Page 436 - Week 02 - Wednesday, 8 March 2006
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .
Senator Lundy has run in the federal parliament in relation to skilled migration of Filipino chefs into Australia. The treatment that appears to have been meted out to these people is entirely inappropriate and should not be supported.
It is comforting to hear that Mr Mulcahy has done his homework and is able to tell the place that breach notices have been issued, that it looks highly likely that prosecutions will take place and that if people are found to have treated their employees inappropriately, not paid them the award wages and not afforded them the award conditions, then they should be punished accordingly. And you will get no argument from me.
But the element of Mr Gentleman’s motion that I want to concentrate on is that in relation to funding. Mr Mulcahy and I have both spoken at length in this place about the importance of training and the importance of increasing the skills base in this country. Mr Mulcahy touched this morning on the very difficult task that that is for all of us and that we should all be working together towards this. I have spoken in the past about this and particularly about—and this touches on something that Dr Foskey said—so far, our failure in Australia to train the people who are underemployed. There are still a large number of people who are either underemployed or are not working in the industries that they would like to. This must be one of the areas where we redouble our efforts in training.
I want to concentrate on Mr Gentleman’s paragraph 2 (a). It is odd, given that the Stanhope government has happily signed up to the 2005-08 commonwealth-state agreement for skilling Australia’s work force as well as last month’s Council of Australian Governments agreement on the new national reform agenda. If people are being starved of funds and if the new apprenticeship schemes are questionable, then it is to Ms Gallagher and Mr Stanhope that he should be directing his ire. The COAG meeting in particular is one the Chief Minister welcomed as “cordial and productive” and was sure it would “deliver meaningful incremental changes for all Australians”, but apparently it was not cordial or productive enough for Mr Gentleman. Perhaps the trouble is that it was too cordial.
With regard to the allegations about the federal government’s continual starving of training funds, I seek leave to table two documents.
Leave granted.
MRS DUNNE: I present the following papers:
Vocational and technical education funding—1995-96 to 2005-06—
Fact sheet
Graph.
The first document provides details of vocational education funding for the life of the commonwealth-state agreement. To touch on a few of those, in 2005-06 Australian government funding for VET was $2.5 billion and, over the life of this agreement, we will be looking at $10 million on top of the cumulative $18 million that has been expended between 1995-96 and 2005-06.
Next page . . . . Previous page . . . . Speeches . . . . Contents . . . . Debates(HTML) . . . . PDF . . . .