Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill

I move, That the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill be now read a first time. I nominate the Education and Science Committee to consider the bill. At the appropriate time I intend to move that the bill be reported to the House by 10 March 2014. This bill is a vital part of the Government’s comprehensive reforms to industry training to achieve better performance for employers, for trainees and apprentices, and also for taxpayers.

To explain the purpose of the bill it is necessary to provide a bit of context. In the decade up to 2010 Government funding for industry training organisations and industry training almost trebled. Unfortunately, those funding increases were not matched with sufficient accountability for taxpayers’ money. Although there was an increase in recorded industry training participation, it did not, in fact, represent value for money. Qualification completions and credit attainment by trainees during this period were very low. In fact, under the previous Government up to 100,000 people a year who were listed as being in industry training were, in fact, phantom trainees, who achieved no credits, and in a limited number of cases were no longer alive. This situation—

💬 Grant Robertson: How much? How much is “up to”?

About 100,000 a year.

💬 Grant Robertson: No, you said “up to”. What’s the number?

If you want me to count—you do not want the answer to that question. This situation was, obviously, unsustainable. The Government took quick and decisive action. Our operational changes led to significant improvements in both qualification and credit attainment, which is ongoing. It has freed up funding for reinvestment in the system.

The next step was to take a more fundamental look at the policy settings of the industry training system, and we initiated a comprehensive policy review to assess whether the current model was fit for purpose. The review was informed by extensive consultation with the industry training sector and industries, and it found that there was significant room for improvement, particularly in the quality of service provided to both employers and trainees.

In January this year we announced a further package of policy changes to industry training. The changes are all about increasing the opportunities for in-work training for New Zealanders by expanding and improving our apprenticeship system and reinvesting some of the money saved through our operational changes. We have announced the establishment of the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme. These combine Modern Apprenticeships and other apprenticeship-type training into a premier vocational qualification. New Zealand Apprenticeships will provide the same level of support and the same level of subsidy for all apprentices, regardless of their age. We have also boosted the educational content of apprenticeships by requiring all apprenticeship programmes to be at least 120 credits and to result in a level 4 qualification.

We have increased the funding for apprenticeships. This increased funding will allow industry training organisations to invest in the quality of education for apprentices. It will enable industry training organisations to lower fees for employers and encourage growth in the uptake of apprenticeships. The apprenticeship reboot has been under way since March of this year. The first 10,000 new apprentices enrolled since March have been eligible for a grant of $1,000 towards their tools and off-job costs, or $2,000 if they are in priority trades, with the same amount paid to their employer.

I announced a couple of weeks ago that the reboot scheme has already signed up 8,000 new apprentices in only 7 months. It has resulted in a 67 percent increase in people commencing apprenticeships compared with the same period last year. Two-thirds of all apprentices who have signed up have been in the designated priority trades, such as construction, engineering, infrastructure, and electro-technology. The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill will support these initiatives by enabling the establishment of a comprehensive New Zealand apprenticeship system, refocusing the role of industry training organisations on standard-setting and arranging training, and strengthening quality assurance of the industry training sector.

The first objective of the bill is to enable the establishment of comprehensive New Zealand apprenticeships that provide the same level of support to all apprentices, regardless of their age. The bill repeals the Modern Apprenticeship Training Act 2000 and amends the Industry Training Act 1992 so that legislation relating to industry training and apprenticeships is located in one modern piece of legislation. The bill defines “apprenticeship training” and removes the existing age restrictions on apprenticeship training. It defines the functions of the Tertiary Education Commission and prescribes the duties and responsibilities of organisations that arrange apprenticeship training.

The bill also allows the responsible Minister to issue a code of practice for apprenticeship training and to set guidelines for organisations, employers, and apprentices. Industry training organisations and other organisations that arrange apprenticeship training will have a statutory responsibility for ensuring that apprentices receive appropriate pastoral care and support. This will mean that the organisation responsible for an apprentice’s training will also be responsible for their pastoral care.

The second objective of the bill is to focus industry training organisations on two core responsibilities: setting skill standards for their industries, and arranging training. The bill removes the industry training organisations’ statutory skills leadership function, which requires them to identify current and future skill needs for their whole industry. Removing this role will encourage industry training organisations to focus on arranging training for employees, which businesses have told us is the service that is of most value to them.

I want to be clear that removing their statutory skills leadership requirement does not prevent them in any way from undertaking skills leadership. Rather, it will incentivise other organisations, such as industry associations, to take a greater role in skills leadership alongside industry training organisations. This will improve links between the Government and industry in determining present and future skill needs. The bill also prevents industry training organisations from owning registered private training establishments. This removes the possibility of industry training organisations directing trainees towards institutions in which they have a financial interest.

The third objective of the bill is to strengthen the quality assurance framework for industry training organisations. At present, the Industry Training Act 1992 does not require an organisation to satisfy any particular quality assurance standards in order for it to be recognised as an industry training organisation. The bill addresses this by giving the New Zealand Qualifications Authority power to prescribe quality assurance requirements for industry training organisations.

The bill also strengthens the quality assurance framework by giving the New Zealand Qualifications Authority power to impose a graduated regime of sanctions in order to address poor performance by an industry training organisation. The authority will be able to issue quality assurance improvement notices to industry training organisations to address poor practice outside the scope of prescribed quality assurance requirements, and to issue compliance notices to an industry training organisation that does not meet quality assurance requirements, or fails to respond to a quality improvement notice. The responsible Minister will then be able to impose conditions on an industry training organisation’s recognition if it has not complied with these initial sanctions.

The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is a vital part of the Government’s revitalisation of industry training to get the best results for employers and for trainees. It completes the implementation of the industry training review. It will boost system performance for all parties and build greater links between the Government, the industry training sector, and the industries that employ the trainees. I commend this bill to the House.

I rise on behalf of the Labour Party to support the first reading of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, with some caveats, which I will come to shortly. The Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment indicated a number of reasons and purposes for the bill but he failed to mention two or three particular areas that are of some concern to the Labour Party, which we would like to see explored at the Education and Science Committee.

It is timely for a relook at the legislation and regulation around apprenticeships and industry training. At no time in New Zealand’s history has it been more important that we have robust, efficient, and effective apprenticeship and industry training schemes. We have currently under way in Christchurch the most significant rebuild of any urban centre in New Zealand in our history. It requires a huge amount of skilled staff to be available. It requires ongoing training to be available above and beyond what is required in the normal day to day of the New Zealand economy. It is on that point that I want to make a couple of comments of context of my own, in comparison to the context that the Minister gave. He is correct to say that a large amount of funding and support went into industry training and apprenticeships in the first decade of this century. In the case of apprenticeships, that was because the National Government of the 1990s had completely undermined the apprenticeship system, to the point that there basically was not one any more. The incoming Government in 1999 realised the folly of that move by the National Party and introduced the Modern Apprenticeships scheme. By the time Labour went out of Government in 2008 the scheme had had around 15,000 people through it as Modern Apprentices. It was an excellent scheme for its time, making up for a very, very poor record from the National Government.

At the same time, there was a significant investment in industry training. Industry training is an important part of productivity in the workplace. It is a significant part of what businesses need to do to ensure that their workforce remains skilled and that they are able to take advantage of innovation, develop new products, and keep their businesses running well. So we want to see a large number of people in industry training.

It is fair to say that there were some issues with the way in which industry training funding occurred during that period. The review that has been undertaken has highlighted a number of those. There has been significant change in the industry training sector as a result of that. But in reality, when we look at the record of this Government, what we see is that through until the beginning of this year there was a huge drop in the number of people undertaking apprenticeships—under National, around a 20 percent drop in the number of people undertaking apprenticeships and around a 38 percent drop in those undertaking industry training. As I say, some of that can perhaps be explained. But the huge drop in the number of apprentices is a massive wasted opportunity.

I want to give some credit to the Hon Phil Goff. When he was Leader of the Opposition in the immediate aftermath of the earthquakes in Christchurch, he said: “We need people training right now, because when this rebuild starts or really gets under way in a couple of years’ time, we as a country are going to need those people trained and ready to go.” But it did not happen. There was a continuing drop in the number of apprentices and in the number of industry trainees in the Canterbury region.

💬 Colin King: Who’s going to employ them, Grant?

Colin King says there is no one to employ them. That is the lack of vision that Colin King has. When the Labour Party went to the electorate in 2011, we said that we would take that money for the dole—money that people are being paid when they are on the dole—and give it to an employer to subsidise an apprenticeship, because just sitting on your hands, as the National Government did for 3 years, and saying “We can’t help here; there is nothing we can do.” is not being a responsible Government. A responsible Government gets alongside business and says: “In the down times we are going to be here to make sure that people are being trained so that when the economy picks up, and when the rebuild starts, there will be trained apprentices.” But that is not the vision of this Government. It sits on its hands and it waits.

What we now have is a slow, lethargic response from the National Party to finally get itself going to have some kind of apprenticeship scheme. There has been a big increase in the number of apprentices and industry trainees this year. Finally the National Party has caught up with the importance of having apprentices and industry trainees on board, but what a wasted opportunity over the last couple of years from this Government.

That brings us to this bill, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, which, as the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment has said, has a number of changes in it to the way industry training organisations operate. From the Labour Party’s perspective, many of them are worthy of being looked at. We want industry training organisations focused on the delivery of training and the maintenance of skills standards. We think that they are the core roles of industry training organisations. I personally have never been a fan of prescribing the number of industry training organisations that there should be, but I believe that some of the mergers that have occurred over the last couple of years have actually been quite sensible, and are going to deliver better industry training standards. I do not think that saying that we are going to have eight or six or nine is the way to do it. It is about getting the industry training organisations together. This part of the legislation will be useful for that.

I am also encouraged by the improvements around quality assurance. It is vital that the New Zealand Qualifications Authority is playing its role in making sure that the taxpayer investment here is of the highest standard, and also that the delivery of training is meeting the needs of employers and, indeed, of trainees and employees. So we are pleased to see those changes.

The area that is of significant concern to the Labour Party, which the Minister did not speak very much about, is clause 15 of the bill, which inserts new sections 11A to 11F into the Industry Training Act on the funding of industry training organisations. New section 11A allows the Tertiary Education Commission to enter into funding agreements with non - industry training organisation persons to provide industry training. It runs through a series of things that can be done. Essentially, that means that organisations that are not industry training organisations can start delivering industry training and receiving funding from the Tertiary Education Commission. This is to implement the idea—

💬 Colin King: What’s wrong with that?

“What’s wrong with that?”, says Colin King. Well, is it not important, Mr King, that we have a high standard of industry training? Is it not important that there is consistency in industry training? But, no, what the National Government is proposing here is to reward its mates once again. So if a business comes along and says: “We do not want all of this palaver where we actually have to work with other people in the industry, where we actually have to make sure that we have got some consistency, and where there are some transferable skills being taught. Let us not worry about that.” Let us just have a business that says: “We are big enough. We are going to take the funding.” Well, we have concerns about that on this side of the House.

In fairness to the Minister he was up front about this when he announced the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme, and he did say that they would be looking to run a trial whereby non - industry training organisations were able to receive this funding—that is, direct funding to a business to organise industry training. We are concerned about that because it is in the name—industry training. It is about the development of a workforce that can work across a range of businesses and that gets skills that are generic enough to be able to be used wherever they may end up in their career. We are concerned that this provision will put that at risk. We do not believe it is necessary. We think that industry training organisations are developing in such a way that they can meet the needs of business, but we are prepared to send this bill to a select committee so that we can have this debate. It is a useful time to relook at the structure around industry training and apprenticeships, and we look forward to the range of submissions that I believe will come in. But I do want to express concern about this. I think there are other clauses in the bill as well that need to be looked at, and other issues in the industry training sector. I am very confident that those who will speak after me will raise some issues.

I note one of those in closing, which is that there is a useful clause in the bill that encourages industry training organisations to focus on the needs of Māori and other priority population groups in relation to industry training. I am sure my colleague Carol Beaumont will speak a little about the failure of this Government to engage one priority population group in industry training and apprenticeships, and that is women. But with that, we will support this bill to the select committee and look forward to ongoing debate.

It is a great pleasure to rise and take a call on the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. I thank my colleague Grant Robertson on the other side of the House for his contribution. We will look forward to dealing with that when the bill is referred to the Education and Science Committee.

The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is a vital part of this Government’s investment in industry training. As we heard from the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment when he made his first reading speech to the House, in the 10 years to 2010 Government funding for industry training organisations almost trebled—almost trebled. Unfortunately, the funding increases were not matched with sufficient accountability for the funding. We heard that under the previous Government around 100,000 people a year listed as being in industry training were in fact phantom trainees—phantom trainees.

I am not sure whether that was “Mr Walker”, “The Ghost Who Walks”, or whether we might have had Clark Kent, or possibly Sherlock Holmes, but there were a lot of people who did not actually exist. [Interruption] They achieved no credits—not surprisingly—because they did not exist, and in fact some, Mr Prasad, were dead. Yes, Mr Prasad—actually dead. They were not trainees. They were not in training. They were not alive. That parrot was nailed to the perch, Mr Prasad. Under Labour some industry trainers combed the headstones in graveyards or drew from The Egyptian Book of the Dead to get the names for their trainees.

Progress in improving students’ skills and achievement levels was zombie-like. The sector was in a parlous state due to Labour’s lack of oversight for those who were actually alive. That led to the level of training they received being such that it was insufficient to unlock the potential that lay within each one of them. So this bill is extremely important. The Minister got on top of that situation. The Minister has created a bill that, it is good to hear, has received a certain amount of support already across the House. We are overseeing a focus and a move to a results intention in industry training—a results preoccupation. We want to see that those who put in the hard time and effort are rewarded. We want to see that they are in quality training and getting good results so that they can go out and unleash the potential that lies within them all—because it is results that determine the skill level of the workforce, not intentions.

This bill, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, implements the findings of the widespread Government industry training review we undertook. The review led us to uncover this vast walking army of the living dead—who did not actually exist—and to establish a comprehensive apprenticeship system for the future. It also builds greater links between the Government and the industry training sector.

The key things we are aiming to do are to improve results for trainees and apprentices, keep more 16-year-olds and 17-year-olds engaged in vocational training, and help young people on benefits get into training. This is really, really important. If we can help folk who are on a benefit, give them the skills so they can go out and get a well-paying job, it helps them and ultimately it helps our country. We want to help students—it is not rocket science. It is simply that we want to ensure that we help students get the results and the skills they need to succeed in this increasingly complex life.

We will continue to work to improve tertiary education and lift achievement for our students, and to focus on better outcomes not only for students but also for the taxpayers—not only for students but also for the taxpayers. We know that tertiary education is a passport to higher skills, higher wages, higher productivity, and higher growth for our economy. So ultimately “New Zealand Inc.” wins. There is a personal win for the individual concerned, but ultimately our society wins. People are healthier. We know from work done in the UK that a job is one of the greatest determinants of a person’s health. So we know that our population will be healthier and they will be happier if they have the opportunity to get a well-paying job. That is what this Government is doing. It is also growing the economy so there are more jobs out there for those with the skills.

We reviewed industry training over 2011 to 2012, and we found that some changes were necessary for the industry training system. We want to make sure that it is well connected to industry, with high employer buy-in; that it is educationally sound; that it is coherent with the wider tertiary system; and that it delivers value for money for the employers, for the Government, and also for the student. This bill makes the amendments required to implement the findings of the review. I look forward to talking further about this bill as it progresses through the House, and in the meantime I commend the bill to the House.

I follow my colleague Grant Robertson in speaking in favour of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. Labour is supporting this bill’s referral to the Education and Science Committee because we are strong supporters of industry training and apprenticeships. We would welcome improvements to the system. We would welcome a greater focus on industry training and apprenticeships. We would welcome greater numbers, and we certainly have absolutely no question about wanting to ensure quality.

Industry training and apprenticeships provide a lead-in for people to get decent jobs and be paid decent wages, as well as providing the important trades and technical skills that this country needs and so sorely lacks at the moment. Labour is committed to ensuring that New Zealand has the skilled workforce we need. We want to see New Zealanders have jobs and opportunities, and we do not believe that this Government has truly focused on those areas at all. The shortage of skilled tradespeople in this country is absolutely criminal. It is a serious concern, and it is one that has been exacerbated by this National Government over the last 5 years by its failure to invest in apprenticeships and industry training. We export our skilled tradespeople and then we have to import them back again. This is a nonsense, an absolute disgrace.

We do support this bill, and we look forward to discussing at the Education and Science Committee how we can really make progress. Industry training is incredibly important. It is about providing the technical and trade skills this country needs. They are the sorts of skills we need in manufacturing. But, of course, industry training has been, under this Government, the Cinderella of tertiary education. It actually fails, generally, to even get across the Government’s radar. Of course, the manufacturing sector itself is languishing, and that is despite the fact that manufacturing—the ability for us to make things in this country—is absolutely important.

Manufacturing has an important multiplier effect in terms of employment opportunities. The figure that people talk about is two or three jobs arising from each job in manufacturing. It is very different from the service sector. So we need these skills in trades and technical areas, not just for manufacturing but also for our building and rebuilding, for the housing that this country is so sorely lacking, particularly in Auckland and Christchurch, where there is an absolute shortage of housing for our people. Skills in trades and technical areas are important for being able to deliver infrastructure development and the rebuilding of Christchurch, and yet we have these huge skills gaps at the moment.

Investing in industry training and apprenticeships will provide jobs for New Zealanders. As I have said already, at the moment we are, instead, exporting so many of our trades and technical people. They are over in Australia—hundreds of thousands of them. We have replaced them. We have had the nonsense of having to import skilled people to work on the Christchurch rebuild because the Government failed to take the opportunity after the earthquake and realise we were going to need more people in construction, for example. So at a time when we have got high unemployment, especially around young people, we have got major skills and training deficits. It is just nonsense.

The other important factor about investing in industry training and in apprenticeships is that it does lift productivity. There are countless pieces of research showing that investing in training at the workplace level, investing in that technical training that is needed on the job, actually lifts productivity in our workplaces, and certainly we sorely need that. So that is the context in which this bill presents itself to the House, and those are the sorts of questions we will be looking at in terms of this bill.

It is also important that industry training and apprenticeships provide people who are not going through our university sector with real qualifications that mean something and provide them with employment security. We know that in a modern economy jobs will change fairly rapidly, and that the idea of job security is actually an idea that is very outdated. But we do need to look at investing in training so that people have employment security and have skills that are transferable and portable.

What is the Government’s record in this area? Well, I recall that it started off fairly early on in the piece in the last term of this National Government. I think it was actually when the member opposite, Kate Wilkinson, was the Minister of Labour that she was part of scrapping the skills strategy, because the Government does not believe in actually having a plan. The Government does not believe in having a plan about what skills we might need in our economy.

There was an agreed skills strategy. Business, unions, Government agencies, and industry training organisations had got together and said: “Here’s a plan. Here’s what we need.” But, no, the National Government, when it came in, said: “Oh, no. That was the previous Government. We’ll scrap that. We won’t bother actually trying to build a consensus around this issue. We’ll just ignore it.” I have to say that was a major sign of what was to come. Of course, the National Government has taken money from industry training and put it into other parts of the tertiary sector. I have no problem with funding our universities and our polytechnics properly. We need to do that, but we need to invest money in industry training too. This Government ripped money out of that part of tertiary education and put it elsewhere. When unemployment is at such a high level, providing training and skills opportunities for young people in trades and technical areas is a really important pathway forward.

I notice that the regulatory impact statement had quite a good analysis of the rationale for Government involvement in industry training. I just want to take a second to talk about some of the things it identifies, because it recognises that investment in this part of the tertiary education sector has a number of what it calls “spill-over benefits” and that there are not only improved employment outcomes—which I have already mentioned—but flow-on benefits to things like improved health outcomes and improved child development outcomes. This is a way of potentially investing in people who have not necessarily done that well in the academic streams in their schooling life and have not necessarily gone on to a tertiary education institution, but who actually want to learn technical skills for their employment. I just wanted to acknowledge that that is recorded in the regulatory impact statement.

My colleague Grant Robertson talked about the fact that this bill does mention in clause 15 provisions around priority groups. It specifically talks about Māori and Pacific workers, and this side of the House has no problem with that. But the shame at the moment is the situation around women and industry training. It is absolutely appalling. The percentage of women as industry trainees has dropped over the last few years. It was 30 percent in 2010 and it is down to 28 percent this year. When you break it down by industry, it becomes even more shocking. We have got a pool of over 50 percent of our population who are not being targeted to move into industry training to get those crucial trades and technical skills.

One percent of the trainees in building and construction are women. In joinery it is 6 percent. In electrical supply it is 7 percent. In the motor industry it is 3 percent. In infrastructure it is 6 percent. This is just appalling. This is coming from a Government that says “Well, we are not going to do anything about revaluing the occupations where women are concentrated, like aged care. We don’t believe that those workers are low-paid or undervalued.” The real solution, says the Government, is to move women into higher-paying jobs.

Well, I have to say that the record on industry training does not show a great deal of movement of women out of industries like aged care—which does need valuing properly—and into better paid trades jobs. So you would have to say that is a big fail. There is nothing going on there. The Minister’s best attempt was to say that the Ministry of Women’s Affairs is working on it. Well, I think that is a research project and a leaflet. Thank you.

I think it is fair to say that this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill has come to the House not a moment too soon. The primary legislation that it seeks to amend dates back to 1989, 1992, and the year 2000. The point has been made by Labour colleagues that it was blindingly obvious a number of years ago that we were looking down the barrel of a serious skills shortage—a trades shortage—in this country. It has taken rather a long time for this endeavour to improve that situation to come to the fore. Having said that, we do see that it is timely to take a fresh look, and to the extent that this bill endeavours to do that, we are able to support this legislation, albeit with a few reservations. We are particularly interested in the select committee process, as indeed we always are with new legislation. We think that there are a number of key stakeholders in this who will have interests, opinions, and positions to offer that almost certainly will enable us to make this adequate piece of legislation a better piece of legislation as we go through the process.

I think that part of our problem has been that over recent years—and it might be heretical from someone who has both studied and taught in a university situation—we have perhaps oversold the value of university education, at the expense of advocating for trades and vocational training. I think we need to reverse that and to give our young people a much broader and deeper picture of the value of not only university education. I think we do need to look very hard at the messages that young people in particular are receiving about the value and importance of trades and vocational training more generally.

The bill prescribes a number of functions and responsibilities to various agencies, including the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment, the Minister’s office, the Tertiary Education Commission, the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, and the industry training organisations themselves—those currently existing and any that might be appointed or accredited in the future.

I think it is possible to feel some unease at how quickly the various provisions—particularly those provisions that prescribe certain processes in this legislation—could very easily degenerate into a sort of tick box mentality, where as long as people jump through the correct hoops in the right order, then all will be deemed to be OK. I am thinking in terms of things like the criteria for accreditation, the quality assurance requirements, and the measuring of the capability and capacity of the industry training organisations to fulfil their functions and their roles. These are all important considerations, but my experience in the tertiary sector and elsewhere leads me to have some concern that these things very quickly become bureaucratised. They simply become little hurdles to jump over on the way. They lose their value, their richness, and their quality.

I would hope that there would be sufficient goodwill to ensure that there is a very robust, a very transparent, and an ongoing engagement between the key stakeholders. Obviously, they will be the regulatory authorities, the Government agencies, the industry training organisations themselves, and the providers of education and training, but not forgetting, of course, the apprentices and the trainees who will enter into the various programmes that will emerge from this legislation, under the conditions that it prescribes.

I think it is important that we do have a genuine and ongoing dialogue within and between those groups to ensure that we achieve the right balance. We want to make sure that influence and responsibility for the ongoing delivery of industry and vocational training sheets home to the appropriate level and in the appropriate time and place, so that we can look with some confidence to a system and to a model that will produce the tradespeople that we want and need going into the future.

The point has already been made, but I think it is worth repeating, that we are desperately short of tradespeople in New Zealand, right across all of the trades, I think. Construction tends to get the spotlight, if you like, for very obvious reasons, but equally, in engineering and elsewhere, we are short of people. Things as simple as motor mechanics, electronics, electrical trades—we are short of skilled people in all of these, to the point that we are importing tradespeople, while also sitting on historically high levels of youth unemployment. There is an obvious disjuncture there. One would hope that some of the provisions of this bill might offer some way to resolve that.

I think that a point that is often overlooked too is that historically the public sector—the much-maligned public service—contributed a regular and reliable supply of tradespeople into the private economy as well as into the public economy. We had the railway workshops, the Post Office, as it was then, and the defence forces, which provided us with fitters, with turners, with welders, with diesel mechanics, with air frame fitters, with pilots, and with boat builders. If you look at the New Zealand superyacht industry, you will find an awful lot of people there who trained in the navy. I think that is something that we have thrown out. One of the babies we have thrown out with the bathwater, in terms of driving down the capacity of the public service, is that we have lost that important supply of trades. Now it is coming back on to the education providers and on to industry to try to plug the gap that has emerged over time.

Again, the point has been made that the legislation requires industry training organisations in the future to have particular regard to the needs of Māori and other population groups. Of course, that begs the question of who is being talked about here. We can look to the education strategy that focuses particularly on Māori and Pasifika, as does this bill, and it talks about youth to some extent. But I think that is a little bit lazy. I think we need to drill in a bit more and perhaps even highlight what the priority groups are that we are talking about. I think we need to identity them. Carol Beaumont has offered one compelling suggestion, which is that women need to be included in that. But I do think that the overall strategy will be weakened if we do not think a bit harder, a bit more seriously, and with a bit more detail about whom we are talking about in terms of priority groups and what the primary needs are. I think it is obvious that young people in the regions and in the provincial areas, who could very well miss out on some of this if they have not got ready access to one of the key providers, should be treated as a priority group. I do think we need to be a little bit more definitive in terms of whom we are talking about there.

The bill makes it clear that industry training organisations may not own or be beneficial owners of registered private training establishments. I think that is a good provision. The industry training organisations themselves may have an opinion on that, and it will be interesting to hear from them if they have any major concerns with that. But on the face of it, it seems an obvious division to make—that industry training organisations ought not to be directly involved in ownership or be beneficiaries of a private provider.

I mentioned earlier the quality assurance improvement provisions in this legislation. One of those will allow the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to impose some compliance measures in the face of poor educational outcomes. Again, I think we need to be a bit careful about some of that language, because, yes, if trainees and apprentices are failing to complete and if the skills are not coming through, there are some obvious failures that can occur in any training or educative programme. But around the margins, we have seen recently, for example, an attempt to use very crude numbers about completion of courses as indicators of the failure of the institutions providing those courses. That is a very crude and unsatisfactory measure and I would hope that we would not resort to such inadequate measures when we are measuring educational outcomes. They need to be much more textured, much more layered, and much more sophisticated than that. It is one example where we do have to make sure that we do not simply resort to the lowest common denominator in terms of filling in the blanks that legislation inevitably prescribes.

I think my final comment—and I will no doubt return to this point again in the future—would be the question of industry training organisations being obliged to offer appropriate pastoral care and support for apprentices, having regard to age and experience. It is actually not a trivial matter for industry training organisations to undertake to accept that responsibility. Obviously, a mature person, somebody going into a second career, an older person, may—in fact, most certainly would—require less pastoral care, but what is an appropriate level of pastoral care for young people who might be from a provincial or a regional environment and are coming to a city to study? At what point is it enough, too much, or not enough? I look forward to the ongoing debate around this bill. Thank you.

It is with enthusiasm that I speak during this first reading of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. It is always good to have a conversation with the Labour Party when you are talking about industry training, because over there on the other side there is really a morass of different views and opinions, and yet you have to learn to understand the Industry Training Act from the point of view of what it actually means. You heard earlier on Grant Robertson talking about why the Government did not act earlier, but, really, in the Industry Training Act the fundamental principle is that you have got to have employment. So the employer and the apprentice work through this arrangement.

What the other side was rambling on about, and Andrew Little over there is obviously equally confused, is that there are two systems of funding. Under the Industry Training Act you have the standard training measure funding, and under the polytechnics you have the fulltime-equivalent funding. I just want to put that out there to clarify some of the double-speak that was coming from those Opposition members.

What is happening here in this bill is very opportune and very appropriate, and, again, it adds to the suite of legislation that will add value to industry training and add value to the pathway of industry training, right back from the point of view of what the Government has done around the vocational pathways in the National Certificate of Educational Achievement. We now have the vocational pathways. We will have early meetings and an introduction of the industry training organisations to those students who will come on through and complete their trade training when they have employment funded under a standard training measure model. So it is very appropriate that the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment has brought this bill to the House.

I just want to reflect for a moment, for the benefit of Andrew Little, on the wasteful spending of the Labour Government when it had its Modern Apprenticeships programme. I can remember actually studying one of the Modern Apprenticeships coordinator’s performance. It spent $250,000 and never had one completion of a Modern Apprenticeship.

💬 Simon O’Connor: How much?

The sum of $250,000 was paid out to a Modern Apprenticeships coordinator and it never had one completed Modern Apprenticeship. That was typical of the wasteful spending under Labour. We saw it in health.

💬 Andrew Little: Go back to the Tourism Board.

We saw it in health, Andrew Little. We saw it in health. Labour doubled the spending but did not get any more performance. What did Labour do in industry training? It tripled the pay, tripled the amount of money going into it, with no better quality.

What have we got today, under this bill? We have got the New Zealand Apprenticeships, and this will provide a level of training to an apprentice regardless of their age. That is exceptionally good thinking.

What actually happened under Labour was that you would go into a factory and you would have two Modern Apprentices and you would have six older apprentices, and they would all get the same deal. It was just a sort of snout in the trough way of funding. It was very, very poorly run. What we have got today is far more refined. I must pay respect here to Lockwood Smith. Lockwood Smith would be so pleased to see that we are finally starting to get to a stage where his vision around industry training will be met. It is so very sad that those people over on the other side who profess—and I use that word carefully—to represent the workers do not have a clue.

I go back to what Grant Robertson was saying: imagine trusting employers to deliver training! Well, I am afraid that there are a lot of wonderful employers out there who do the training. Tell that person over there who spoke so disrespectfully about our business people, who are the backbone of this country, our employers.

💬 Andrew Little: How’s this member’s relationship with Anadarko going?

Andrew Little should just breathe through his nose and actually apologise for the reckless, wasteful spending that we saw from the Labour Government in the industry training and apprenticeships situation.

It is a real pleasure to support this bill. I look forward to working with the sensible, grounded people of the Education and Science Committee. We will get the bill reported back to the House, I am sure, by 10 March 2014. Thank you.

Kia ora, Mr Assistant Speaker. Thank you very much. I rise on behalf of New Zealand First to speak in support of the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. I look forward, as my learned colleague Colin King just said, to discussing the bill with the right-minded, level-headed people of the Education and Science Committee. If we go back to the bill and away from the political rhetoric for just a moment—actually, before I do that, I would have to say to Mr King that people who live in glass houses should not throw stones. Considering that Novopay was paid when its key performance indicators were not met, I do not think the Government should actually be launching any rockets towards the Labour Party with regard to the Modern Apprenticeships scheme.

The amendments in this bill are to implement the findings of the review. The general policy statement of the bill states: “The review found that changes were needed to ensure the industry training system, which includes apprenticeship training,—is well-connected to industry, with high employer buy-in; and is educationally sound; and is coherent with the wider tertiary system; and delivers value for money for employers and the Government.” I want to note that that fourth bullet point makes no statement about value for money for the apprentice. I know that we have said that out loud, but it is in the explanatory note and I think that will be one of the points I will be raising with the Education and Science Committee. There must be value for money for the apprentice.

New Zealand First is very pleased to see that the first bullet point under the policy objectives is to “establish a comprehensive apprenticeship system that provides the same level of support to all apprentices, regardless of age;”. New Zealand First has always been a strong supporter of lifelong learning. We actually mean that; we mean that you should be able to learn for the length of your life.

I believe that Carol Beaumont brought our attention to the situation of women in today’s society. The ability of women to enter training or education perhaps in their 30s and 40s is of particular significance to women because, like it or not, we bear the children. More often than not, it is us women who leave the workforce for a period of time in order to stay with those children. So to come back and to be able to access learning, lifelong learning, is a very important thing to us females.

It also says here that the bill is about the focus of the industry training organisations on “setting skill standards for their industries and arranging training;” and to “clarify the functions and powers of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority …”. We are hopeful that this amendment means that we are actually going to minimise, perhaps, the number of qualifications that we are seeing out there. We are hoping that we are going to create a clearer standard around industry training certificates or qualifications so that the parents of students, the parents and the future apprentices, can be more confident that when they sign up to an apprenticeship, they are getting high-value credits and a high-value qualification, because, at the end of the day, apprentices also pay for that training. So we will be very keen to talk about that a bit further.

As many have already mentioned, the bill “requires ITOs to have particular regard to the needs of Māori and other priority population groups,”. We will be very interested to discuss what that actually means. It is all very well to put these statements in bills and in legislation. It says that there must be particular regard given to the needs of Māori and other priority population groups “when developing and maintaining arrangements for the delivery of industry training.” My fellow colleagues on the Education and Science Committee will testify to the fact that I sometimes ask the questions that nobody else asks. One of them would be around this particular statement in this bill, which is how a small engine apprenticeship would be delivered differently for Māori than for anybody else. That statement suggests that you actually need to have particular regard when developing and maintaining arrangements for the delivery of industry training. So that would be an interesting conversation that we would like to have. I think I would also like to extend that to how that would look different for women.

We are concerned that statements like that take away from the good work that has been done around the vocational pathways by the Ministry of Education and this Government. It is going to be modified in some way. Anybody who requires an apprenticeship to create a sustainable vocational pathway is a priority to New Zealand First. So we would be looking forward to a conversation around that.

We also have some concerns around the New Zealand Qualifications Authority, which operates on a cost-recovery model. The bill allows the New Zealand Qualifications Authority to charge fees to industry training organisations for its new quality assurance activities. Will the businesses that are able to gain this funding also have to pay those fees? There is some concern, we believe, among the industry training organisations themselves, and around this fine print around businesses being able to deliver these services and whether they will also have to pay the fees and meet the same standards. The conversation needs to take place.

We have had some talks. New Zealand First talks quite a lot, actually, when I am talking to educational groups, about widening the success criteria, and we see this as part of that move towards widening the success criteria, rather than this narrow sort of sausage machine that we are currently working with. So we are pleased to enter into this conversation. Throughout the history of our party, which is close to 21 years, we have always supported the training of New Zealanders and the fact that skills shortages should not be used as an excuse for mass immigration. This has been ignored, largely for the 20 years that New Zealand First has been saying it. So it is nice to hear the Green Party actually vocalise that right now, and I believe that other parties in the House are coming to the same conclusion. We cannot keep importing skills and letting our own people be unemployed. New Zealand First 100 percent supports the concept that New Zealanders should be trained before we start bringing in people from overseas.

The construction industry has been mentioned a lot with regard to this bill, but some of the other apprenticeship areas that are currently on the skills shortage list are bakers, metalworkers, plastic technicians, upholsterers, and winemakers. We would like to think that, although we are doing this work around this bill, the industry training organisations and the industry organisations are actually thinking about how we can improve, how we can widen, and how we can support in all those skills shortage areas, not just in construction because construction seems, as David Clendon said, to get the greatest amount of attention at the moment. I understand that because Christchurch is on the books, but we will live past Christchurch.

We would also be very interested in the recognition of the fact—David Clendon and the Greens and New Zealand First, again, on this particular issue, seem to have more things in common than we have against—that if we are going to support people into apprenticeships, there needs to be recognition of the loss of adult and community education in 2009, which severely hit the regional areas, and the need to support apprentices with their paperwork. It needs to be part of this conversation to make sure that apprentices in rural and semi-rural areas are able to access this sort of training. The small to medium sized enterprises in the rural and semi-rural areas are businesses that have, on average, 1.5 to 2.5 employees. They need to be able to access this support. Stonemasons are, actually, on the skills shortage list. There is a stonemason out at Leigh who would take on an apprentice but, actually, margins have been cut so low that he needs to be able to access this support from this date to be able to take on apprentices. So we want to make sure that this is available to those in the rural and semi-rural areas, even those semi-rural areas inside the super-city of Auckland. Those are the sorts of conversations that New Zealand First will be having at the Education and Science Committee, so, at this stage, we will support the bill through its first reading.

My constituents in Hamilton West often say to me that they are very supportive of apprenticeships. They want to see good quality apprenticeships and training that will lead, particularly for our young people but, in fact, for all people—

💬 Sue Moroney: And they are disappointed. They are really disappointed.

—into really sustainable jobs. They are disappointed, Ms Moroney, because over the previous 10 years, when your party was in Government, they saw a threefold increase in expenditure on industry training organisations for absolutely no result whatsoever. Not only are my constituents supportive of apprenticeships but also they believe in accountability for the expenditure of public money. They know, unlike the Opposition, that the Government does not have the money. It is their money, which came out of their pockets. They want to see the young people and all those who aspire to a job getting good training and delivering results for that training.

It is worth reminding the Opposition that during those 10 years at the start of this century, qualification completions and credit attainment by trainees were pitifully low. In fact, as the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment pointed out, up to 100,000 people a year who were listed as being in industry training were, in fact, phantom trainees, many of whom achieved no credits whatsoever. That was a disgrace. [Interruption] Instead of shouting at me, Opposition members should hang their heads in shame at that.

We as a Government are determined to ensure that the changes will increase opportunities for in-work training, and that they will expand and improve our apprenticeship system. That is why this year the Budget increased—

💬 Dr David Clark: Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs?

—the number of trade training placements for Māori and Pasifika applicants from approximately 600 previously to approximately 3,000 today—over the next 4 years. What a great thing that is. Dr Clark sits here in this House day after day calling out “Where are the jobs?”, even when that question is repeatedly answered and he is told to have a look at the SEEK and TradeMe websites. There are jobs out there, but what we are doing with this measure is ensuring that there will be a better fit between the training and the jobs that are there. He will remain on the Opposition benches for a very long time, until he takes his head out of the sand and recognises that reality. His party did nothing of any value for those people. We are getting on with the job and it will work.

New Zealand Apprenticeships will provide the same level of support and the same level of subsidy for all apprentices, regardless of their age. That is important because they are not all young. They are not all just out of school. We have also boosted the educational content of apprenticeships by requiring all apprenticeship programmes to be at least 120 credits and to result in a level 4 qualification. Why is that important? Well, it is important for the reason that Phil Goff told us during the last election. Labour members who campaigned at the last election, and it is all of them over there, ought to remember that when their then leader, Phil Goff, was going around the country, he was regularly quoting Brent Mettrick of Stonewood Homes, who repeatedly said that this measure, the bill we have got here, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, is exactly what is needed. He called for this, and Phil Goff said: “We will deliver.” So that is why I was astonished when Grant Robertson earlier said something completely different. It was as if he had no recollection of what his own party was campaigning on. Phil Goff supported and emphasised Mr Mettrick’s plea for the system to increase funding for apprenticeships, which would allow industry training organisations to invest in the quality of education for apprentices, lower fees for employers, and encourage growth in the uptake of apprenticeships. That is exactly what this bill will do. I am proud to lend my support to it. I know that it is going to be very good for those young people and for the country.

You know, it is an incredible thing, as I rise to speak on the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, that as the rest of the country is celebrating the blowing up of Parliament, when some parts of the country are celebrating a more indigenous event—that is, the events at Parihaka, the events about peace—and at a time when the Opposition is trying to assist the Government and support this bill, we have the mad rantings of the members of the Government. How amazing it is that otherwise respectable members like Tim Macindoe should want to go back 10 years but refuse to go back to 1992. How is it that members like Colin King can talk about the last 5 years but whose brain sort of does not compute when it comes to 1992? Then there is Cam Calder, who had the temerity to talk about the vast army of the living dead. I thought he was talking about the National Party conference a few weeks ago, but, of course, he was talking about the age of industry training during the Labour Government. But, again, he failed to acknowledge the disaster zone that this National Government left apprenticeships and industry training in in the period between 1992 and 1999.

That party, when it was in Government the last time, all but destroyed the hopes and the dreams of young people in this country to get on and get practical skills, to get apprenticeships, and to do on-the-job training. That was the legacy that the last Labour Government had to pick up and address and fix up, which it did with aplomb from 1999. Let us not forget the damage, the vicious damage, that the National Government from 1990 to 1999 did to industry training in this country. And National members all hang their heads in shame, as they should—as they should. I am still waiting for the apology. I am still waiting for the official apology. Maybe it will be the next generation, the young bucks of the National Party, the Simon O’Connors of the world, who when he cannot run a full marathon has to run a half-marathon. But that is still an achievement. We do not detract from that. Fresh from his half-marathon, plodding over the bridge—maybe he can offer the apology for what his predecessors did to industry training. Let us make no mistake. But I want to say, in the spirit of generosity, and as we the parliamentarians of this generation hunker down while the rest in the Commonwealth countries celebrate our blowing up, let us hunker down and let us offer the Government this support.

This bill stands in stark contrast to the National Party’s efforts last time it was in Government, in 1992. The 2000s were about rebuilding industry training and apprenticeships in this country, because the truth is that we had a massive drop-off. If you talk to tradespeople today—you will not talk to many under the age of about 45—they will say “Where is that generation behind us?”. There is an emerging generation of those who started their apprenticeships under the last Labour Government. They are in their late 20s and early 30s now, but there was that big gap. There are those who are in their 60s now, waiting to retire at 67 and pick up their superannuation, some who are being asked by their employer—

💬 Tracey Martin: 67? 65.

I know that New Zealand First supports us on this because it wants universal superannuation just as much as we do. But I have met tradespeople—tradesmen, actually, because they are all men. I met one recently who at the age of 68 has been asked by his employer whether he would be happy to work for another 5 years so that it can get the latest group of apprentices up to speed before he retires. He is a linesman. He cannot—

💬 John Hayes: Why don’t you retire?

Because, Mr Hayes, I have a lot more years to offer this Parliament than you do. The people of the Wairarapa will have something to say about that. I venture to suggest that I probably have offered a bit more to this Parliament in the last 2 years than the honourable member has in his time here, which is a lot longer than that. But I want to say this. There are some 68-year-olds, Mr Hayes—and you might want to take a lead from them—who are keen to retire and who want to make way for the younger generation, but because they are in trades occupations their employers are saying to them: “We need you to stay.” These are tradespeople whose job it is to clamber up ladders in the dead of night, during the fiercest storms in Canterbury and the rest of the country, to restore power and make sure that we can all snuggle up in our warm beds—snuggle up in John Hayes’ warm bed in the Wairarapa—

💬 Dr David Clark: Please, no.

No, no, not with him. No, he can snuggle up in his warm bed, but the rest of us do not have to join him—the rest of us do not have to join him. Employers want the tradespeople to be able to do the fantastic job they do, but they are an ageing workforce. So we have to do more.

💬 Hon Simon Bridges: Hey, you get back to snuggling up with John Hayes.

“Mr Anadarko” over there—his client companies, they need their tradespeople as well. Maybe one or two of them will be pulled from Kaikōura, although Colin King was not so sure. But we need those people. We need people to be going into apprenticeships and into industry training. This bill will go some way to do that.

There are a couple of things I want to comment on about it because this is important stuff. Apprenticeships are important. They have been important in this country since the age of Julius Vogel—the only Premier for a long time who took seriously the rebuilding of infrastructure. Of course, now we have got a generation of politicians who want to sell our infrastructure. At least Julius Vogel had the vision to build our infrastructure, and he understood the value of apprenticeships, which is why we have had them since that time. We have been very thankful for those generations of workers, of indentured tradespeople, who have come from other shores to add to our industry training and apprenticeship training capacity. That has been very important.

Industry training is very important too. On-the-job training is vital. There is a part of our cohort who do not take easily to sitting behind a desk and learning theory. They learn on the job, and they are very important to us too. We have world-class on-the-job training. We have had a world-class on-the-job training system under our industry training legislation, and we need to continue that.

The reality is, as we know, as I think this Government knows, and as we too would acknowledge, that where we got to in the 2000s was that there were some industry training organisations that were more into empire building and building up their accumulated reserves than they were into training people. I agree with the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment, and I agreed with him at the time when I was a union secretary, about the criticism of those industry training organisations that could boast extraordinary bank balances but not much by way of the output of industry training and apprenticeships. So it was right that there should be some reform. It was right that there should be some rationalisation. One of the very good things that this bill will do is set up a programme and a means for proper rationalisation.

I remember when I sat on the board of the Tertiary Education Commission and we were dealing with industry training organisations. There were about 46 of them at that time, including one I remember very well, which was the New Zealand Equine Industry Training Organisation, which had only seven trainees. It is appropriate that I should mention that on this day of great equine achievement and, indeed, equine training achievement, with Mike Moroney and his achievements at Flemington today. But the New Zealand Equine Industry Training Organisation had only seven trainees, and we did wonder whether an entire organisation should be built around that. But the Tertiary Education Commission at the time had no levers to pull to not just encourage but sometimes compel those amalgamations and mergers, and now we will have the means to do that.

One point I do want to make is that I want to just acknowledge the strange sort of approach to tripartism. The industry training organisations always reflected a level of tripartism. The current legislation provides for workers’ representatives in governance and, of course, employers. This bill makes explicit the role of employers in the governance, but then the bill goes from section 6 on employer governance to new section 11 for workers’ representatives to be in governance. I am not quite sure why that should be reflected in that way.

There will be some questions, I think, that will be raised as we examine this, on how existing industry training organisations manage themselves. I think the Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation will stand out for attention because one of the problems it has here is that this is an industry that is crying out for more apprentices, and it has not had them. That is partly because 50 percent of its apprentices, up to now, have been labour-only contractors. They have not been employed under conventional employment agreements. We might want to say that under this legislation we should have more conventional arrangements in order to encourage apprentices. But we will support this legislation. We see great hope for it, and we will examine it closely in the Education and Science Committee.

I am pleased to rise and speak in support of this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill in its first reading. As someone who sits on the Education and Science Committee, I am very much looking forward to this bill coming through. I am also very pleased to hear the support from around the House at some points in time, particularly from Opposition members. We were not sure by their words that they were in support, but they do indeed tell us that they are.

One thing we have heard this evening, particularly from the Opposition, is this whole discussion of “Where are the jobs? Where are the apprenticeships? We just made it happen in the past.” I think one of the key elements, and my colleague Colin King raised it earlier, is that to be an apprentice you need the economic opportunities and the jobs there. I can think of my brother and others who have gone through the apprenticeship schemes. A lot of the great learning comes on the job. So there is a certain irony today as the jibes from the Opposition have been pointing out why we did not have apprenticeships or larger numbers in the past. If there are not the jobs, it is always hard to correlate it to the apprenticeships. But here we have an economy growing, more jobs in the economy, and therefore more opportunities in the apprenticeship space. I was saying that what is ironic is that we have just had, before this bill, discussion around the New Zealand International Convention Centre, a great opportunity to build jobs and to build opportunities, if there is no pun in that, but also an opportunity, of course, for people to be apprentices. If you are going to learn trades like carpentry, joinery, and so on, or even be in the hospitality business, you need opportunities for jobs.

I think one of the key elements underpinning this bill is a Government committed to creating jobs, be it the convention centre or be it the work that Minister Bridges is doing around oil and gas exploration. This creates jobs. When you want to talk about apprenticeships—and Labour and the Greens have said: “Yeah, it’s a great idea. We support that.”—on the flip side you need to support the industries that create jobs.

Another one jumps to mind tonight, actually. We heard that the Government has committed $900 million to the World of Wearable Art Awards. That is going to create opportunities and jobs as well. We know that it creates millions of dollars of opportunities where those shows are held. Again, these are opportunities for young New Zealanders if they want to get involved in those areas. Think about the hospitality trade-off. There will be a number of young people who will want to work in that area.

I think what we need to stress is not only the importance of apprenticeships but also the importance of this Government’s focus on creating jobs and not putting obstacles in the way. To finish, I just want to note—

💬 Dr David Clark: Unemployment’s up.

We have someone yelling out that unemployment is up, but, actually, he should look at the figures and the great work that has been undertaken by this Government to actually take people off unemployment benefits and off sickness benefits and put them into jobs and opportunities. What we know too is that in the decade up to 2010, the Government funding for industry training organisations almost trebled. We have also noted that during the Labour time there was an increase in industry training participation, but completion rates and student attainment were low, as a number of my colleagues have pointed out in the debate. We are not interested in just the bums on seats approach of the Labour Government. I saw it in the days I worked within the Ministry of Social Development as well. We are here to set high standards focused on real opportunities and real jobs for our young people. We back them. It is not about just talking; it is about actions as well.

We are very pleased with the reboot scheme that was announced recently. Young people can achieve up to $1,000, followed by—

💬 Carol Beaumont: How many young women were given apprenticeships?

Someone is yelling out “How many young women?”. That is the Labour Party, you see. It wants to force everything—absolutely force everything. Actually, I am going to end with this. I am looking forward to David Cunliffe, the current leader of the Labour Party, announcing the co-leader for the Labour Party, the female co-leader, because if it is going to follow the logic of its conference, then it must be ready to appoint a female co-leader.

💬 Hon Judith Collins: It can’t find any.

Well, yes, indeed. The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill—I recommend it to the House.

I rise to support the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill and welcome putting apprenticeships back into the Industry Training Act of 1992. Before I get into the bill, may I say I think the previous speaker, Simon O’Connor, is feeling just a little bit envious about the progressive Labour Party. It actually is prepared to confront the issue of gender representation, and perhaps before he criticises this party he should have a look at his own in terms of representation of women in that party. If he does not think there is a problem about women in industry training, he should go and have another look at the figures.

One of the things I think is a little bit sad about this bill, even though we support it, is that we are repairing an awful lot of damage that was done during the 1990s, particularly to apprenticeships. As we have heard tonight, Labour had to bring in the Modern Apprenticeships scheme and deal with trying to put apprentices back into the picture after they were taken out of the picture by a National Government in the 1990s.

I also just wanted to reflect on the last election, and what Labour was committing to do about apprenticeships, particularly around young people. I want to tell listeners that, actually, if Labour had been in power, by now we would have had every at-risk 15 and 19-year-old either learning or earning, and we would have provided for 9,000 unemployed New Zealanders to come off the unemployment benefit and into apprenticeships, with a subsidy of $8,727, equivalent to the dole, going to employers willing to offer a permanent full-time job. I went and talked to quite a lot of people during the last election, particularly those running group and shared apprenticeship schemes and so on, and they were very enthusiastic about this policy and very condemning of the fact that the National Government had run down industry training, with $55 million cut from industry training. This is at a time when unemployment is now up to 170,000. There are 294,000 people actually jobless and 113,000 people looking for more hours. It has declined by 20 percent under National, so it is pleasing to see something in the House at last, after nearly 6 years of a National Government, addressing the issue of apprenticeships.

I also want to draw the attention of members opposite to the purpose of this bill. It is, of course, about providing opportunities for young people and older people to get the appropriate skills and qualifications that are portable, that are relevant, and that are going to enhance their employability. This is not about employers doing favours for people by offering them apprenticeships; this is about making sure that we are building the skills that we need for the future of our country. Without the industry training that we have had over many years, we know that it has caused a huge problem. It has also added to our low wages in New Zealand. Industry training and apprenticeships actually get people with skills so that they can take on the kinds of jobs that we need in this country—we are going to make things that the rest of the world needs—and they will make those people much more employable.

As others have said also, we import skilled workers. I think there is no greater example of that than in Christchurch at the moment. It is disgraceful, really, that 3 years after an earthquake—3 years later, when we knew there was going to have to be a rebuild—we are now importing something like 17,000 or 18,000 workers from overseas, from other countries, to help with the Christchurch rebuild. It has to be done, but when Shane Jones sees the unemployed young Māori in Northland, from where he comes, you cannot blame him for asking why it is that that is happening when we are bringing in skilled workers in Christchurch. It is a failure of this Government to address the need that was clearly coming.

I think it is very important that the Education and Science Committee has a very close look at industry training and apprenticeships, because I think there are some rorts still going on and they are different rorts from the ones that the members opposite decided. It concerns me, for example, that we have people training to be hairdressers in industry training who are paid $10,000 to $20,000 to learn to be hairdressers, yet they are on minimum wage—in fact, they are on training wages, which is about $11 an hour. That is supposed to be tied to credits. In fact, did this Government not reduce the number of credits that you have to have or can have to be paid a minimum wage or training wage? I think there are some quality issues there. I think there are some rorts for young people and that does concern me. I hope that the select committee takes the opportunity to have a look at that.

I think another obvious issue at the moment is other areas of skills. We all talk about building and construction, but it really bemuses me that we are having a debate in this country about truck drivers at the moment. We have an industry that is simply unable to get people to drive trucks, even though we have had industry training in that area for some time. Why is it that people do not want to do that job? My colleague Andrew Little talked about the building and construction industry and how many apprenticeships are actually labour only, which seems to me an incredible rort, actually. That is a terrible rort. They are supposedly apprenticeships, but the apprentices are not even being paid properly. They are supposedly self-employed, with no security of employment, and paying their own ACC.

One thing that happened in the last year was that Mainzeal Property and Construction went bust. But before that it applied to Immigration New Zealand to bring in 100 Chinese workers to work in its business called King Facade. People objected to that at the time, and the unions objected to it on the basis that this was a job where New Zealanders should be being trained—that is, we did not need to be importing Chinese workers to do, basically, what is a job where New Zealanders could be trained and have a profession and have an occupation that would hold them in good stead. The sad thing about what happened to those Chinese workers, of course, is that they all got sent home when Mainzeal Property and Construction went bust. So not only were there opportunities lost for New Zealand workers but also those Chinese workers were not treated particularly well.

Anyway, as I said at the beginning, Labour is committed to supporting this bill and that we have the skilled workforce that we need. We want New Zealanders to have jobs and opportunities, and we want to make sure that we hold the Government to account and make sure that it gets moving on this. It is a serious concern that we have a shortage of skilled tradespeople, and I think it is a disgrace that we have overseen the loss of thousands of apprenticeships under National—thousands of opportunities for industry training. Our young people have suffered. The 20 percent drop in the number of Modern Apprenticeships and a 37 percent drop in the number of industry trainees are shameful. It has fed into the unemployment of our young people. It has created a whole problem for the future. I am glad that the Government has seen sense and has brought this bill to the House, and we look forward to supporting it. Thank you.

I commend the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill to the House.

Bill read a first time.

Bill referred to the Education and Science Committee.

on behalf of the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment: I move, That the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill be reported back to the House by 10 March 2014.

Motion agreed to.