Martin Tracey: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In CommitteeText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeMartin Tracey: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — In Committee[Sitting date: 08 April 2014. Volume:697;Page:16951. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]TRACEY MARTIN (NZ First):Kia ora Mr Chair. There are two sides to the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. One is the apprenticeships side and the other is the industry training side. Just to be clear some of the rhetoric that has gone on in the Committee today has made it sound as if when young people are in industry training—actually I take that back. It is not just young people and that is one of the positives in the bill. One of the positives in the bill is that the same amount of support will be provided to all apprentices so we are pleased to see the ageism around apprenticeships being taken away. But young people and people in industry training also gain a debt. They also have to pay a certain amount to gain the industry training whether it be in hairdressing or in building or whatever. The industry training organisations’ services although subsidised by the State are not 100 percent free. That needs to be made clear because it sounds as if this is all just an argument about a Government gift and it is not an argument about a Government gift.Some of the changes that were made to the industry training organisations previously—and this is the end of a long period of change for the industry training organisations—were around minimising the industry training organisations getting some clarity for both employers and young people in apprenticeships and industry training and their families and ensuring that the qualifications they were gaining had value out there in the market place across the board. And therein lies one of the major concerns about this shift or the proposal in this bill to hand industry training money to business. That is a complete contradiction to the controls around making sure that we can quantifiably say that the qualifications that those apprentices and industry training individuals gain are quality. We start to lose that ability to truly say that they are quality because as my colleagues from the Labour Party said there are lower criteria a lower threshold for those businesses. It is relatively silent actually with regard to those criteria.It is very very interesting that none of the proponents for the ability for industry to be funded in this way came to the Education and Science Committee to submit—not one. One has to ask oneself why that is. Is it because it is actually not that important? Or is it because actually they knew they did not have to? Is it because they already knew that it was going through anyway and that it did not matter whether it was supported or not—that the Government was just going to put it through? Why did those in industry not then bring their voice and add the reasons why they wanted it? Not a single one did. You have to ask yourself then why if nobody came and asked for it it is still here. Why when most of the submitters said: “This is a problem and we don’t recommend it. This is of concern to us.” did the members of the National Party on the select committee just shrug their shoulders and say: “Oh well why not?”.There has never been any argument put forward by the Government members on the select committee as to why this needs to be there. It did come out of a review—absolutely as did many other steps that have been taken—but there was no support in the submissions and yet from those members there was just a shrug of the shoulders and: “Oh well never mind we will do it.” That is exactly the same response that the Government members on the select committee had to charter schools—“Oh well why not?”. New Zealand First is not confident that that is a good way to create legislation—“Well why not? Let us just do it anyway whether or not we need it. Let us do it anyway whether or not industry wants it.” We are in a dilemma around that. The Minister in the chair might be able to answer it or perhaps one of the members from the Government benches on the select committee could stand and answer that question. Why exactly is it still in the bill? To date those members have not been able to answer that.I think the comments Nick Smith made with regard to apprenticeships industry training and so on and so forth were very interesting. He gave the impression that the Opposition is opposing the bill because it does not like any money to go to private training providers. Obviously anybody who has spoken to any of the Opposition members—and believe me many many many people in education are speaking to Opposition members as we move towards the election date—will know that private training establishments are strongly supported by the Opposition parties and that there is much discussion going on around their role in training. That is just to make sure that that little sound bite from the Minister does not stay out there in the ether because that is certainly not the case.The other point that New Zealand First would like to make with regard to this particular bill is probably the lost opportunity here. There are continual contradictions with the National Government in the way it deals with anything to do with education actually. In this bill on the one hand you have a large subsidy for industry or businesses if they want to tap into the education dollar and train people specifically for their specific industry as opposed to on the other hand the Government supporting vocational pathways—supporting that there should be a generalised education pathway towards the vocations and that it should be wide so that young people people in this sort of training can change through companies as we go forward. We all know that the whole area of employment is going to change and we cannot pick winners and losers in this environment as we move forward into the 21st century.But the other thing that has happened is that on the one hand we have got this subsidy for large business now being written into the bill and at the same time small and medium sized business—and we have heard it before—still have a financial barrier to taking on apprentices. A hairdresser for example who wants to take on an apprentice has to pay $500 a year—$500 a year—for every year that that hairdressing apprentice wants to be there. How do the small and medium sized businesses in rural communities that want to participate with the educational advancement of their young people and the educational and economic development of their areas manage? It may not sound like much but how does a single hairdresser who works in a sole-chair outlet in their small town and who wants to support a young person into industry training or an apprenticeship cover that fee? It would be our suggestion that rather than subsidising big business there was an opportunity in this bill to take away some of the financial barriers to small and medium sized businesses so that they can support their communities.The Government would argue that the industries should have skin in the game. The industries do have skin in the game. The industries have skin in the game on the boards of the industry training organisations and in the setting of the direction around the skills which comes now to the setting of the skills standards and the removal of the name of anyone to be responsible for it. If there is nobody responsible whom is the Government going to hold accountable? If there is nobody’s name on that job whom will the Government hold accountable? At the end of the day somebody is going to do it but if nobody is identified as that somebody you cannot hold them accountable. You cannot take their funding. You cannot say they should have done it. You cannot do anything. You have to put a name on it and then through accountability measures you make them responsible.You might have picked up that New Zealand First will not be supporting the bill. There are some very smart things in this bill and it is a shame that the two things—and New Zealand First will be supporting the amendments on David Clendon’s Supplementary Order Paper 426. We ask that the Government consider supporting them also and then there would be agreement across the House. They are amending the two small yet very important things in this bill that New Zealand First cannot support.