Subjects: VET; apprentices.
EO&E………………………………………………………………………………………………………………………….
STEVE PRICE:
Yes indeed, Danny’s in the studio, great to have you with us again.
DANNY BIELIK:
I’m really well Steve, how are you?
STEVE PRICE:
Good, two days to go until the Federal election. We’ve had a lot of discussion probably over the last four or five weeks now about various policies. Particularly though we keep getting asked about what are the two sides’ policies on apprenticeships and a lot of our callers call and say they would like to get back to apprenticeships being an important way of training people outside of university. We have a lot of discussion about TAFE and about how people want the TAFE system strengthened. We’ve had both state ministers – New South Wales and Victoria on the program in recent weeks, and the Labor party have put out a policy on jobs and training that you’ve looked through and highlighted some of their highlights. What do you think is the best part of that policy?
DANNY BIELIK:
Yeah look I mean the Labor party have no doubt put out a really comprehensive set of policies. Some good, some bad in my opinion. I think in my opinion the Tools For Your Trade program I actually think was a good policy. This was about giving a $3000 grant to people as they progress through their apprenticeship –
STEVE PRICE:
Why can’t you buy your own tools?
DANNY BIELIK:
Well you can. But you’re trying to get these people up on their feet and out. I prefer that to-
STEVE PRICE:
No-one gave me any money to buy anything when I started work.
DANNY BIELIK:
Right now they get access to a $20,000 dollar loan which they then have to pay back.
STEVE PRICE:
No-one gave me any money to buy anything when I started work. No-one bought me a suit or gave me biros to write my columns.
DANNY BIELIK:
I think –
STEVE PRICE:
Are you ignoring me?
DANNY BIELIK:
I’m not ignoring you.
STEVE PRICE:
Why is it a good policy that the taxpayer should pay for someone’s toolkit?
DANNY BIELIK:
Because we need more people with trades in the market right now. There are a lot of skill shortages, a lot of people have been sucked out of trades because of the decline in apprenticeship[s and because of the great growth in the university sector, which is where a lot of people should be –
STEVE PRICE:
I’ve got no evidence for this, but isn’t that easily rorted? Go and get some tools and then go and flog them off?
DANNY BIELIK:
No, I think it probably isn’t because you’ve got to be pretty serious about it to go through a three or four year apprenticeship and you know, you’re getting this money as you progress through. I think it’s better than what we’re doing right now. That’s my point, and my point is that right now, we’ve got a $20,000 loan program where people can borrow it and people can use it for whatever they like, it doesn’t have to be tools.
STEVE PRICE:
Okay, I think a lot of money in those sectors is and has been wasted. So the Federal Government has to go to the election on the weekend. Are you clear on what their policy on apprenticeships and TAFE and vocational education and training is?
DANNY BIELIK:
No, but we’ve managed to get the minister, Senator Scott Ryan from Victoria –
STEVE PRICE:
Minister for Vocational Education and Skills. Senator, good evening.
SCOTT RYAN:
G’day Steve, g’day Danny.
STEVE PRICE:
Does that Tool for Your Trade scheme work?
SCOTT RYAN:
Well I actually disagree with Danny and I’d like to explain why. The current scheme is a loan, up to $20,000 dollars, over 40,000 have been taken out. I’ve met quite a few people who’ve used it. The fact that you do borrow it actually, I think, puts a bit of a break on inappropriate use. I’ve met people in Southern Queensland people doing building and carpentry; they had to do a lot of travel. First year apprenticeship wages aren’t great you know, they have some costs. And so this helps them with travel costs, keeping the car, filling it with petrol. The important thing is though that if you do take out the $20,000 loan under the Coalition’s scheme, and you complete your apprenticeship, you actually get 20 percent of the loan amount, up to $4000 dollars taken off. So it’s actually worth more than Labor’s policy of up to $3000 dollars and it’s loaded towards actually completing it.
DANNY BIELIK:
It’s an important point actually, because I’ve been talking about this sort of thing – Minister it’s Danny Bielik here – and they call that loan extinguishment and a number of countries do this, particularly the Netherlands and I think that there’s room to do a lot more of that sort of thing. People finish something, they actually qualify in something and the government pays off a bit of their loan. I think it’s a really, really good idea. But in the Tools for your Trade – you guys took this program that was already out there and you deleted it in favour of this $20,000 dollar loan. Did you have some data that said that Tools for Your Trade wasn’t working?
SCOTT RYAN:
I’ll be honest, I was in a different area at the time and I can’t attest to that. That was made a couple of years ago, that decision. But we have had these sort of loans in place in other parts of government. And just with my experience in this role since the start of the year, when I’ve met students and apprentices, they’ve said that the flexibility of this – you know, they can borrow up to certain limits, but they can access more money when they really need it at the start of their apprenticeship, particularly if they’re in an apprenticeship that involves a lot of travel. Because as we know, first year apprenticeship wages aren’t particularly high. That’s the training component. So I think ours has flexibility. But importantly, if you do complete – and it has that incentive to completion – it’s actually worth more than Labor’s Tools For Your Trade, which is only $3,000 dollars.
DANNY BIELIK:
So how big, can I ask you, you know we’ve been, Steve and I have been doing this show for nearly four years now and my gut feeling about the number of calls that we take on this show, the hottest issue across those four years has been apprenticeships. How big an issue do you see apprenticeships being in the next term of government?
SCOTT RYAN:
Apprenticeships are particularly important. I mean, I think one of the things that was done over the last thirty or forty years – and I think particularly the start of the 80s – when I finished school in 1990, and John Howard spoke about this, there has been a devaluing of vocational education, on-the-job training and the classic apprenticeship. There is occasionally when we talk about apprenticeships at the policy level, that’s the broader term., It includes a lot more than of course, just what we’ll call the classic trade apprenticeship which people are familiar with, such as plumber or maybe even something that’s traditionally done by an apprenticeship that’s not licenced, like a chef. It also includes a lot of things that people would refer to in common terminology as traineeships.
STEVE PRICE:
Well I did a cadetship at a newspaper that lasted four years.
SCOTT RYAN:
Exactly, and so I think when people talk about apprenticeships, they talk about what we’ll call classic apprenticeships, or licenced trades or things like electrician or things like chef. I think they’re particularly important because the vocational training sector has gone through some challenges recently and still is. Damage caused by the VET FEE- HELP rorts are, has been I think immense. It will be a couple of years of working through that.
STEVE PRICE:
Are you on top of that yet, do you think?
SCOTT RYAN:
Changes were announced last year and were put in place so far, the court actions we’re undertaking with the ACCC; there was a police action earlier this year. I am confident that we’ve got the most egregious abuses under control, but it needs legislative change.
DANNY BIELIK:
You look and I think you’re right, but to be honest Minister, I actually want to bring this back to apprenticeships –
SCOTT RYAN:
Yeah of course.
DANNY BIELIK:
Because I think this is really the hottest issue, and I also have to call out the politicians of Australia who talk down the training sector and I heard Bill Shorten do it this week in a really dreadful way, and it turns off Mums and Dads and it scares them, so I’d really like to hear from you. You know, a lot of support for vocational education and training and to be honest you know, you’re the fourth skills minister in the last two years as well, so I’d like to see some support from the government in this really important area. And to see some, not just policy stability, but also executive stability in terms of the Minister in charge.
SCOTT RYAN:
Well I think there were a similar number through with the Labor party.
DANNY BIELIK:
Oh, 100 per cent. Carr, Emerson, Bowen and Evans, in 2013. One year.
SCOTT RYAN:
What’s that, sorry?
DANNY BIELIK:
In one year we had Kim Carr, we had Craig Emerson, we had Chris Bowen and we had Chris Evans in one year, 2013.
SCOTT RYAN:
It’s an area – when I received the job in February someone said to me it’s an area, and pointed out to me that there had been this instability. I think you’re right to say that we do need to talk about the positives. One of the things that’s happened here, not just through the damage that happened through VET FEE-HELP, which I think was significant, there were problems with the TAFE situation in Victoria back in 2009, 2010, when that was opened up it caused quite a few problems. But politics generally seems to focus a bit on the negative, and so there has been a lot more negative discussion about vocational training than when you have similar challenges in other areas. I will say however that there hasn’t been a lot of negative discussion about apprenticeships and the value. SO I think that’s one of the reasons that the public still values them.
DANNY BIELIK:
Minister we’ve got 3.9 million students enrolled in accredited training in one year in Australia. So it’s a lot of the population in this really important area –
SCOTT RYAN:
Yeah, and over 70 percent…
(Interrupted)
DANNY BIELIK:
Yeah, you better believe it.
SCOTT RYAN:
And over 70 per cent of employers are satisfied.
DANNY BIELIK:
And they are happy. They are happy. The employers are happy, and the people are happy. So this is a positive story.
STEVE PRICE:
(inaudible) people ring up and say they can’t get apprentices.
DANNY BIELIK:
And this is the problem, so the employers are ringing us. They are not ringing – they might be ringing your office. But they are absolutely ringing us every Wednesday night on 53 stations around Australia. Yet, we have seen these apprenticeship numbers tick down – not tick down but actually plummet.
STEVE PRICE:
What is the example of that?
DANNY BIELIK:
Let me give you an example – and you will be familiar with this out of the Sydney Morning Herald early this week. If we look at somewhere like the electorate of Patterson which is in the Central Coast of New South Wales, we have had some really good apprenticeship numbers there – 3,000 of them, in 2013 1,944 down 36 per cent. Chisolm in Victorian which is the Melbourne suburbs of Box Hill and Burwood, Anna Burke’s seat, 38 per cent decline. So these are massive numbers going down. Hindmarsh 47 per cent.
SCOTT RYAN:
It is important to, again, classify what we are talking about with apprentices here. Yes, there have been some significant drops. There were nine separate payments to employers to support Australian apprentices that were cut by the Labor Party – $1.2 billion worth in a couple of years. There was a 25 per cent drop in one year, the biggest ever drop, and that happened a couple of years ago. And that takes a while to get through the system. However, let’s also say there is some good news here. Because if we go to the what I will call the classic apprenticeships, what people would consider when you say ‘apprentice’. And if we go to the construction trades there has been an increase of 11 per cent in the number of people commencing an electrician apprenticeship. Construction trades commencements are up 35 per cent year on year.
STEVE PRICE:
Is that driven by the building boom, Scott?
SCOTT RYAN:
Agreed. But the key point there is…
(Interrupted)
DANNY BIELIK:
And it is people retraining as well Minister? It is people retraining out of the motor vehicle industry, the mining industry.
SCOTT RYAN:
It is some of that. But they do tend to be, well they are older than what they used to be. There are a lot more apprentices in their twenties. The key thing here, and this is what the Labor Party haven’t mentioned in any of their policies, every apprentice needs an employer. You can’t have a strong apprenticeships system without a strong business community. You are right, Steve, to say that there has been a continuing strong construction sector, but that means there are now more plumbers in training than at any point in the last decade. We are seeing an uptick in carpenters, joiners, electricians.
DANNY BIELIK:
So, Minister the Labor Party wants to give this a boost by saying that a fixed number, or percentage of workers on Commonwealth or Federally funded projects should be apprentices as well. Is that something you support to help get those numbers up?
SCOTT RYAN:
I am not inclined to head down that path for a couple of reasons. Firstly, there is a lot of double counting there. There is a lot of state governments – and remember that state governments do register most of these apprentices, and the state governments do most of the Commonwealth funded building work – they have those schemes in place. So I am not going to say ‘well, Victoria does 10 per cent, we’ll claim that 10 per cent and double count it as federal’. There is also another issue which is that I do not want to make it hard for businesses. If, for example, we have got a construction project that goes for 1 year or 18 months. How does a business, how do we guarantee training to a person for 3 to 4 years out of that?
DANNY BIELIK:
With respect, they did that here in New South Wales. The Lend Lease agreement that they did to create Barangaroo – and for the interstate listeners who have never seen Barangaroo go and google it, it is an unbelievable construction project – a set number was set aside for apprentices.
SCOTT RYAN:
I might say though that I think construction is something that for the way that the business model works, where you have a lot of sub –contractors that regularly do work for different companies. There is, I think, a stability of employment there that might be different to apprentices enrolled in road making where there might be a different labour market.
STEVE PRICE:
Have you been disappointed that this hasn’t been a bigger issue in the campaign? I know it is hard to get noise into an area like this. We find that on this program, when we talk about it that people really want to talk about it, but the wider community seem to not want to debate it.
SCOTT RYAN:
Look, I think it is fair to say that higher education gets more attention. That is a product of the fact that a lot of people involved in media and politics and government probably have a higher education background. It was one of the things that I was very aware of when I took on this role, aware of the limits of my own experience. But, the larger campaign debate around the strength of the economy I think is the most important thing to deal with apprentices. Because, I knew people who lost their apprenticeship in 1991 and 1992 in Victoria and South Australia, who were hit very hard in particular by the ‘recession we had to have’. Some people close to me. And if you do not have a strong economy, if you do not have a strong small and medium business sector, then you do not have apprentices. And I think Malcolm Turnbull’s campaign about strengthening small and medium business in particular, we know that a disproportionate number of apprentices work in that sector. So, I have been quite happy because we need to strengthen that to get more people through the system I will also say that I think this system needs a bit of stability after the radical cuts that came in under the Labor Party, those nine employment incentives. We have put in place the new support network with mentoring, that has been in place for a year. I do not want to make any rash judgements on it, I want to get some feedback from apprentices, employers, and parents and see what could be approved rather than throwing everything up in the air and starting again.
STEVE PRICE:
We appreciate you coming on, if you believe the bookies the Coalition will win on the weekend and what we would like to do is when you get back your feet under the desk, if indeed that happens, love you to drop in one Wednesday night in the studio and take calls from people about this very important issue.
SCOTT RYAN:
Yeah, would love to.
STEVE PRICE:
Good on you, thanks for your time tonight.
DANNY BIELIK:
Thanks Minister.
SCOTT RYAN:
Thanks Steve, thanks Danny.
(ENDS)