Apprenticeships and Traineeships

The Hon. J.A.W. GARDNER (Morialta—Deputy Leader of the Opposition) (15:16): It is Halloween today and it is a time to be scared. Of course, one of the things scaring many young people in my community is whether or not they are going to be able to have their own home in the years ahead.

One of the big challenges, of course, as we seek to increase the availability of housing in our community, is the workforce there to build it. This week we had a big scare from Build Skills Australia who have done a significant body of work, one of the findings of which is that next year alone we will be about 20,000 workers short of supply in the construction, property and water industries. Indeed, that is set to get worse, certainly set to get worse under the settings of the current state and federal Labor governments.

Their modelling prediction shows that by June 2035 there will be a shortfall of greater than 47,000 workers. They note in their 2024 National Workforce Plan that the capacity of the skilling system to scale, in line with an increased demand for skilled labour, is in question.

This fits in very much with what we have seen over the last two years since this government came to power in the training skills, training and apprenticeship sector, where commencements increased each year under the former Liberal government to the point where between March 2021 and March 2022 there were 17,870 commencements of traineeships and apprenticeships in South Australia. That dipped after a year of Labor from 17,870 to 13,000. Then in the most recent figures, released a couple of weeks ago, it is down to 9,200—nearly a 50 per cent drop of traineeship and apprenticeship commencements.

That has had a flowthrough to the number of people in training, from 29,090 at its peak in 2022 at the change of government, down to 28,585 in training in March 2023 and then 24,765 in the most recent figures. That is set to continue going down every year under Labor, whereas the number of those apprentices increased every year under the stewardship of David Pisoni, the former skills minister. As those apprentices complete their apprenticeship, indeed some of them will potentially withdraw as well. As those people cease to be in apprenticeships the numbers of apprentices are coming down. It is hitting a range of sectors, including the construction trades where those numbers have diminished from 1,565 commencements in 2022, down to 1,280 in 2024.

Yesterday, the Leader of the Opposition asked the Premier, what was the government's target to address this skills shortage in the construction sector and what was the government going to do about these alarm bells, these scary Halloween-style alarm bells that have been raised in the Build Skills report?

The Premier responded saying that a target was unnecessary but the government had engaged in serious policy consideration and he had five responses. I want to briefly go through these and demonstrate why the government have, in fact, through their responses, made things worse and will continue to make things worse unless they have a radical about shift towards the Liberal Party's way of going about things, which was working very well before the change in government.

The first thing the Premier said was 'technical colleges'. There is nothing wrong with spending money on new school buildings, but to pretend that the five school buildings that the government is building around South Australia for $300 million including ongoing operating costs are going to address our skills shortage is fanciful. Five schools with 20 per course across three courses each who will eventually, upon leaving school, get into an apprenticeship is so far short of the scale needed that it is remarkable. In the last year of the Liberal government, we had a program across all of our public schools that had, I think, about 10 times more young people leading to apprentices than this $300 million program.

The second thing was fee-free TAFE, the government's marketing exercise. You know what is a great fee-free TAFE course or a great fee-free training course? An apprenticeship or a traineeship. Not only is it fee-free for the students, they actually get paid to do the work. Moving all those resources out of apprenticeships and traineeships into the fee-free TAFE marketing exercise has indeed reduced the number of people in traineeships and apprenticeships that we need.

For the third and fourth thing, we are talking about group training organisations, and we know that the government has reduced funding to the GTO Boost program, which we really need to look at. The last thing is the Deputy Premier and the Premier have claimed that they have successfully persuaded the federal government to block the cap reductions on our universities. What they missed is, of course, our training sector is dramatically suffering from caps on international students. This government has failed the construction workforce, traineeships and apprenticeships.

Time expired.