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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1524 ..

apprentices but they just do not have the time to complete the mountain of paperwork that is required to make it happen.

I talk to many small business owners who would benefit from having a trainee in their workplace. They could pass on their business skills to that person and obtain a benefit from having somebody else working with them. The amount of time that small business owners spend on administration and on completing the necessary paperwork prevents them from doing their core business. People get stuck in a cycle. They would like to employ an apprentice but they cannot because of the paperwork that is involved. We must simplify the process and assist those businesses that want school-based new apprenticeships, ordinary apprentices, or trainees to work with them.

The ACT Training and Adult Education website, which should be the first point of reference for employers wanting to engage a trainee or an apprentice, tells employers that they need, first, to find a suitable employee; second, to complete a training contract and get it approved by Training and Adult Education; third, to complete a training plan with a registered training organisation once they have found the right person for their business; and, fourth, to organise structured training.

All that has to be done before an apprentice or trainee can commence to learn or to help them with their businesses. That would amount to a huge investment of the time of management. Management would have to work through all the different registered training organisations and establish what kind of training they offered, whether or not it was the best training for the business, and whether the training contracts that were approved were in the right format. Many businesses—small businesses in particular—just do not have the capacity to invest that sort of time, even though they know they would benefit from having trainees on their sites.

Industry training advisory boards have the skills that are necessary to help businesses complete the necessary paperwork and organise the training, but they are currently struggling to do that work as they have been provided with only one-off incentives by the federal government. Any investment by the territory government would reduce the administrative burden on businesses and quickly result in a lot of new placements for workers. Group training organisations could shoulder that entire administrative burden by directly employing trainees or apprentices and then simply billing businesses for the work performed by them.

A number of thriving group training organisations are currently taking on the administrative work relating to trainees and they are involved in pastoral care—supporting trainees throughout the workplace. Businesses and trainees benefit from that. However, there is a lack of industry awareness about the management of existing training and placement systems. Many employers do not understand the role of group training providers. Group trainers and training advisory boards require sufficient support to assist businesses with the administrative side of engaging apprentices and trainees. Employers would also require to be informed about the availability of such support.

What support is given to group training organisations? Unfortunately, a lot of training time is taken up to ensure that training packages are continually developed and assessed, and that registered training organisations are complying with registration requirements. However, that is only one part of the suite of training and apprenticeship options that are

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