Robertson Grant: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third ReadingText is incorporated into the Bound VolumeRobertson Grant: Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill — Third Reading[Sitting date: 15 April 2014. Volume:698;Page:17245. Text is incorporated into the Bound Volume.]GRANT ROBERTSON (Labour—Wellington Central): The provision of industry training and the availability of apprenticeships are a vital part of ensuring that we actually have economic growth and innovation in New Zealand. We need more people with skills in our workforce. If we have a more skilled workforce it will drive productivity. If we drive productivity there will be better economic outcomes higher wages more growth for the New Zealand economy and more opportunities for New Zealanders. If we have people in apprenticeships we will be growing the next generation of workers who will be providing the engine room of that economic growth and innovation. We will be giving people—young people especially—the opportunity to have a career and to get under their belt a trade and a skill and giving them guidance around that by those who have experience.Industry training and apprenticeships are such an important part of our economic future and indeed of our society which is why we on this side of the House are so disappointed that we are unable to support this legislation the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill because there are in this legislation a couple of pretty good elements. The first of those is the creation of the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme because that brings together the range of different kinds of apprenticeships and industry training programmes under one umbrella. It addresses an issue that on this side of the House we acknowledge which is that when Labour brought in the Modern Apprenticeships scheme we had to do that off the back of apprenticeships having been destroyed by the National Government in the 1990s. We deliberately focused on opportunities for young New Zealanders because that is what had been taken away when the apprenticeships scheme was disestablished in the 1990s. What the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme which is brought in under this bill does is to expand that out to people from older age groups and we accept that that is an important thing to do. There is a need nowadays for retraining for a lot of people when they are older. It is not about just young people. We believe that this is a good element of the bill—to create a more coordinated apprenticeships scheme.We also accept that there has been a need for some reorganisation of industry training. We are not ashamed of the fact that many more people got the opportunity to undertake industry training and to get new skills under the last Labour Government. Maybe there were one or two people who did not complete their qualification and it would have been good if they had but at least we had a Government that was prepared to invest in skills in our workplaces. So now when the opportunity to reorganise the sector has come along it is a good thing. Industry training organisations have responded to the need to reorganise themselves and we welcome the fact that they are now leaner and more efficient entities.They are two good things that are in this bill and that we could support. But on top of that we have a Government whose ideological agenda means that it wants to impose on the industry training sector a contestable model of funding—a privatisation of the sector. Let us be absolutely clear. The purpose of industry training the reason the Government funds industry training is to quote the officials the availability of a common transferable set of qualifications that considers the needs of the industry as a whole. That is akin to a public good which is unlikely to emerge without Government intervention. That is the purpose of industry training: creating a skilled workforce that can move between businesses that ensures that people have skills that transfer across industries. So why bring in a system of funding that directly funds employers? Is it not the Government that should be telling us: “We’re not going to pick winners. We’re not going to privilege people.”? No. This Government says: “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to ensure that we can directly fund those employers to deliver the training.” There are no guarantees as the Minister for Tertiary Education Skills and Employment might claim that that will be a transferable qualification or skill. In fact it is highly likely to be a qualification that is relevant pretty much for only that business.As my colleague Tracey Martin has raised before what are the businesses that are going to want to do this? Are they the Minister’s mates? Are they run by the people who have got the Minister’s ear? Because they are being set up in a completely different way from the way that industry training organisations are. The Minister made a big thing in his speech of the fact that industry training organisations are prevented from setting up private training establishments to deliver training. Well the new clause enables these private businesses to not only organise the training but deliver it as well. So the very thing that the Minister is denying to industry training organisations he is delivering to his mates. He is privatising it and allowing them to both organise the training anddeliver the training. He is the one setting up two different standards within this system for these individually funded employers and for industry training organisations.At the Education and Science Committee submitter after submitter said to the Government: “Don’t do this. Do not create this situation.” The only submitter that demurred from that was Business New Zealand which said that it gave qualified support to the idea but it thought that there needed to be a review to see whether it was necessary. That is Phil O’Reilly - speak for “For God’s sake don’t do this. It’s a terrible idea and it will ruin everything.” Phil O’Reilly is the only person who came to the committee with even that level of lukewarm support. Everybody else from the Contractors Federation to the Council of Trade Unions and other employers said: “Please don’t do this because you will undermine industry training organisations.” Far from this great competitive model that is going to lead to these high-performing industry training organisations the only businesses that can take up this direct funding are the big businesses and the small businesses which rely on a strong industry training organisation to enable them to deliver training are the ones that will suffer from an industry training organisation that no longer contains the large employers which contribute more money to those industry training organisations. So not only does it undermine the purpose of industry training it undermines the industry training organisations that the Minister purports to support.This is a very retrograde step when it comes to industry training. There is already flexibility within the industry training organisation model. Employers are perfectly entitled to move between different industry training organisations and in the reorganisation process a number of businesses have done that. They have aligned themselves with a different industry training organisation from the one they were in. The Minister is trying as he often does to address a problem that is not here in order to implement his own ideological view about the privatisation of education. It makes no difference whether it is charter schools public-private partnerships to build schools or this privatisation of industry training; it has an agenda from Steven Joyce and the National Government to undermine the public provision of education and training and in this case the training that takes place through industry training organisations.I want to make it absolutely clear that on this side of the House we see no need for these changes. We do not believe that they are good for industry training. They are not going to be good for the trainees involved if they end up with skills that are not transferable. I ask the question again: why is the Government paying for it? This comes from the party that is meant to believe that it is somehow or other a great steward of the economy. It decides that it can directly chuck money at its mates and say: “You deliver the training.” instead of strengthening those industry training organisations.The second reason why the Labour Party cannot support this bill is the abolition of the skills leadership function. Industry training organisations have had the legislated and mandated role of looking at the skills that are required within their industry and saying: “How will we provide these in the future being the body that says: ‘This is where we need to go.’?”. We had a great submission fromCareerforce which said that it had sat down with Health Workforce New Zealand and looked at the future skills needs for those people who look after our elderly and who look after our disabled in the community. No one else was doing that but the industry training organisation got in there and did it. It played its skills leadership role. That role disappears. It is gone and we have to hope that a Government department will pick up that idea. It is not mandated to do that. We just have to hope that it will. Well on this side of the House we actually believe that industry should be leading it. We actually believe that business knows more about it than the Government does. But no all of a sudden National members havedecided that they know better. They have arrogantly dismissed the role of industry in this.We cannot support a bill that has no one responsible for working out what skills we need in industry in New Zealand in the future. That is irresponsible. It is the kind of short-term thinking we have come to expect from this Government. So we will be strongly opposing this bill. We have strongly opposed it. We will turn back these changes when we get back into Government because we want strong publicly funded industry training organisation arrangements and apprenticeships that give New Zealanders the skills that lend to the productivity gains we need and that ensure that all trainees are getting skills they can use across an industry.This bill is deeply flawed. It is an ideological response to a problem that is not there and it will undermine industry training and apprenticeships in New Zealand.