Question Time

WorldSkills Australia

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:01): My question is to the Minister for Education, Training and Skills. Will the minister commit to seeking to bring the WorldSkills Australia national finals to Adelaide at the first possible opportunity?

The Hon. B.I. BOYER (Wright—Minister for Education, Training and Skills) (15:02): I thank the member for Morialta for his question. I am very pleased to have an opportunity to update this place on the trip that the member for Morialta and I took just a couple of months ago to the United Kingdom and France.

Mr Whetstone: What did we miss?

The Hon. B.I. BOYER: You are just jealous of what we have got—you can say it; it's okay. I am pleased to have the opportunity to talk about the significance of the WorldSkills event, which I think I speak on behalf of both the member for Morialta and myself, and the South Australian Skills Commissioner, when I say the magnitude of the event took us all by surprise.

For those who are unfamiliar with it, it is an international competition for vocational education and training, for people who are in a VET profession to compete against other people like that from all around the world. There are countries represented from everywhere on the globe—China, Japan, Germany, the United States, all with very large contingents of primarily young people under 24 years of age who have won regional and then national finals in their home countries and then get a chance to go to wherever the international final is. This year was in Lyon.

The member for Morialta and I had the opportunity to attend the convention centre there, which, just to put it in a bit of perspective, has floor space about seven times the size of the Adelaide Convention Centre, and every square inch of that was being used for competitions in a really broad range of areas. I would like to list a few just to give people an idea of how immense this event is. There was electrotech, plumbing, patisserie, carpentry, floor tiling, hospitality, welding, fabrication, mechatronics, robotics, joinery, painting, decorating, landscape gardening, hospitality, renewable energy, bricklaying, cloud computing and fashion technology. That would be about half, perhaps a third, of the events that were on display there.

It was amazing for us to get the opportunity to spend a few days wandering around watching the competition. To give an example, in landscape gardening, parts of the convention centre were physically set up like enormous garden beds, and it was a live competition that was being judged by international judges, as people set out sand and rocks and all sorts of things. It was the same with patisserie, where we had a judge from Adelaide there as well in the patisserie section.

I think what really spoke to us most powerfully about the importance of the event, and I think why the member for Morialta has asked about whether or not we will do some work to try to attract the event here, is the day on which local schools were able to come and watch the events. The Lyon Convention Centre was absolutely packed with thousands and thousands of local school kids who had an opportunity to see people not much older than them have an chance to actually represent their country in a trade.

Sixteen thousand people were at the opening of the event. Macron himself opened the event, and all those competitors from every country got to come out dressed in their national colours and were welcomed, as they should be. Although in this place we often talk about not needing to go to university to have a great career, the truth is there is only so much we can say to convince a 15-year-old boy or girl around what they should do with their career. The opportunity to have a world skills event here where those young people can watch someone represent their country and potentially win a gold medal by performing to a world class and excellent standard in a trade is, I think, an incredibly powerful thing and something that I am certainly willing to consider.