Beaumont Carol: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — First ReadingText is subject to correctionBeaumont Carol: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — First Reading[Sitting date: 05 November 2013. Volume:694;Page:14369. Text is subject to correction.]CAROL BEAUMONT (Labour): I follow my colleague Grant Robertson in speaking in favour of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. Labour is supporting this bill’s referral to the Education and Science Committee because we are strong supporters of industry training and apprenticeships. We would welcome improvements to the system. We would welcome a greater focus on industry training and apprenticeships. We would welcome greater numbers and we certainly have absolutely no question about wanting to ensure quality.Industry training and apprenticeships provide a lead-in for people to get decent jobs and be paid decent wages as well as providing the important trades and technical skills that this country needs and so sorely lacks at the moment. Labour is committed to ensuring that New Zealand has the skilled workforce we need. We want to see New Zealanders have jobs and opportunities and we do not believe that this Government has truly focused on those areas at all. The shortage of skilled tradespeople in this country is absolutely criminal. It is a serious concern and it is one that has been exacerbated bythis National Government over the last 5 years by its failure to invest in apprenticeships and industry training. We export our skilled tradespeople and then we have to import them back again. This is a nonsense an absolute disgrace.We do support this bill and we look forward to discussing at the Education and Science Committee how we can really make progress. Industry training is incredibly important. It is about providing the technical and trade skills this country needs. They are the sorts of skills we need in manufacturing. But of course industry training has been under this Government the Cinderella of tertiary education. It actually fails generally to even get across the Government’s radar. Of course the manufacturing sector itself is languishing and that is despite the fact that manufacturing—the ability for us to make things in this country—is absolutely important.Manufacturing has an important multiplier effect in terms of employment opportunities. The figure that people talk about is two or three jobs arising from each job in manufacturing. It is very different from the service sector. So we need these skills in trades and technical areas not just for manufacturing but also for our building and rebuilding for the housing that this country is so sorely lacking particularly in Auckland and Christchurch where there is an absolute shortage of housing for our people. Skills in trades and technical areas are important for being able to deliver infrastructure development and the rebuilding of Christchurch and yet we have these huge skills gaps at the moment.Investing in industry training and apprenticeships will provide jobs for New Zealanders. As I have said already at the moment we are instead exporting so many of our trades and technical people. They are over in Australia—hundreds of thousands of them. We have replaced them. We have had the nonsense of having to import skilled people to work on the Christchurch rebuild because the Government failed to take the opportunity after the earthquake and realise we were going to need more people in construction for example. So at a time when we have got high unemployment especially around young people we have got major skills and training deficits. It is just nonsense.The other important factor about investing in industry training and in apprenticeships is that it does lift productivity. There are countless pieces of research showing that investing in training at the workplace level investing in that technical training that is needed on the job actually lifts productivity in our workplaces and certainly we sorely need that. So that is the context in which this bill presents itself to the House and those are the sorts of questions we will be looking at in terms of this bill.It is also important that industry training and apprenticeships provide people who are not going through our university sector with real qualifications that mean something and provide them with employment security. We know that in a modern economy jobs will change fairly rapidly and that the idea of job security is actually an idea that is very outdated. But we do need to look at investing in training so that people have employment security and have skills that are transferable and portable.What is the Government’s record in this area? Well I recall that it started off fairly early on in the piece in the last term of this National Government. I think it was actually when the member opposite Kate Wilkinson was the Minister of Labour that she was part of scrapping the skills strategy because the Government does not believe in actually having a plan. The Government does not believe in having a plan about what skills we might need in our economy.There was an agreed skills strategy. Business unions Government agencies and industry training organisations had got together and said: “Here’s a plan. Here’s what we need.” But no the National Government when it came in said: “Oh no. That was the previous Government. We’ll scrap that. We won’t bother actually trying to build aconsensus around this issue. We’ll just ignore it.” I have to say that was a major sign of what was to come. Of course the National Government has taken money from industry training and put it into other parts of the tertiary sector. I have no problem with funding our universities and our polytechnics properly. We need to do that but we need to invest money in industry training too. This Government ripped money out of that part of tertiary education and put it elsewhere. When unemployment is at such a high level providing training and skills opportunities for young people in trades and technical areas is a really important pathway forward.I notice that the regulatory impact statement had quite a good analysis of the rationale for Government involvement in industry training. I just want to take a second to talk about some of the things it identifies because it recognises that investment in this part of the tertiary education sector has a number of what it calls “spill-over benefits” and that there are not only improved employment outcomes—which I have already mentioned—but flow-on benefits to things like improved health outcomes and improved child development outcomes. This is a way of potentially investing in people who have not necessarily done that well in the academic streams in their schooling life and have not necessarily gone on to a tertiary education institution but who actually want to learn technical skills for their employment. I just wanted to acknowledge that that is recorded in the regulatory impact statement.My colleague Grant Robertson talked about the fact that this bill does mention in clause 15 provisions around priority groups. It specifically talks about Māori and Pacific workers and this side of the House has no problem with that. But the shame at the moment is the situation around women and industry training. It is absolutely appalling. The percentage of women as industry trainees has dropped over the last few years. It was 30 percent in 2010 and it is down to 28 percent this year. When you break it down by industry it becomes even more shocking. We have got a pool of over 50 percent of our population who are not being targeted to move into industry training to get those crucial trades and technical skills.One percent of the trainees in building and construction are women. In joinery it is 6 percent. In electrical supply it is 7 percent. In the motor industry it is 3 percent. In infrastructure it is 6 percent. This is just appalling. This is coming from a Government that says “Well we are not going to do anything about revaluing the occupations where women are concentrated like aged care. We don’t believe that those workers are low-paid or undervalued.” The real solution says the Government is to move women into higher-paying jobs.Well I have to say that the record on industry training does not show a great deal of movement of women out of industries like aged care—which does need valuing properly—and into better paid trades jobs. So you would have to say that is a big fail. There is nothing going on there. The Minister’s best attempt was to say that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is working on it. Well I think that is a research project and a leaflet. Thank you.