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Legislative Assembly for the ACT: 2004 Week 04 Hansard (Thursday, 1 April 2004) . . Page.. 1527 ..

for mature age people to upgrade their skills and increase their career and employment options.

The government has undertaken extensive communication and it has implemented many new marketing projects, which have paid off. The statistics speak for themselves. As a major new initiative—to my knowledge this has never been undertaken anywhere in Australia before—this government will be publishing a community magazine that will be distributed to every household in the ACT. That magazine will provide useful information about how vocational education and training can benefit individuals and their families.

The government continues to look at the best way in which to maintain momentum in the funding of all this training activity. That includes regular consultation with industry to ensure that the government is in tune with its needs. Every six months the department scans the ACT environment and it systematically produces a logical collection of the latest intelligence on skill shortages from the industry. Through that process we are able to ensure that we have a sound information base from which to develop policies and address skills shortages.

For example, shortages of bricklayers, plasterers and tilers—exacerbated by the impact on the ACT building industry of the bushfires and high levels of housing activity nationally—are being addressed by the provision of substantial financial incentives through the Building and Construction Industry Training Levy Fund. That encourages employers to take on apprentices in these trades. The group training organisations, the Master Builders Association and the Construction Industry Training Council are all working to ensure that young people in the ACT participate in this activity.

I hope that more employers take advantage of this opportunity to help to meet the present and future skills needs of their industries. One unexpected outcome of the bushfire tragedy is that the rebuilding activity is providing the real work experience required by many young people who want to become tradespeople. Last year I attended the Apprenticeship of the Year awards hosted for the time by the Construction Industry Training Council. That is another way in which to promote these trades. Sometimes recognition for trades that are represented by the Construction Industry Training Council are not always reflected in Australian National Training Authority local and national awards.

Consultations with industry through the ACT Industry Training Advisory Association—an association set up and funded by the ACT government after the federal government withdrew funding from industry training advisory boards in the ACT—are broad ranging and deal with issues other than skills shortages. They cover issues such as changes to training packages and their impact locally; new training opportunities in the ACT; issues that impede expansion of the delivery of nationally recognised training; industrial and equity issues that may cause barriers for the disadvantaged; and delivery of vocational education and training qualifications in schools.

Those discussions, which are held twice a year after receipt of written industry analyses, contribute to the development of priorities governing expenditure by the ACT on vocational education and training. The government, in its economic white paper, committed itself to a training pathway guarantee of one year’s post-school training in a

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