Page 1606 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 17 May 1994
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should all aspire. It is a standard to which I am sure that the Liberal Opposition aspires, just as it is a standard to which the MBA apprenticeship scheme aspires. What we are talking about here is a procedure that will, in our view, deliver the continuity of a quality product in the ACT, and, indeed, expand that quality product. The appropriate methodology for that to be done, in my view - it is just my humble view - is via the Industry Training Council.
In talking about this quality scheme, we are looking at a group of apprenticeship schemes. As an example, we have apprentices in the first three months of their indenture working at, say, Gungahlin. They are required to pay $1,700 for an air nail gun and $300 for a battery operated screw gun, and I presume that that does not include other costs that they are required to meet, such as the award tool kit which generally costs about $700. We can see that, indeed, there are costs associated with group apprenticeship schemes, particularly one that is not yet covered adequately, in my view, by the funds made available to it. That may be testimony to the way in which it is administered.
I want to go on and to talk about this concept of apprenticeship training and post-apprenticeship training. One of the concerns that we have - I am sure that it is a concern for the Liberals as well - is that within the Territory we have had a history, particularly over the last three years, of a number of builders and contractors going bust. There is a range of reasons for that. Some went bust simply because of bad financial decisions made by the company or by the individual contractor. At the meeting which the Minister for Education and Training and I had with industry participants it was acknowledged that one of the failings of our system is that we are not equipping these people who are starting off as apprentices, either through the apprenticeship training program or afterwards, to be business people in our community. We do not provide them with the opportunity to undertake those fundamental management courses which everybody, in our view, should at least have the opportunity to undertake.
Let us say that you are an apprentice chippie. At the end of your indenture you go into work as a paid employee. In a lot of cases you end up as a subcontractor. Nowhere in that process are the management skills required to run a business imparted.
Mrs Carnell: But if you want to register as a builder, what happens? What does the building registration board want?
MR LAMONT: Mrs Carnell, not every shop assistant who gets involved in the Retail Trades Industry Training Council ends up being a chemist, thankfully. What we are proposing in this Bill is that these funds continue to be provided for training. At the moment 10 per cent of that levy is being used for training purposes, or is allowed to be used for that purpose. What we are providing for here is another stream to reflect costs across the whole of the industry.
At the moment it is principally the larger builders who contribute to that long service leave catchment. A lot of the smaller builders are using subcontractors or, in the cottage industry in particular, apprentices. The level of contribution from the cottage construction industry is nowhere near that from the construction on-site industry.
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