprenticeship approach and strategy. If it had had that then it would have listened to the Labour Party which within 2 months of that earthquake started begging the Government in this very debating chamber to actually bring in industry training and to add to the apprenticeships in order to prepare for the rebuild of Christchurch. The Government ignored those calls.Now we have got the building industry screaming out to the Government—still 3 years later—saying that it is 5000 apprentices short of what the building industry needs. That is the track record of this Government. In its sixth year of Government it has got rising unemployment—certainly in the Waikato region it has been rising.David Bennett: No it hasn’t. That’s not true.SUE MORONEY: Well there we go again. David Bennett does not even know the unemployment figures from his own region.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! It is not about unemployment.David Bennett: Prove it.SUE MORONEY: Well the member wants me to prove it Mr Chair. Am I allowed to respond? If he goes and looks at the last quarterly figures released by the Waikato region they increase from 6.1 percent to 6.8 percent.The CHAIRPERSON (Lindsay Tisch): Order! This is not about unemployment; this is about industry training.SUE MORONEY: Well thank you Mr Chair. I was just responding to the member opposite but I will now focus back on the bill itself.What this bill does is yes some useful things. As some of my colleagues have said it is a shame that we cannot support the bill in its entirety because there are one or two things that it does that are useful. Sadly as this Government is wont to do it has got privatisation at its core. It has also got the narrowing down of what we are trying to achieve in terms of people’s education and is that not a theme from this Government as well? It has done that with compulsory education as well as industry training now. It has taken a very broad concept that gives people a very broad set of skills that they can apply across industry or across different careers and different things that they might want to pursue in their lives—that is what the compulsory education system is supposed to help with. Both with the compulsory education system and now with industry training the Government has taken the approach of narrowing things down.In this bill it is doing it by not requiring the bodies that take care of this area to be industry wide. It can be just an employer. What we start to get is the narrowing of skills that are actually going to be imparted to people as a result because although an employer might have specific skill needs for their particular business they will not be necessarily engaging in preparing those people for a skill base that is to be used right across their industry. I can see that a couple of the members opposite are quite interested to learn that this is a bill that is going through in their name that does this.