Page 1413 - Week 06 - Tuesday, 5 June 2007
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An investment in training and skills
Mr Speaker, successful businesses depend, first and last, on skilled workers. Growing businesses need a constant supply of such workers, ready to sign up and raring to go.
In the ACT, as elsewhere, there are too few skilled workers to meet our needs. And our already high participation rates and low jobless rates mean that finding solutions must be systemic and will take time.
The Skills Commission, chaired by the vice-chancellor of the ANU, Professor Ian Chubb, is examining this issue in detail and will advise the government in the near future. I have asked the commission to come up with realistic, affordable, practical solutions. I look forward to making its recommendations public and responding.
In the meantime however, today’s budget continues Labor’s historic investment in training and skills—an investment that has already helped deliver us the highest labour force participation in the country, and that has fed the astounding growth of the private sector over Labor’s time in government.
In the 2007-08 budget, we provide $7.6 million in recurrent funding over four years and $1 million in capital funding for vocational education and training and skill shortages.
We are investing in extra trainee and apprenticeship places in areas of known skill shortage. In particular, we are boosting capacity in some of the remaining pockets of less than full participation, helping women on low incomes and from indigenous and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds return to work.
We are also freeing up resources worth about half a million dollars for new traineeships for young indigenous men and women.
This budget also makes provision for the creation of a memorial scholarship in honour of Audrey Fagan, the first female ACT police chief. Today I announce that $250,000 will be made available over four years for the tertiary scholarship, which will be open to Canberra women in leadership positions working in law enforcement, care and protection and allied areas.
I hope that the scholarship will keep bright and fresh the memory of a woman who was admired and held in deep affection by many thousands of Canberrans, and whose name will endure in our collective memory.
Mr Speaker, another means of boosting our skilled workforce is to make sure that the world knows what a great place this is to live and work.
In the past two years, the revived skilled and business migration program has made a significant impact, bringing 1,130 new Canberrans to our workforce and community from overseas.
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