29-June-2007
Speeches, Immigration and Multicultural Affairs, Workplace Relations, Education and Training
SCIENCE SPEECH BY THE HON ANDREW ROBB, AO MP
29 JUNE 2007
Thanks very much, John, and good morning ladies and gentlemen. I do appreciate this opportunity this morning. I was interested when I got the invitation. I've had a long standing interest, to be honest, in science and engineering and maths. Before I did economics part time I did a Diploma of Agricultural Science at Dookie Agricultural College, and as part of my economics degree, actually, I did two years of maths stats at the maths school at La Trobe University.
I was a board member with Sinclair Knight Mertz for several years in between politics when I was in business. I really sought that out, because of my interest in engineering and the sciences, I wanted to build a network as my objective had been, as John said, why is another story, to try and find an opportunity in politics. I sought out Sinclair Knight Mertz to get some network and exposure to what's happening. Of course, they've got 3000 consulting engineers across just about every discipline, and it's a fascinating organisation doing wonderful work.
The focus of this symposium, to me, it is a critical one. It's an issue that is facing so many professions, but my assessment of your disciplines is that there's perhaps even a sharper edge to the problem facing so many others. When I look at the trends in vocational and secondary education in science, engineering and technology, the proportion of students completing those areas has declined from 29 per cent in 1996 to 22 per cent in 2004.
There's a fairly dramatic decline on what was already a declining trend in any event, I think. Oddly, 38 occupations that are currently deemed to be in serious skills shortage out of literally hundreds of occupations, every one of the 38, on my reckoning, requires at least a good working knowledge of maths, and over half of them require science, engineering or technology skills. So, it's really important, this gathering here today, I think, and yesterday, to workshop the problem, because it is not going to automatically self correct, in my view. You do need to be on the front foot and be taking action, as you are as I see and I'm aware of since I've taken over these responsibilities four or five months ago.
There are quite a range of projects and studies being undertaken to see what can be done to track young people into these disciplines and to hold them and to upskill them, in fact, through the line. A lot of that I can see in your program as being reported on, and many people in this room are far more qualified to report on that than me. I'm not going to bore you with listing all of those sorts of projects, many of which governments, state and federal, are, in part, involved with.
What I thought I would do is to give you perhaps some context, because my particular responsibilities are in the vocational technical area, Julie Bishop has schools and universities, my comments will be particularly focussed today on the VET area, but it has got wider implications. I do think the shift to sort of multiskilling that has taken place for individuals that have skill sets that sometimes cross the traditional boundaries between trades, the para-professions and the professions.
I think it does blur to some extent the distinctions between the three levels, and that's increasingly happening not just in these disciplines but in so many disciplines. You see it, in particular, in electronics and specialised areas of manufacturing, but it's true across so many areas. I recall even my first occupation, too long ago to remember, but I was a stock inspector for three years while I did economics in Victoria.
I was doing post mortems on cattle in paddocks and all sorts of things, working with just about every type of livestock disease issues, often trying to identify why things had died. Sometimes there was compensation and all the rest, but having done three years of a Diploma of Agricultural Science and having acquired a certain level of skills and knowledge and then working as a practitioner in the field, every time something significant would come along, such as a major disease scare, the veterinarians would move in and we would become the sort of drivers.
I remember it was immensely frustrating to me I hadn't been trained as a veterinarian, but I had a lot of the skill sets and more practical knowledge that I was acquiring, and in many ways it drove me to finish my economics degree and move to other things because I found I hit the ceiling there all the time. Now I'm seeing, I think, there's an important and good development.
There is this blurring starting to take place. There is more of a continuum that is now being developed, so I think all of you need to be aware of and take advantage of that, because it gets back to what John was saying in the previous address. He talked about TAFE and universities and the pathway between the two.
I agree with John, you know, not a lot has happened in that area. But I think it is more for institutional structural reasons than for the good sense of it happening. I do think, given that the nature of the workforce and all the issues that we're confronting and what a modern economy dictates about current economy, I do think we have to foster this sort of continuum rather than have boxes for trades, paraprofessionals and professionals. You know, I might have still been in science if I hadn't witnessed in a very early stage of my career what I saw as to be a very fixed ceiling on me doing things that extended me and interested me and enabled me to fully utilise what I thought was the skill set I had.
I thought I would particularly focus my comments and contribution on the context of federal government policy at least towards skills shortages so that you who are involved in so many wonderful institutions around the country can just see at least the framework that we are trying to work to create. I think that is the role of government, to create a framework. I think individuals and organisations are far better placed to find, often, the solutions, so long as we can clearly create an appropriate framework.
Fundamentally, we have got a labour shortage. Ever since I got into these responsibilities in February, I keep hearing about a skills crisis. Well, there is a real skills problem, but it is driven, not wholly, but largely, by a labour shortage. There is a wider dimension to the skills issue, but we have first and foremost got a labour shortage problem. I'll give you a sense of that. I was just looking at the numbers the other day for May, the workplace figures.
We've created in this country 66,000 new jobs in May, over 2000 jobs a day on average, both new jobs and in addition to what was already out there. 94 per cent of them were full time. Again, I looked at what's happening in the availability of people in the workplace. In the month of May, on average, every day, 530 more people came into the 15 to 64 year old bracket than left it. So we had an increase every day of 530 people. That's about 16,000. That's 66,000 new jobs, 16,000 new people to do that work. And not all of those 16,000 who came in would be in the workforce.
Now, every other month is not quite the same, but there was a prime example of the problem that we've got. You know, if we think it's difficult now, if you look at Peter Costello's intergenerational report, the second one just recently released, it assumes 530 people at the moment coming in, that includes migration, skilled migration, and all the rest, more coming in than leaving, retiring, whatever, 530 on average a day now, 160 in eight years time. Now that is dramatic.
That's with high levels of immigration we've got now. Bear in mind, 10 years ago we had 75,000 people coming in and a family skill mix. Now we've got, last year 100,000 came in as permanent skilled migrants, with families, another 35,000 families associated with those 100,000. Then we had 40,000 temporary skilled migrants coming in for four year terms, many of whom will stay on to become permanent residents.
And we had 30,000 refugees. So we've gone from 75,000 migrants to last year close to 200,000, and we'll do 200,000 again this year, because temporary skilled migrants are doing 20,000, 40,000 and probably closer to 80,000 this year. So we are dramatically ramping it up, and yet we still have 530 a day compared with 66,000 new jobs. That still assumes that sort of pattern of migration off into the future, and we'll get 160 a day in eight years time.
So, what you're planning and considering and all the rest of it, you know, it's going to become a bit large in the years ahead. It is an OECD phenomena. It's not just restricted to our country. It is certainly restricted to the developed world, but not just to our country. The significance of that is that often when we drew lots of skilled migrants in the past from a lot of cultures not that dissimilar to ours, a lot of European cultures.
They might have had different languages, but culturally, they were not that far apart. There's a new dimension to that. A lot of the people we're bringing in now are great people but they come from cultures far wider and far further apart. It brings a whole set of other issues into this whole equation. But, you know, it just means a whole new dimension, again, which I think many of you need to accommodate because many of the skilled workers that are coming in gravitate and are well placed to be part of the teaching force out there and to also be part of the professions that we're talking about here today.
I think the three things that are really driving this labour shortage and, in turn, contributing to the skills shortage, is now over 14 years of uninterrupted economic growth, which is a phenomena not true to Europe, but it is true to here. It is not even true to the US. They were in recession in 2000.
That is a major factor which is putting a lot of pressure on the ageing population, which we were now was coming, but it only really started to manifest itself this century as the bubble of the baby boomers worked its way through and has now emerged. I think also the profound and unexpected emergence of China and India. Put those three things together, it has created a skills demand but also a competitive demand in our economy which we have to be mindful of both those factors as we move forward.
The China and India thing can't be underestimated in terms of its impact especially on a lot of the engineering demands and the rest. I did a lot of work in 2000 and 2001 with a lot of big mining companies, North West Shelf project, a lot of gas projects in particular with other things in Thailand and elsewhere with BHP, Rio, Chevron and Shell, different projects with these different companies, and I was doing strategic work with them.
And I had access to often buildings full of boffins with Shell and Chevron, and I visited these, and they had literally floors of people whose job it was to estimate what was the demand and likely supply of energy, total energy in the next two years, five years, 10 years, 50 years. Very sophisticated work with companies that are in every part of the world. I can tell you, in 2000 2001, there was no sense within all of that work with all of those people of what we have subsequently seen with China and India, the profound emergence. There was no sense of that.
The oil companies and the resource companies had no sense of it, you know, we shouldn't all be lipping ourselves too much. We've got a problem, we've got to deal with it, we've got to be aware of it, but it has emerged, and if there's any comfort, there are a lot of people confronting the same sort of issues that you're confronting, not just in Australia but elsewhere. We have got a new set of problems, so the more aggressive you are in trying to deal with it, the chances are you'll get an edge on how to deal with it. Often if you're realistic about the problem, you're halfway to solving it and not just doing some incremental and marginal sort of responses.
To me, and the government, for that matter, there is no real silver bullet. Often we will look for a silver bullet when you have a problem, and invariably, whether it is business, politics or family, for that matter, usually there's a whole lot of issues that have to be done when you've got an issue to solve. It is the government's conclusion that dealing with the labour shortage and internal skills shortage requires action on a whole bunch of policy fronts across a lot of different portfolios. I think, you know, particularly since Peter Costello's intergenerational report about five years ago, a lot of what we've done in a policy sense since then, actually most of the big initiatives have really been directed at getting this labour shortage issue and the competitive issue thrown up by India and China. There are great opportunities in India and China, but there are enormous threats also.
I was in Shanghai 18 months ago and went out to see a car plant they had just finished building just on the edge of Shanghai. It was a car plant that could turn out a million cars a year. I'm talking to the people who manage the show and said, "What's your next big challenge now you've done this magnificent thing and all the rest?", and they said, "Well, this has gone so well and we've still got everybody here and put it together, we thought we might go to 2 million cars a year while we're at it".
I got back to the hotel that night and thought there's probably three or four other car companies, Chinese car companies in China at that time deciding whether they go from 1 million a year to 2 million cars a year. You know, the potential to swamp us and I had a bit to do with the Mitsubishi expansion over many years. It took about eight years to go for an extra 220,000 cars a year in South Australia. All of a sudden, the potential to swamp us is enormous. I got back to my patch in Victoria and I'm looking at the export statistics out of Victoria, the second biggest manufacture of car components, so the potential to swamp us with finished products is there, but huge opportunities.
So, what I'm saying is, you know, we've got a whole new environment. It's not just cheap labour up there. It's very sophisticated stuff happening, as you know probably much better than I do, many of you. So it's got this environment, not just the labour shortage but also what skill sets we've got and how to respond and be very quick on our feet and fast on our feet. I think a lot of what you do in terms of encouraging these disciplines, it's also how you encourage them and what skill sets and how they can be responsive and how there can be a little operation in Victoria, a little manufacturing plant that has previously sent plastic moulding for cars for a finished product which is now getting that done in China but adding value back here and sending the product back again. How do we keep ramping up that skill set to deal with the technology needs of this new modern 21st century environment?
The sort of work we've done, the welfare to work legislation, this is highly critical. I'll come back to it in a second. The tax changes over the years, the superannuation changes, the interaction between tax and welfare payments. The workforce reform, the independent contractor legislation, the skilled migration program and a raft of initiatives, particularly in education and training. All these things intercept.
I'm finding often the workplace relations reforms are as central to delivering new training opportunities and all the rest as some of the more specific, you know, dollars on training. They all intercept in this new environment. I think you've got to look more broadly, because, again, the point the John raised about, you know, TAFEs and universities, there's plenty of will and there's plenty of people who see the commonsense of it, but there are really structural issues stopping progress, and I'll come back to that again.
To meet these labour and skills shortages, the government has been working really on three broad fronts, and I'll talk about it as it relates to more my area, but we really have been working on three broad fronts to deal with the labour shortage and skills shortage. The first one is we're seeking to get anyone who can work into work or to stay in work. It sounds like a pretty simple proposition, but it is a pretty important objective. To get anyone who can work into work or to stay in work.
The fact of the matter is we have got 700,000 people on disability pensions. Many of those can't work, but hundreds of thousand, I put to you, could work, would love to work, can't do full days, have got a capacity, there own self esteem, everything else, would be enormously advantaged by them getting into the workforce, but they don't work at the moment 700,000. We've got 750,000 on parenting payments, many of them want to work, could work, many can't, they've got little kids. Many have got kids up to 16, can't get back into the workforce because they can't work full time, and there aren't opportunities, and there's a cultural sort of block, in many cases.
A lot of these things are cultural more than anything else. We've got 490,000 people still on unemployment benefits, despite having, you know, very low levels of unemployment. This just proves to me again the interaction of policy across all sorts of areas. In the last 12 months, 22 per cent of long term unemployed have found jobs. Now that has usually been a very sticky sort of number. Very hard to get people into jobs. A lot of them have been trained and trained and trained in order to keep getting the goal, they're trained and trained, but they still can't get jobs.
The last figure saw a 22 per cent reduction in the long term unemployed. My observation is, and I've had a lot to do with small business, the unfair dismissal laws going for people under 100 has now made it worthwhile for companies to take the risk of employing somebody who they think would be all right but because they've never had a job, they're 28 and have never worked, they're not prepared previously to take the risk of $30,000 go away money, that is not attractive it, they can't afford it. But now they can take the risk, if it doesn't work out, they can move them on, so overwhelmingly, it's working out, as you'd expect.
We've got 3 million people between the ages of 55 and 70. Again, John talked about this. In your area, how you keep them on in different capacities as coaches and mentors and in other capacities. We've got a growing indigenous population in a lot of mining areas and other areas. Its capacity is young and growing very significantly. It is the only area that is really growing significantly. There are real opportunities.
We've got all these significant pockets of untapped resources , huge, hundreds of thousand. If you add them all up, the ones who probably are available across all those numbers I've talked about, there's probably, you know, well in excess of a million people who are and could be gainfully employed in some way or other but it requires often just a cultural change to tap into those and to provide an opportunity for them to come and do the work.
The second broad front that we have sought to deal with is to encourage those entering the workforce to value technical and vocational and creative training, to see it as important, to see it as fulfilling. Now, I think we made a huge mistake 20 to 30 years ago when we started to talk down the trades. We suggested that unless you went to universities, you somehow or other were a second class citizen. We have got to the point now where a lot of parents out there still feel they're failures if their kids don't go to university. And yet, the fact is, that we're all born with some level of academic skills, but most of us are born with stronger technical, vocational or creative skills an academic skills. That's a fact of life.
In the workforce, the current modern workforce, it is estimated that we need 20 per cent of the workforce with university qualifications going forward to deal with the sort of climate we've got and the opportunities and threats. We'll need about 60 per cent with a good quality technical or vocational qualification.
Currently we have got about 20 per cent for university, that is roughly in balance, the university qualifications, but we've got 30 per cent of the workforce with a good quality technical qualification, not 60 per cent. There's a huge gap there. My assessment is a lot of it is driven by this sort of cultural attitude, again, towards technical and vocational occupations. It is changing, but it is really quite critical, I think, that we turn this around so that people do enthusiastically and positively embrace opportunities.
Many schools I go to, the teachers tell me if the young people haven't sort of shown some interest in the trades in particular I think the same thing is now applying to things like maths and sciences if they don't show an interest by year 10, you've lost them. You know, years 11 and 12, it's too late. They've already got most of them, the teachers are telling me, they've already been conditioned to a certain set of opportunities out there.
So, you know, I don't know what you've been talking about, no doubt, this is coming up, but I think a lot of this has to do with parents and parents experiences. If they haven't had any experience with the trades, as many haven't, if they haven't had any experience with science and maths, and it's been talked down for 20 to 30 years and some of that is true of science as well. You know, it's lost its lustre.
All of you in the room are leaders. A lot of this, to me, is actually what we say. We get out there and proudly and positively and constructively say these are really important things. “These are talents had you've been born with, for God's sake don't waste them. You've got to make the most of them. You'll be happiest if you exploit what you've been given, what God's given you has talents, whether it's creative, it's technical, vocational or academic, you've got a responsibility to make the most of those talents, and you, as parents don't steer your kids into things they're not good at, because they should do what they do best”.
That's the sort of message that often people like myself in government or yourselves as leaders in institutions around the country don't underestimate the power of a message. You give people the right message, they are very well equipped to deal with it and exploit it and assess it and analyse it and act on it. You don't have to force the action. We have to, I think, create the right framework and mindset.
One of the reasons we've set up technical high schools around the country, which is something you'd be well aware of, not to take over technical education at secondary level, but we have now created and have in place 20 Australian technical colleges, years 11 and 12. They get the year 12 certificate, a third of a way through an apprenticeship, two years in the workforce, and an environment, most importantly, in their years 11 and 12 years, which is focussed very deliberately on developing the technical and vocational skills those young people have been born with rather than being a tack on to an academic education, rather than being almost an elective.
Now, there's nothing wrong with a lot of very good vocational courses that are introducing people to technical areas in a lot of schools, but, clearly, some kids from a very early age have outstanding technical skills and they should be developed and promoted. That's why we think closing the high schools, technical high schools, you know, they were everywhere when I was a kid, has been a very big mistake. We are trying to get back to a point where people in the community see that a high quality technical education is as valued as a university education. If that's what you're good at, go for it, you'll make a huge contribution to the community and to yourself, and it should be and is as valued as a university qualification.
Now, finally, the third area that we are focusing on as a government. I think this is a really critical one, given the nature of the competitive environment we face and a lot of the Generation Y issues that are coming through and all the rest. We need to build a culture conducive to training and retraining for topping up of skills of existing members of the workforce. Again, it's a cultural issue. Almost the whole three of these areas I'm talking about, when I look at it, more and more, what's holding things back and what's locking it in to this disadvantaged situation, is a cultural mindset, a mindset that, maybe for good reasons originally, has developed.
In this area, you know as well as I do, that many people feel that you do your training at the end of secondary school and that's it. The rest of anything you pick up is experience in the workplace. This mindset, especially in small and medium business managers and owners out there, they feel they've failed if they have to have their workforce trained or they have to be trained. They think they've done something wrong because, you know, they haven't been able to shape their workplace to accommodate the skills the person they employed has. We've got to turn it around so that people see, "I've failed as a manager if I'm not constantly looking to upskill my workforce and myself for that matter".
So, again, I think it's a really cultural thing. We've got 3.4 million of the workforce who haven't finished school or have no technical training of any consequence. That's over a third of the workforce. They have really no formal training. I think this is a really significant thing, because so much of the response to the labour shortage, as there has been for 150 years, it's not a new phenomenon, it has just really accelerated in the last few years for various reasons so much of the response will be industry substituting technology for workforce, but as we do that, the existing workforce has to be able to cope with that technology and deal with that technology and use that technology.
I was out at a really it really came as an enormous enlightenment, I suppose, three or four weeks ago, I was with my wife in the Northern Territory. I used to be on the Cattle Council of Australia, it's a lobby group for cattlemen. I've got a lot of friends on big cattle stations. I went out to see one fellow and his wife. My wife and I, we went out for a drink, and the place is a 20 minute off the road to get to the homestead. That's just the horse paddock, it's about 10,000 acres. He's got about 8000 head of cattle.
We drove in on Saturday afternoon, and I didn't see any horses. I said to him, "I didn't see any horses. Where are all the horses? Have you shifted them?". He said, "No, there's not a horse on the cattle station. Not one horse. We used to have about 150, 200 horses for mustering". And then we had a drink and were looking around and he said, "I've got to take you down to the yards, I've got this wonderful cattle crush".
We go down to the yards and here’s this $400,000 cattle crush, all singing, all dancing. He started it up, the technology is unbelievable. There's a key pad that drives the whole thing. The cattle crush, you've got hundreds of head of cattle each day going through the yards, you're doing all sorts of things to them. The cattle crush, you lead them through all sorts of races, lots of things happen, gates open and shut, until you get individual cattle into a metal crush with bars across their neck to hold them in place while you do all sorts of sometimes unfortunate things to the animals, ear tag them, whatever.
It's quite a dangerous business, labour intensive over the years. He has one person on a key pad, and dogs and another person working all the cattle in the yards. His son is 40, and he and his son run the place. He's up the front doing the mouthing and all the rest. Everything is driven from this key pad. There's no horses. All the mustering is by helicopter and by aircraft.
I said to him, "Where are all the people? Where's the stockmen? I haven't seen any stockmen or ringers", as they're called out there. He said, "I don't have any ringers any more. My whole workforce are backpackers, German and Swiss". Here we are, out in the middle of the Northern Territory. I said, "Where's the romance? It's gone out of the cattle industry". It was unbelievable. That's where it's moved. If that's where things have moved on a cattle station in Central Australia, two hours north of Alice Springs, what's happening in every little place around the country, every manufacturing operation, et cetera, et cetera?
He's there enthusiastically talking about using the backpacker market. He knew the market back to front. He had contacts overseas, he had it all beaten, and he was very happy with it and was able to introduce them to little training exercises when they first arrived. They got three months or six months out of them and ran a cattle station with 8000 head of cattle. Very profitable.
So it just shows you what's happening out there, and you know, his training operation is fundamentally different. The skill sets he needs to maintain his $400,000 cattle crush and to maintain his helicopters and his light aircraft, the skill sets needed in Alice Springs and Katherine are quite different from the skill sets that were needed even 15 years ago in Central Australia. This is happening all around. There is a revolution going on, and it's always been the case, but it has been accelerated by that conjunction of things I mentioned at the start.
I think we have to have that overlay, this urgency. We can't just sort of limp along and say, "How are going to respond to some of this?" If you do understand and can convey that urgency and that bigger picture, I think it's remarkable how the people that, you know, you're working with and are working to you and all the rest will respond. They'll work it out, what to do, they just have to understand that there's a time frame and urgency and all the rest.
I'll just finish off with a couple of comments really relating to that third, critical area, this training of people in the existing workforce. A lot is happening at the lower levels with those coming into the workforce, and it always can be improved. But there's a lot of focus there, and a lot of really good and innovative things happening. But it is in this existing workforce, you know, I don't know if you go to Bunnings these days. But, I used to hate going to the hardware store when I had to renovate houses when you didn't have enough money. I never knew what I was doing, I didn't know quantities, quality, anything. You go to Bunnings nowadays, it's full of former tradesmen.
They've got an explicit policy of finding people with 30 years experience who's bodies no longer allow them to crawl around a roof and do plumbing and all the other things they used to do. They give them four weeks training in retail, new skills attached to there old skills, and here you've got a whole lot of people who were going to retire at 50 or 55, they're still there for another 10 or 15 years, loyal, effective, motivated, and all the rest of it. But, mostly, they know what they're talking about, and it's a wonderful experience when you go there and they've got the flexibility.
If one fellow says, "Well, I really was going to take two months holiday in the caravan with my wife and do the usual thing at this stage of life", sure, go and do it. Come back after two months, "I want to do two days a week on the golf course", no problem, three days a week for you. That is the whole mindset. They've got a deliberate strategy to tap into a very experienced older workforce.
Now, that sort of thing, again, is, to me, a prime example, and it is adding skill sets. There's no attitude you've got to have a course and you've got to do it early on and it's three or four years and it's a double degree. You know, what is happening around the country is that managers and companies, they want their existing workforce, they might have 34 people, they want them to cope with a new set of technology to have another skill. A year later perhaps another skill, but they don't want a 12 month course. They want someone to come in, often into their workplace, and deliver a particular skill set, to upgrade whatever the people have got in their operation.
We saw this week in the census, can you believe it, the number of people involved in TAFE education declined in the last five years at a time when we've got the problems we've got. And yet, what it didn't pick up in the census is the explosion that has taken place amongst private training organisations and in house training organisations who are delivering these skill sets. The big challenge is to make sure if everyone acquires these different little blocks of skills that they are accredited and they can build, so people do develop a qualification over time. We've got this flexibility, horses for courses.
I think it is a big challenge for us, at every level of education to get to this building blocks approach, far more flexible, it meets the immediate needs of particular workplaces, it is demand driven, not supply driven. Not, "Here we are, you take it or leave it". What do you want? Where do you want it? How do you want it? Now we've got the technology so much can be done online, so much can be done in the workplace.
The mining industry said two weeks ago in the Financial Review overwhelmingly they have moved away from TAFE. We’ve got this wonderful investment in TAFE around the country. A super investment, great people in these TAFEs, they are all handcuffed, because of mountains of regulation. I talked to the TAFEs. The only state that has it Victoria in the 1990s freed up TAFEs and gave them autonomy, not dissimilar to universities. Those TAFEs are just jumping out of their skin.
They went from the back of the pack to the front in terms of TAFE education. 60 per cent of all international students in TAFE in Victoria. A lot of the invasion and the demand driven stuff is coming out of that because the people who are running those organisations are given the freedom to manage their business and not be hide bound by bureaucratic, centralised structure dictating everything.
In New South Wales, if the head of the TAFE wants to go to Malaysia to go to a conference to try and talk about a deal, he has to get ministerial approval for the air flight. Now, this is the sort of nonsense that, you know, in a modern economy, if you want to be able to link TAFEs with universities with a dual campus operation, which I think is critical, we've got to allow them to run their businesses. We've got to allow them to appoint their own staff, to enter partnerships, to retain revenue, to purchase capital items, to run tailored training programs in the workplace and to negotiate flexible workplaces. All these things, the continuum of normal business responsibilities.
I do think the biggest factor on reform we've got in the whole education sector is to provide much greater autonomy to this great TAFE resource. We've got for it to breathe life back into our TAFE sector so we can take advantage of a great resource of so many people. This is constraining a lot of the opportunities again, it's very important to look at the topic you've got here today. How do you get people to acquire and have an interest and engage in the disciplines you're talking about if you haven't got one big part of that resource that can stimulate and cultivate and provide that training? It's hands are tied, so that they are not able to respond to industry demands or demands of individuals.
I think I'll just leave you with that thought. This is the area, to me, that requires the greatest attention in terms of structural and other change. There are lots of things to be done. Could I just conclude. There are sort of four things I really tried to get across. First, I think we need to foster a cultural change which restores the standing of the technical and vocational training. Secondly, I think we need to foster a cultural change to see training and education as part of a complete working life. Thirdly, I think we need to foster a cultural change to see the possibilities for a continued contribution well into later life. Finally, to deliver all this, I think we've got to move away, not just in terms of TAFE, it's true in many sectors, but from the four walls classroom approach to education, away from the supply driven, historical model, to very much a responsive and flexible demand driven approach, which sees every education experience as a building block approach to acquiring training and qualifications. Thanks very much.
QUESTIONS
MALE SPEAKER: I think TAFE has taken on some of the challenges you talked about. I've got teachers in the water industry all over New South Wales, …(inaudible)... We've got teachers in Newcastle training people, that's kind of happening. But one of the things I think is missing is that we talk about the trades, we talk about higher education, we talk about schools supplying higher education and the trades, but a lot of people who need science and engineering skills are operators in the industry, they are …(inaudible)… cement works, a lot of the processes in manufacturing areas. One of the areas I look after, I look after …(inaudible)… industries for New South Wales.
That's where we need a lot of training. We need more educators and people in the higher education sector to get involved with that in developing training packages. I've got a book here on the …(inaudible)… the explosion at the Esso plant in 1998. Victoria was without gas for two weeks. The royal commission found that it was a basic lack of training, in particular, in understanding physics and chemistry of the plant at the operator level.
A couple of years later, the National Centre for Vocational Education and Research published a report on new skills, what are we going to need for people in the future who work in paint factories cement works or whatever. What was indicated was basic physics and chemistry. So there's a need to find not just putting funding and knowledge into vocational training, but a broader knowledge, to make people more transportable across the sectors. So I think that's a challenge to this group, bringing it back to science, there's a definite need for the operators who are considered trades and many of them still don't have qualifications.
There are many people who have been in the workforce for 20 years and all they've got is a certificate, but …(inaudible)... They're the people that we need to get to, and we need not just the HR people to get involved with training package development, but we need the universities and the professionals within the industry to take a real interest in developing training packages and vocational workforce training.
ANDREW ROBB: Yes, look, I need to respond to a couple of points. I accept that things are happening in TAFEs around the country, but it is snail's pace. I'm telling you, there is an urgency about this. I'm talking now of people individually running TAFEs all over. There is a deep, deep frustration. National industries want national responses, national solutions. They come to a TAFE, they're very happy with what a TAFE might provide them locally, TNT, or one of these organisations, they say, "Right, we want to do this around the country".
TAFEs then look, from Victoria, for instance, to go and replicate that joint partnerships, provide a seamless and identical service to the companies that they're providing for. That's impossible. The bureaucratic hurdles to jump just make it totally an impossibility to consider that.
So what happens? You get the mining industry, who used to be, you know, great users of TAFE, and still respect what's there. They say, "We've got a revolution happening on our doorstep. China and India have emerged in a way that no one ever thought of, even ourselves, who are out there, the resource companies. We want somebody who can drive a shovel". Shovel operators in the mines are very important. It's like a quarterback.
They really dictate the whole activity of the mine. "We want a shovel operator.", "Yes, we can do it, but they've got to do a four year course. Come down to Perth and we'll sort it out". No. What do they do? They go to a private provider or they build in house capacity, it's the same thing, go and poach the lecturers from TAFE and other places and they teach these people as a highly technical shovel operator. A year later they might do another skill, and another skill and another skill, and, ultimately, if you add these up, as I was saying, they've got the broader qualification and are running a mine in 20 years time. But, until we get that mindset, we are under-utilising and devaluing.
We're building an alternate sort of structure out there, albeit under the radar, when we've got this huge investment and expertise and resource that we should be using. That's my frustration, I've got to say. I do think the point about the training packages, there's a lot of really good work that has gone on, cooperative work between the feds and the states and industry with all of the skills councils and the training.
We're the envy of the world in terms of our national training. Again, there's more to be done, but, again, if you give this really flexible delivery of training, the companies and others will be dictating in a very aggressive way, "This is what we want, these are the skill sets". Rio last year, 20,000 people apply for 1000 jobs. The capacity for Rio to say, "We want people who've got science, maths, whatever, depending on what the sort of areas we want them", there's great capacity for industry to dictate both what they need and to line up training and the training packages and all the rest.
CONVENOR: Thanks very much.