Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill

I move, That the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill be now read a third time. Can I thank members for the work they have done on this bill. Their amendments have improved the bill. This is a very important bill, which completes this Government’s comprehensive reforms to improve industry training to achieve better performance for employers, for trainees, for apprentices, and also for taxpayers. There is a big opportunity over the next few years to train more New Zealanders in vocational careers that will set them up well for their working lives. To maximise this opportunity, it is essential New Zealand has a high-quality, responsive industry training system.

When we came into office, it was clear that that was not the case; in fact, industry training was a mess. Government expenditure on industry training had more than trebled from $64 million in 2000-01 to $204 million in the 2009-10 financial year. In 2011 there were approximately 154,000 trainees and apprentices enrolled in industry training. This included nearly 15,000 Modern Apprentices. However, performance, as measured by qualification completions and credit attainment, was very poor. Only about a third of trainees achieved the qualification 5 years after starting their industry training programme. Typically more than half of industry trainees and over 30 percent of Modern Apprentices achieved no credit between 2002 and 2010. The system was riddled with what has now become known as “phantom trainees”—thousands and thousands of trainees who had not completed any credits. Under the Labour Government of the day, it was all about signing people up and nothing about what happened afterwards.

That was an obviously unsustainable situation, and the Government took very quick and decisive action. Our operational changes have led to significant improvements in both qualification and credit attainment. That work continues and it has freed up funding to reinvest into the system. We also initiated a much more fundamental look at the industry training system. Overall, the review found that the industry training system was highly variable in terms of levels of service to employers and trainees in its connection to industry and its performance. The bill implements the changes arising from that review that required legislative change.

The first objective of the bill is to enable the establishment of a comprehensive New Zealand apprenticeship system that provides the same level of support to all apprentices, regardless of their age. It repeals the Modern Apprenticeship Training Act 2000 and amends the Industry Training Act 1992 so that legislation related 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 that activity. The bill combines Modern Apprenticeships and other apprenticeship-type training programmes into what is 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 boosted the prestige and the educational content of apprenticeships by requiring all such programmes to be at least 120 credits and to result in a level 4 qualification. This Government has increased the funding for apprenticeships, which will allow industry training organisations to invest in the quality of education for their apprentices to lower fees and to encourage uptake.

Our apprenticeship reboot has been under way since March of last year. New apprentices enrolled since then have been eligible for a grant of $1,000 towards their on-job and off-job costs, or $2,000 if they are in priority trades, with the same amount paid to their employer. Initially the reboot applied to the first 10,000 apprentices, but uptake has been so good that in December we extended it to the first 14,000 who applied. Since the reboot started, so far over 11,000 apprentices have been signed up.

The second objective of the bill is to focus industry training organisations on two core responsibilities: setting skills standards for their industries and arranging training. The bill removed the industry training organisation’s statutory skills leadership function, which required it to identify all current and future skill needs for their whole industry. Removing this role will encourage industry training organisations to focus on arranging training, which businesses have told us is the service that they most value. Removing the statutory skills leadership requirement does not prevent them in any way from undertaking that role. However, it will incentivise other organisations such as companies and industry associations to take a greater direct role in skills leadership with Government agencies like the Tertiary Education Commission, the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment, and the Ministry of Education. This will improve links between the Government and industry in determining present and future skills 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. Thanks to a comprehensive amalgamation programme with the Industry Training Federation, we have reduced the number of industry training organisations by two-thirds. We now have fewer industry training organisations, and they are larger, more capable, and well placed to provide a better service to their trainees and employers. However, an appropriate regulatory regime needs to be in place to address any unsatisfactory performance that may arise. This bill addresses this by strengthening the quality assurance framework for industry training organisations. The quality assurance framework for industry training organisations is currently weaker than for other tertiary education organisations. This has contributed to the issues of quality of industry training in the past. The bill gives the New Zealand Qualifications Authority power to prescribe quality assurance requirements for industry training organisations. The bill also gives the New Zealand Qualifications Authority the power to impose a graduated regime of sanctions in order to address poor performance by an industry training organisation.

Members opposite expressed concern about the provisions in the bill that make it clear that non - industry training organisations can receive funding for industry training and apprenticeship training. With the greatest respect, these concerns are misplaced. Allowing non - industry training organisations to be funded for arranging training and apprenticeship training activities will strengthen the incentive for industry training organisations to provide excellent service to their employers and their trainees. The review of industry training in 2011 found that a significant number of employers thought their industry training organisation did a poor job. Having this option available as an alternative for employers will encourage the industry training organisations to provide quality service to their employee clients at all times. It is called competition.

Secondly, I do not expect many employers to take up the option. Only $10 million worth of funding for non - industry training organisations is available in each of 2014 and 2015, which is about 5 percent of total funding for industry training and apprenticeships. It is worth remembering that participating employers must have at least 40 trainees each year.

💬 Grant Robertson: Just an ideological little dalliance.

No, it is not ideological, Mr Robertson. It is about getting the best result for trainees and the employers.

💬 Grant Robertson: You just said they wouldn’t want to do it.

They do want to do it, and they want to do it across regions in New Zealand. The monitoring and assessing of non - industry training organisation arrangements for training will have to be acceptable to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority. Furthermore, the funding determination specifies that in order to receive funding, non - industry training organisations and industry training organisations must ensure that any programme in which a trainee is enrolled meets the New Zealand Qualifications Authority’s quality assurance requirements. In practice, as a matter of policy, the Government funds only industry training that leads to transferable qualifications for the employee. That policy will apply to non - industry training organisations in the same way that it applies to industry training organisations. There will be a level playing field.

But, once again, I make no apology: if industry training organisations are not doing their job, this Government and this Minister will allow employers to make other arrangements. It is called competition, and the Opposition should not be afraid of it.

This bill is a vital part of the Government’s comprehensive reforms to industry training to achieve better performance for employers, better performance for trainees, better performance for apprentices, and also better performance for taxpayers—groups that the Opposition is completely estranged from. Most of all, the result of this bill and the Government reforms that accompany it mean that many more thousands of New Zealanders will achieve a real vocational qualification that will provide them with a career and that will allow them to provide for themselves and their families into the future. For that, this House can be very proud. I commend this bill to the House.

The provision of industry training and the availability of apprenticeships are a vital part of ensuring that we actually have economic growth and innovation in New Zealand. We need more people with skills in our workforce. If we have a more skilled workforce, it will drive productivity. If we drive productivity, there will be better economic outcomes, higher wages, more growth for the New Zealand economy, and more opportunities for New Zealanders. If we have people in apprenticeships, we will be growing the next generation of workers who will be providing the engine room of that economic growth and innovation. We will be giving people—young people, especially—the opportunity to have a career and to get under their belt a trade and a skill, and giving them guidance around that by those who have experience.

Industry training and apprenticeships are such an important part of our economic future and, indeed, of our society, which is why we on this side of the House are so disappointed that we are unable to support this legislation, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, because there are in this legislation a couple of pretty good elements. The first of those is the creation of the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme, because that brings together the range of different kinds of apprenticeships and industry training programmes under one umbrella. It addresses an issue that on this side of the House we acknowledge, which is that when Labour brought in the Modern Apprenticeships scheme, we had to do that off the back of apprenticeships having been destroyed by the National Government in the 1990s. We deliberately focused on opportunities for young New Zealanders because that is what had been taken away when the apprenticeships scheme was disestablished in the 1990s. What the New Zealand Apprenticeships scheme, which is brought in under this bill, does is to expand that out to people from older age groups, and we accept that that is an important thing to do. There is a need nowadays for retraining for a lot of people when they are older. It is not about just young people. We believe that this is a good element of the bill—to create a more coordinated apprenticeships scheme.

We also accept that there has been a need for some reorganisation of industry training. We are not ashamed of the fact that many more people got the opportunity to undertake industry training and to get new skills under the last Labour Government. Maybe there were one or two people who did not complete their qualification, and it would have been good if they had, but at least we had a Government that was prepared to invest in skills in our workplaces. So now, when the opportunity to reorganise the sector has come along, it is a good thing. Industry training organisations have responded to the need to reorganise themselves, and we welcome the fact that they are now leaner and more efficient entities.

They are two good things that are in this bill and that we could support. But on top of that we have a Government whose ideological agenda means that it wants to impose on the industry training sector a contestable model of funding—a privatisation of the sector. Let us be absolutely clear. The purpose of industry training, the reason the Government funds industry training, is, to quote the officials, the availability of a common, transferable set of qualifications that considers the needs of the industry as a whole. That is akin to a public good, which is unlikely to emerge without Government intervention. That is the purpose of industry training: creating a skilled workforce that can move between businesses, that ensures that people have skills that transfer across industries. So why bring in a system of funding that directly funds employers? Is it not the Government that should be telling us: “We’re not going to pick winners. We’re not going to privilege people.”? No. This Government says: “I tell you what we’re going to do. We’re going to ensure that we can directly fund those employers to deliver the training.” There are no guarantees, as the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment might claim, that that will be a transferable qualification or skill. In fact, it is highly likely to be a qualification that is relevant pretty much for only that business.

As my colleague Tracey Martin has raised before, what are the businesses that are going to want to do this? Are they the Minister’s mates? Are they run by the people who have got the Minister’s ear? Because they are being set up in a completely different way from the way that industry training organisations are. The Minister made a big thing in his speech of the fact that industry training organisations are prevented from setting up private training establishments to deliver training. Well, the new clause enables these private businesses to not only organise the training but deliver it as well. So the very thing that the Minister is denying to industry training organisations he is delivering to his mates. He is privatising it and allowing them to both organise the training and deliver the training. He is the one setting up two different standards within this system for these individually funded employers and for industry training organisations.

At the Education and Science Committee submitter after submitter said to the Government: “Don’t do this. Do not create this situation.” The only submitter that demurred from that was Business New Zealand, which said that it gave qualified support to the idea, but it thought that there needed to be a review to see whether it was necessary. That is Phil O’Reilly - speak for “For God’s sake, don’t do this. It’s a terrible idea and it will ruin everything.” Phil O’Reilly is the only person who came to the committee with even that level of lukewarm support. Everybody else, from the Contractors Federation to the Council of Trade Unions and other employers, said: “Please don’t do this, because you will undermine industry training organisations.” Far from this great competitive model that is going to lead to these high-performing industry training organisations, the only businesses that can take up this direct funding are the big businesses, and the small businesses, which rely on a strong industry training organisation to enable them to deliver training, are the ones that will suffer from an industry training organisation that no longer contains the large employers, which contribute more money to those industry training organisations. So not only does it undermine the purpose of industry training, it undermines the industry training organisations that the Minister purports to support.

This is a very retrograde step when it comes to industry training. There is already flexibility within the industry training organisation model. Employers are perfectly entitled to move between different industry training organisations, and in the reorganisation process a number of businesses have done that. They have aligned themselves with a different industry training organisation from the one they were in. The Minister is trying, as he often does, to address a problem that is not here, in order to implement his own ideological view about the privatisation of education. It makes no difference whether it is charter schools, public-private partnerships to build schools, or this privatisation of industry training; it has an agenda from Steven Joyce and the National Government to undermine the public provision of education and training and, in this case, the training that takes place through industry training organisations.

I want to make it absolutely clear that on this side of the House we see no need for these changes. We do not believe that they are good for industry training. They are not going to be good for the trainees involved if they end up with skills that are not transferable. I ask the question again: why is the Government paying for it? This comes from the party that is meant to believe that it is somehow or other a great steward of the economy. It decides that it can directly chuck money at its mates and say: “You deliver the training.”, instead of strengthening those industry training organisations.

The second reason why the Labour Party cannot support this bill is the abolition of the skills leadership function. Industry training organisations have had the legislated and mandated role of looking at the skills that are required within their industry and saying: “How will we provide these in the future, being the body that says: ‘This is where we need to go.’?”. We had a great submission from Careerforce, which said that it had sat down with Health Workforce New Zealand and looked at the future skills needs for those people who look after our elderly and who look after our disabled in the community. No one else was doing that, but the industry training organisation got in there and did it. It played its skills leadership role. That role disappears. It is gone, and we have to hope that a Government department will pick up that idea. It is not mandated to do that. We just have to hope that it will. Well, on this side of the House we actually believe that industry should be leading it. We actually believe that business knows more about it than the Government does. But, no, all of a sudden, National members have decided that they know better. They have arrogantly dismissed the role of industry in this.

We cannot support a bill that has no one responsible for working out what skills we need in industry in New Zealand in the future. That is irresponsible. It is the kind of short-term thinking we have come to expect from this Government. So we will be strongly opposing this bill. We have strongly opposed it. We will turn back these changes when we get back into Government, because we want strong, publicly funded industry training organisation arrangements and apprenticeships that give New Zealanders the skills that lend to the productivity gains we need and that ensure that all trainees are getting skills they can use across an industry.

This bill is deeply flawed. It is an ideological response to a problem that is not there, and it will undermine industry training and apprenticeships in New Zealand.

We on this side of the House realise that for New Zealand to remain internationally competitive, our tertiary education providers need to ensure their relevance in the modern workplace. That is a given. I would like to acknowledge the help of the Opposition members on the Education and Science Committee when we were going through the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill. Even though they lodged their objections to the bill, they did work hard to make some improvements, and I hope to touch upon those later in my brief speech.

We have got a Better Public Services target of aiming to get to 55 percent—55 percent—of 25 to 35-year-olds gaining a level 4 or better qualification. In 2012 we managed to get up to 52.6 percent with level 4 or above, which was an improvement on the previous year’s 51.8 percent. Since coming into office, we have worked hard on many different strands of lifting educational achievement. The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is just one of those strands in the cable of lifting student achievement over a lifetime of learning.

We are clear, having reviewed the industry training that was on offer over 2011-12, that there were some changes necessary. Some changes were needed to ensure that the industry training system was well connected to industry with a high employer buy-in, that it was educationally sound, that it was coherent with the wider tertiary education system, and that it delivered value for money for employers and the Government.

We have heard in this House over the time that this bill has been debated how a remarkable number of trainees did not actually exist. They were phantom trainees. I wonder whether they signed in under the name of “Mr Walker”, the ghost who walked, because they certainly were not there at the end of the day, and they certainly were not there to receive their qualifications. In fact, some of them did not even exist. Some of them may have been dead. We do not know what the reason for the non-appearance of the others was, but we are determined to get on top of this.

This bill will establish a comprehensive apprenticeships system that provides the same level of support to all apprentices regardless of age. It was pleasing to hear the Opposition acknowledge the worth of this provision, the New Zealand Apprenticeships system, which will mean that people will no longer be discriminated against for their age. All apprentices will get the same level of support, the same level of subsidy, regardless of their age.

The bill will focus the industry training organisations on two key functions, as we have heard: setting skills standards for their industries and arranging training. It will clarify the functions and powers of the New Zealand Qualifications Authority in relation to the industry training organisations. It will include criteria relating to quality assurance in the process by which the responsible Minister recognises an organisation as an industry training organisation.

This bill is, as I said, yet another strand in this Government’s steadfast resolve to make a stronger cable to lift students’ achievement across the board, right from early childhood education and right through primary, secondary, and tertiary levels. I commend this bill to the House.

I think that Labour actually agreed with the previous speaker, Dr Cam Calder, when he summed up at the end of his speech that this Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is very much part of National’s education agenda. I will talk more on that as I go through this speech. Before I get on to that, I do want to acknowledge the work of the Education and Science Committee. I want to acknowledge the work of the chair of the select committee that went through this bill, Dr Cam Calder. But I also want to reiterate what my colleague Grant Robertson said—that it was a deeply disappointing process for us that for the submitters who came to the committee and who put forward very strong arguments around aspects of this bill, those words fell on deaf ears. These were not ideas that the Government members of the committee were willing to even countenance.

I think that it is right in this third reading of the bill for us to say that it is a disappointment for us that we cannot vote for this legislation. There are elements in this bill that we would like to support. Dr Calder, in his speech, talked about one of those elements, and that is the evolution of the resurrected apprenticeship training scheme in New Zealand that Labour put in place in the 1990s being extended out to beyond young people. So it is with a great deal of disappointment that we are voting against the bill. I think it should be noted that Labour has supported measures that this Government has brought in that we genuinely believe are going to improve industry training in this country. But it is fair to say that we simply cannot support the fundamental measures in this bill, because we know that they are going to be to the detriment of industry training in this country.

For Labour, industry training is absolutely central to its vision for New Zealand in the 21st century. We know that in order for people to have higher-paying jobs and for people to get out of poverty cycles, skills training and apprenticeships are vitally important. We know that if we are going to lift ourselves beyond being a commodity-producing nation, if we really are going to be the innovative country that people talk about, then we have to have a skilled workforce. The reason that Labour cannot support this bill is that it does not deliver that for New Zealand and for New Zealanders. It is with a heavy heart that we are doing that.

I think that if we have a look at the history of Labour with apprenticeships, there has been a lot of myth-making attempted by Government members on this bill about the great rescue job that they had to do around apprenticeship training in this country. But let us have a look at the facts of that history. When Labour came back into power in 1999, it had to deal with an absolutely decimated apprenticeship training scheme in this country. It had to put back in place some form or way of making sure that our young people were getting the skills training they needed. The scheme that was put in—and my colleague Grant Robertson talked about this—was limited to young people. So we would have liked to vote today for a scheme that extends that out, but we are not. It is a scheme that did need some fixes. We acknowledge that and we voted for them. But the myth-making of this Government—for these Government members to stand there and say that they are the saviours of apprenticeship training in this country—is actually just laughable. It absolutely belies the history of this country and what we lost out on as a nation.

National members are good at the big talk around apprenticeships and skills training. We saw it in 2011, post the Canterbury earthquakes. We had John Key talking the big game about the need for skills training in Christchurch and the fact that his Government was going to back it. Labour foreshadowed that, even before John Key started talking about it. We knew. It was not rocket science. Buildings and houses were falling down. People were going to have to rebuild them. We lacked the skilled workforce to build those buildings, and to rebuild the horizontal infrastructure, we needed to train our young people then and there. But did we take that opportunity? No, we did not.

Steven Joyce can stand in this House today and talk about the success of his apprenticeships reboot scheme and his need to expand it. Well, Mr Joyce should have got on to it 2 years earlier, because for 2 years the money allocated for the Skills for Canterbury training sat unspent. It sat unspent while Minister Joyce came to the select committee and sat there and said that he was not willing to frogmarch young New Zealanders into skills training. Perhaps some encouragement, perhaps some incentives, and perhaps some energy in terms of getting our young people into that skills training would have been preferable, because we saw none of that from the Minister. It is an opportunity of a generation that this Government has missed. It has let young people down by not acting. And to stand in this House and gloat about the Government’s record in skills training in relation to the needs of the Canterbury rebuild is shameful. It is an area that this Government has absolutely failed in.

We came up with creative solutions around it. We said: “Let’s look at innovative ways. Let’s not just pay young people the dole. Let’s actually make that a payment to help employers take on more young people into apprenticeship training while we wait for the work stream to come on board.” But did the Government take any of this on? No, it did not. We could now have people 3½ years into their training, instead of us having to look overseas rather than employing New Zealanders. That is sad. It is a policy that Labour knows would have worked and will still work. It is a policy that I have as a member’s bill in my name, one that I very much hope gets pulled out of the ballot before the general election, because it is very much needed.

The chair of the Education and Science Committee, in the speech he has just given, told us that changes were needed and that we needed to have an industry training scheme that was well connected to industry and with high employer buy-in. I thought that was a particularly interesting comment from the chair of that committee, given that what we had was employers coming to the select committee and telling us that they did not want the bill. I do not know how he thinks this is buy-in. I do not know how he thinks it is well connected to industry, when we had industry coming to the select committee and telling us that it would not work, that it was not the way for us to do skills and apprenticeship training in New Zealand, and that it just was not going to benefit the system. The words we are hearing in this House today are hollow. They absolutely belie what happened in that committee room and what Government members know they heard from the submitters who came to the committee. My colleague Grant Robertson talked about the very lukewarm support that the one supporter of this proposal, Phil O’Reilly, would give it—that it was damning with faint praise. As Mr Robertson said, it was code for “Please don’t do this. It’s wrong. It’s not going to work.”

But perhaps one of the biggest concerns for us in this legislation is the ability for non - industry training organisations to take on a role that has previously been something for industry good. One of the submitters came to us and told us that if this legislation goes through, we can no longer call it industry training. I think that was one of the most telling comments I heard in that select committee. This is not a piece of legislation that is about helping industry; this is a piece of legislation that is about helping big business. Steven Joyce talked about that in his speech, actually. He thought he was giving us reassurances when he wanted to highlight the fact that it was only employers with 40-plus employees who could be open to the provision of taking on the funding and taking over the function of industry training organisations. This is legislation for the big end of town. This is not about helping small and medium sized enterprises in terms of their skills and training needs.

For us on this side of the House, for us in Labour, we know that if we are going to transform our economy, we need to be doing everything we can to back our small and medium sized enterprises with the kind of skilled workforce that they are going to need for the 21st century. But, no, what is happening under this legislation is that already we are having mates of the Government tendering to get in on the funding. This is for business good now, not for industry good. It is a sad day for New Zealand industry when we have a Government that is willing to look after the big end of town and its corporate mates, rather than thinking about what the strategic needs of industry are and the kind of skilled workforce that we are going to need to drive it.

Labour is opposing this bill. We wish we did not have to, because industry training is so important to this country, but this bill simply will not deliver industry training.

Casting back to January 2013, the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment indicated the shape of what this legislation, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, would probably look like. He indicated some changes in industry training and apprenticeships. At the time, the Greens said publicly that we sort of liked the general direction and the shape of what the Minister was indicating. We also noted that it was rather late in the piece, and that point has been made by the previous speaker, Dr Megan Woods. The need for expansion in the industries to ensure a supply of skilled, trained labour was paramount. In fact, that was obvious at least 3 or 4 years prior to the Minister’s announcement. It is unfortunate that the Government chose to sit idle while an obvious need was growing more urgent.

Nevertheless, we finally saw the bill in September last year. We looked at it, analysed it, and took some advice, and, with some qualifications, we came to the House and voiced our qualified support for the bill. There were some good aspects to it, and I will reference those in a moment. We saw one or two things that puzzled us and that we were not clear on. One of those, in fact, was the issue of skills leadership. We thought that the Government seemed to be suggesting that the industry training organisations would not have sole responsibility for skills leadership, but it was not clear to us where that responsibility would land. We now know, of course, that the responsibility lands in a black hole somewhere. Nobody carries the burden of responsibility for skills leadership, and that is an untenable situation. Now, unfortunately, as with our Labour colleagues, we have to oppose a piece of legislation that we would have liked to support. It does some useful and good things. It might have been a very good piece of legislation. But, sadly, it misses the mark, it misses the targets, and it will require amendment to bring it up to being fit for purpose in the 21st century in order to meet our current needs.

One of the things we do like about the bill, to be relentlessly positive, is that it does remove age restrictions. Many apprenticeships, many disciplines, skills, whatever you like, no longer require the strength and enthusiasm of youth. There are many trades, many situations, in industry where people who are no longer young might usefully pick up skills, get qualifications, and effect a career change. This is the era of career change. Very few people, very few of our students currently at school, will have one career from the time they leave training, education, whatever, to when they get their gold watch. This is the era of career change. Retraining is valuable and critical, and it is useful that this removal of the age restriction will facilitate that.

We like the fact that this is a unified piece of legislation. It brings together a number of other pieces of legislation. It is always desirable to have a single document that covers a particular issue or industry, whatever it might be. We like the fact, and always have, that the bill prevents industry training organisations from owning private training establishments. It obviously removes the potential for a conflict of interest, and that is as it should be. We particularly like the fact that it names particular groups that are identified as in need of particular support—currently Māori and Pasifika—and that is, again, a very well-targeted intention.

We regret that the bill is silent on women. We know for a fact that there are way too few women taking apprenticeships and going into industry training, and we could put some effort into amending that and putting that right. If I recall correctly, the issue of who will get particular consideration at any time is tied to the tertiary education strategy. Tertiary education and industry training apprenticeships are two separate domains. They have some crossover, clearly, but I do not think it is particularly smart to link the particular support, the special cases, if you like, to whatever is written in the tertiary education strategy. It would be better to have a stand-alone consideration of which particular groups in society would benefit from some particular attention and how we might attract particular groups, demographics, into industry training or apprenticeships. I think that could have been a better move, but, as I say, I do certainly support the focus on Māori.

In the last few days I have visited a number of schools around Northland for another purpose. You see these young, predominantly Māori students and you want for them the very best future. They are at great schools. Their parents and teachers are committed to doing the right thing for them. But they are also coming from behind the eight ball in some respects, in terms of distance, in terms of social capital. Anything we can do to enable those young people, empower them, put them in a position where they can get a skill, get some training, get a qualification is only to the good.

What do we not like about the bill? First, I should comment on some of the changes made in the Education and Science Committee. There were some useful changes. The bill as drafted gave the Minister significant ability, capacity, to impose or amend conditions on the recognition of an industry training organisation. The language got tidied up about that just to put some reins on the Minister, just to make sure there was some justification for what he or she might do at a particular time. The bill, again as introduced, was seen to potentially give the New Zealand Qualifications Authority perhaps a little bit more sway in terms of governing industry training organisations than was appropriate. The select committee reined that in and made some language changes that will ensure that the appropriate level of authority is given to the New Zealand Qualifications Authority but no more than that.

What we do not like—yes, again, some of this has been outlined by our Labour colleagues, who are equally disappointed. The issues include that, yes, industry training organisations will have responsibility for developing and maintaining standards and for organising training, but the skills leadership function will simply fall into a black hole. Building and construction is one of those skill sets that is so critical at the moment. We have a badly broken city that needs to be rebuilt. I would hate to see us importing tradespeople when we have a large pool of unemployed and untrained youth. Skills leadership in building and construction is critical to ensure that we are doing the right thing. The Building and Construction Industry Training Organisation came to us and pointed out that something like 90 percent of building companies, companies in that industry, are small to medium sized enterprises. They employ fewer than 20 people and many of them employ fewer than 10 people. They are not of a scale where they can purport or pretend to undertake skills leadership. It is not their role or their function.

I was very disappointed that the Government chose to vote down Supplementary Order Paper 426, which I put in at the Committee stage and which would have remedied these two major flaws in the legislation. Even had the bill gone so far as to suggest that the Ministry of Business, Innovation and Employment or some other Government agency had ultimate responsibility for ensuring that there was skills leadership being displayed, being undertaken by somebody, we would have been reassured, but we have not even got that reassurance. We can predict with complete confidence that in many cases that will fall off the edge and we will see a lack of leadership in developing the necessary training to keep up with changes in particular industries and particular trades.

The second major concern for us, of course, was the fact that public funding will go to private companies under the provisions of this bill, and we heard from the Minister that this was in deference to the great god of competition. Yes, competition can often be a very good and useful thing, but there are limits to it. Interestingly, I was at a presentation last night from a person who felt—well, I am paraphrasing, but in my view he was suggesting—that competition was a solution to all things. In theory it often is, but in practice it fails badly, and that is what we will see here.

I was interested too that the Minister referenced the necessity for amending a situation based on a survey done in 2007. The industry training organisations have conceded that there were some shortcomings in their performance, and they have upped their game. They are performing better and differently from how they were 6 or 7 years ago, and it is unfortunate that this legislation is responding to a problem that was perceived 7 years ago but has since been remedied by other means. We think it unfortunate, and the point has been made about Business New Zealand. It has put two conditions around the proposition that public money should go to private companies for training. Neither of those conditions has been met by this bill. Business New Zealand will be as disappointed and as concerned as every other person, every other organisation, and every other stakeholder in this legislation.

So we will, regretfully, in some regards, oppose this legislation. Its redeeming feature perhaps is that it will be easily amended and can become what it ought to be: a piece of legislation fit for purpose to ensure that we have got the skills and the tradespeople that we need to build our future. Kia ora.

It is a pleasure to be following the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill to its completion in the House during the third reading of the bill. It is very important that we put on record that every industry training organisation—all 14 of them that now exist—has an industry advisory group. That industry advisory group works very, very closely with the industry training organisation to ensure what this bill enshrines, which is that industry training and the qualifications that are registered with the New Zealand Qualifications Authority are up to date and appropriate for the time for that particular industry. It was my pleasure the other day to sit in on a meeting with the primary industry training organisation and see that advisory group at work.

When we hear the laments from the Opposition about a lack of leadership, it tends to tell us that it is poorly informed and does not understand how industry actually functions.

💬 Carol Beaumont: That’s a very arrogant point of view.

They on the other side call a shearer arrogant. What I would say back to them is to do their homework, understand how things work, and give some credit to industry for taking a leadership role. One thing I would like to say is that industry in this country needs to take more leadership in the industry training space because as an industry, when you look at it, there is the 80/20 rule: 20 percent of businesses are doing the training and 80 percent are waiting there to pick up the apprentices when they are trained. Really, we have got a very, very long way to go until we are at world’s best practice in valuing skills and trades.

From that point of view, when we look at the comments that the Opposition is making, it was interesting that there was a comprehensive review done in 2012, and what that identified was that there were gaps in the provision of industry training. It was not the big end of town that the Opposition likes to accentuate; it was actually one of our cooperatives, Foodstuffs, that talked about wanting to have the opportunity to customise the training to meet its particular needs. From that point of view, this bill actually enshrines the good practice that needs to be adhered to.

In conclusion, I would just make the point—and I have made it before and I would like to make it again—that Labour created an environment where industry training became a gold rush, apprenticeship training became a perverse incentive to grab money, and I cite one case where a Modern Apprenticeships coordinator took $250,000 and only ever had one completed Modern Apprenticeship. This is an outstanding bill. It will bring in disciplines that are overdue and it is only a National-led Government that had the courage to do so.

Kia ora, Mr Deputy Speaker. I find it very interesting that Mr King has risen to his feet and again repeated the amazing statement that all that is wrong with the apprenticeship system can be blamed upon the Labour Party.

💬 David Bennett: Well, it is.

The reason why I am so fascinated by it—and Mr Bennett probably does need to actually listen, because he is not so young that he cannot remember the 1990s. He is not so young that he cannot remember. All the apprentices who are out there should listen up and go back to have a look at their history books and have a look at who decimated—decimated—the apprenticeship scheme in this country. Have a look at small-town New Zealand and rural New Zealand and at what happened to those companies, those small to medium sized enterprises, and their ability to actually build on the economic development of their towns and take in apprentices and young people from their towns. I will tell you what happened to it. What happened to it was the 1990s and a National Government. So go and have a quick look. Go and have a look in the history books. It will be there somewhere. The National Party has not got to that part of the curriculum of the school day and has taken that out of the history books.

Part of this bill, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, is a solution looking for a problem. There is no problem here. The industry did not come and submit in any way, shape, or form to say: “We need the ability to train apprentices and trainees.” It did not. It never came to the Education and Science Committee. It did not submit in any positive way.

The other thing Mr King has done—and it is interesting how members of the National Party every now and then do the Opposition a favour by accidentally uncovering in their speeches information that they did not want us to know. Foodstuffs has never ever been mentioned before with regard to this bill. And all the time, sitting on this bill at the select committee, nobody ever uncovered the fact that it was Foodstuffs that is supposedly the amalgamated company that wants the ability to train its staff. This is the first time that that has ever been disclosed. Is that not interesting? Is that not interesting? Why did Foodstuffs not come and put in a submission? Why, then, did Foodstuffs not come and explain to the select committee why it is so vital that it can access really rare education dollars so that it can train employees? Why did Foodstuffs not come and actually explain what is wrong with the current industry training organisations? Why did it not submit on the current system right now? It did not, but apparently it has the Government’s ear. How interesting. How interesting that it is only in this House, by accident, that we find out that Foodstuffs has spoken to the Government but did not bother to come and talk to the select committee. I think that is an incredibly interesting piece of information that Mr King has just handed out.

Let us focus on this industry subsidy for the training of employees. This is a Government subsidy for industries around the training of their employees. This is a continuation of the shift of cost from the employer to the employee, because apprentices do not get a free ride. Apprentices have to pay as they work, so do not let us think that this is a gift for them. Apprentices have to participate in the payment for their own training. What we have got now under this clause is industry basically being subsidised by the taxpayer to cover that part of the area that employers should cover—their skin in the game. But will this be available to all industry players? No, it will not. No, it will not. It will not help any of these small and medium sized businesses in Ōpōtiki or Ōtorohanga or Warkworth or Wellsford or Mataura or Westport. None of those small and medium sized businesses that are in those towns, that would work with the young people in those towns who are looking for apprenticeship opportunities, will meet this criterion. You have got to be a large business—we heard it from the Minister for Tertiary Education, Skills and Employment himself—that can employ 40-something or more workers. Who is that? Obviously, it is Foodstuffs. Have a think out there, New Zealand. Have a think about who else fits that criterion. It is not the people in small rural towns. It is not those people.

Here is another contradiction and an example of how this cost keeps getting taken away from the employer and placed on the employee. A really simple example is barista training. There is a $200 course to learn how to make coffee, which only 20 years ago was part of a person going for a job interview. Young people will not know this. They are so used to paying for everything that they do not see how far this has gone and how far large employers are being subsidised by them for them to actually gain employment. Twenty years ago when you showed up at work with a clean record and your curriculum vitae, they trained you in the specific skills for the industry. That no longer exists, and this legislation is another move down that pathway. That no longer exists, so, right now, the new generation of employees is consistently subsidising large business.

I want to also talk about one of the other reasons why business has not been able to take on employees. There are a couple of reasons. The first is the barriers to small and medium sized enterprises. Big business will be able to get this education dollar. For small and medium sized enterprises in small towns there is a financial barrier and a financial cost to them for every year of an apprenticeship for them to participate. For a hairdresser, for example, it is $500 per apprentice every year they go through their apprenticeship. That is a cost on that employer—the small employer and the medium sized employer. But now we have actually got big employers being able to gain more money.

There is another reason why this Government has forced this, and it is around the idea that competition is always the answer. Let us have a look at this Government, and to some extent the Labour Government before it. When they opened up the borders and decided that competition was everything, that there was supposedly a level playing field across the planet, and that New Zealand was now going to do that too, one of the things that happened was that the margins of New Zealand companies got cut to the bone. I was on a plane recently with an employer who runs a company. He is running two teams down in Christchurch, replacing the infrastructure—the lines companies—under the ground. He said that he cannot take on apprentices. He wants to participate, just like everybody else, in building the next generation of apprentices, but he cannot take them on because his margins have been cut to the bone through competition with international companies. So he does not take on young people because, although the Government might say that people should have to pay the $500 a year to have skin in the game, small and medium sized businesses already have skin in the game. They have skin in the game. There is a cost for taking on a young person who has no skills, and it takes time to upskill them. The Government will argue that time is money and that there is skin that these companies, the small and medium sized enterprises, have to put into this game. This man cannot take on any apprentices in his industry down in Christchurch because he does not have any fat left in the contract when he has to compete in the international market. That was something that this Government did. That was something that a National Government did. It is not talked about because nobody wants to know about it. That Government does not want to know about it. But that is part of this idea that competition is the answer to every question.

The Minister also stood and lauded the $1,000 given this year to apprentices and the $1,000 given to business. That is great—11,000 new apprentices in the field. Brilliant. What about next year? What about next year?

💬 Simon O’Connor: Doesn’t that just invalidate your last argument?

Next year the business will actually have to fund that financial cost, Mr O’Connor. The apprentices will have to fund those costs. This Government cut all adult and community education throughout rural New Zealand, so there is nowhere for them to get support around their theory. There is nowhere for them to get support around doing the paperwork while they do the practical in their environments. This Government came up with a solution that nobody asked for.

So New Zealand First will oppose the bill because it goes nowhere—nowhere—in terms of truly creating the ability in rural New Zealand and small and medium sized businesses for our communities to participate in youth employment, which this Government says is a high-priority area for it. Yet it goes and puts another barrier in the way.

Everybody who has taken part in the debate on the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill to this point has acknowledged that we need high-quality industry training organisations in New Zealand and that we need a really effective apprenticeship scheme that not only gives good, long-term job prospects to the apprentices themselves but also meets the needs of our economy. We think, obviously, of the situation in Christchurch, but right around the country there are jobs and areas that are developing all the time that need good-quality apprenticeships. But the New Zealand First member Tracey Martin, who has just resumed her seat, made the extraordinary claim that there was not a problem. So let us just remember why the Government reviewed this sector back in 2011.

That review found that there were very significant problems. One of the most worrying things of all was that the previous Government, during the first decade of this century, had trebled the investment in the industry training organisation sector—which, in itself, sounds really great—but achieved virtually nothing for that investment. In fact, course completions were at a worryingly low level, the credits achieved were very, very disappointing, and we were seeing more and more money going into a system that was delivering no improvement whatsoever, so that is what had to change. Although, unfortunately, I do not have a lot of time available tonight to be able to talk about it, I want to say that the changes that this Government is making have already been shown to be working and are going to make a significant improvement.

One of the things that I am particularly proud of is that last year’s Budget increased the number of places for Māori and Pasifika in trades training from around 600 to 3,000 over the next 4 years. That has got to be a really good thing for those young people.

We are seeing significant improvements. As I say, unfortunately, I do not have a lot of time, but the whole point of this bill is about bringing the law relating to industry training and apprenticeships together within one piece of legislation to establish a comprehensive apprenticeship system that will provide the same level of support to all apprentices regardless of their age, that works with industry, and that meets the needs of our modern economy. It is already being shown to be significantly improving the course completion rate and the quality of the qualifications that those young people are getting. It is done in conjunction with good industry consultation right around the country. It is for those reasons that I warmly endorse this bill.

I just want to make the point, following on from Tim Macindoe, that I think it is important that we remember that qualification completion—or full course completion—and completion of learning are not necessarily the same thing. People can complete parts of qualifications but not complete the whole qualifications for a variety of reasons. Sometimes there are really good reasons why people do not complete an entire qualification. They may go into a qualification and upgrade to another qualification. They may start with a fairly low-level qualification, find that they actually quite enjoy it, and move up to a higher qualification. That is a successful outcome. They may begin a qualification in workplace training that then leads them to think about their career, which involves them then moving on to another job, a better job where they are doing a different qualification or they are doing some different form of training. That is a successful outcome.

The fact that they have not completed the specific qualification does not mean there has not been value from them engaging in that qualification in the first place. I think that that is actually a really important point to remember, because when we are looking at workplace training, getting people engaged is the first priority. Getting people doing learning in the workplace is important. Sometimes that will mean that they switch to some qualification or some form of training that is different from what they originally enrolled in. We should not discourage that. In fact, that is quite often a very welcome thing.

I do agree that there was huge room to improve qualification completion—there is no doubt about that—but if that is the only measure, we are potentially saying to some of those people who are moving out of one qualification pathway and into another without completing the first that that is the wrong thing to do when, actually, sometimes that is the right thing for them to do. Not completing their qualification if they are going on to something bigger and better is actually a good thing, and we should celebrate that and recognise and reward that.

The Labour Party is opposing the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill for two main reasons. The first is the decision to allow industry training funding to be given directly to companies, corporate entities, employers rather than to industry training organisations. The second is the removal of the skills leadership function from industry training organisations.

I worked in the industry training field for a period of time—nearly 2 years. It was a very rewarding and eye-opening experience for me. The first thing I did was work at the Industry Training Federation, where I was involved in researching and writing the history of industry training up to the beginning of the 2000s. I was looking at how we had gone from the previous apprenticeship system through to having industry training organisations in the first place. What was very clear there was there were some great strengths in the new industry training system, but there were some weaknesses in the way the new system was established by the then National Government. Let us not forget that it was put in place by a National Government—Bill Birch, Lockwood Smith, etc.

There were some great strengths in that system, but there were some weaknesses, and one of them was that there was a huge emphasis on the fact that anyone could set up an industry training organisation. Bill Birch admitted he went around the country and said everyone can set up an industry training organisation. So from the beginning, it was about numbers. It was about getting more people into industry training organisations, and more industry training organisations being set up everywhere, rather than looking at some of these more strategic questions, which, in future years, Governments would look at. The last Labour Government looked at them and this National Government is looking at them. That was not the case early on when the industry training system was established. So that was one of the first things that came out of my early work in industry training.

Then I went to work in the oil and gas industry, and I was primarily working for one of the largest companies in New Zealand in the oil and gas industry. By a process of deduction it is not that difficult to figure out who it was.

💬 Simon O’Connor: Don’t tell the Greens.

That is right; I will not. My good friends the Greens have forgiven me. What is absolutely clear from that experience is that the large multinational company I was working for in the oil and gas industry was actually much more interested in qualification portability within its own company around the world, globally, than it was in qualification portability within New Zealand.

If you think about why we have an industry training system in New Zealand and why we have a qualifications framework in New Zealand, a lot of it is about ensuring qualification recognition, recognition of skills that are transportable, portable, across businesses in New Zealand and across different jobs. A company, if it is given the money directly to provide its own training onsite and so on, is going to be more interested in using that as much as it can for its own competitive advantage. That means there is potential for it to be aligning that training more with its internal—and when I say “internal”, I mean globally internal—systems of training and qualification requirements rather than ones that are going to make those employees readily transferable amongst different employers within New Zealand.

So the question I have to ask is why the taxpayer should pay for that. If the qualifications and training that are taking place within an individual company are specific to that company and are basically training requirements that that company would have to be doing with those employees anyway, why should the taxpayer be subsidising that? We subsidise industry training through industry training organisations because we recognise that there is value for this country as a whole in having a skilled workforce—skills that can be transferred, skills that can move from one employer to another.

When we start giving money directly to companies themselves rather than through a structured industry body, we start saying that those things are not as important, and I do not agree with that. What I think we could see here is companies using taxpayer subsidies for health and safety training and so on that they have a duty and an obligation to pay for and provide as good employers. Why should the taxpayer be subsidising those things when that is part of the cost of companies doing business? If those are the minimum requirements they have to have just to operate, then they should be paying for that. I think that is one of the issues that are very lacking from this debate. The Government has not made the case for why giving industry training funding directly to businesses rather than through industry training organisations is going to lead to better outcomes. I am not convinced, from my own experience working in industry training, that that is going to be the case.

There is a shortage of skilled tradespeople in New Zealand, and the National Government has certainly exacerbated that by its current approach to industry training funding. We have seen the loss of thousands of people in apprenticeship positions. The fact that the National Government woke up to that in January this year after being in Government for 5 years is a very welcome thing, but had it not implemented many of the policies that it has implemented over the last 5 years, then maybe we would not be in as much of a position with that as we are now.

Let us look at Modern Apprenticeships, for example. Between 2009 and 2013 there was a 20 percent drop in the number of Modern Apprenticeships and a 37 percent drop in the number of industry trainees. It is easy to improve completion statistics and so on when you push a whole lot of people out of their training, but, actually, we should have been looking at the reasons why they were not completing it, because, as I said right in my first comments, sometimes there are good reasons why they are not completing their training. I think simply damaging the credibility of the entire system because of that is not necessarily a good thing.

We should never forget that it was the National Government in the 1990s that did away with the old apprenticeship system in the first place. We should never forget that. I think sometimes—

💬 Carol Beaumont: Vandalism.

Well, it was vandalism, but I think that sometimes when people talk about that, they forget about what was put in place, which was the industry training system. I am a big fan of industry training organisations, having worked in that sector. I do believe that industry training organisations provide a very useful contribution, but there is no doubt that in the hurried transition between the old apprenticeship system and the establishment of new industry training organisations an awful lot of expertise was lost and an awful lot of momentum from various industries was lost. It has taken quite some time for some of them to get back on track again, so we are still suffering from the legacy of the 1990s and the decisions made by the then National Government.

Finally, I have got a chance to touch very briefly on the removal of the responsibility of industry training organisations around skills leadership, setting leadership for their industries. If they are not going to do that, who is going to? Why is the Government going to invest a whole lot money in industry training if we do not know that that is actually what the industry needs? That has got to be a fundamental question. We are very, very bad at workforce planning in New Zealand in terms of making sure we have got the right people with the right skills at the right time. We have never done that very well, but taking responsibility away so that no one has actually got any responsibility for it is not the right thing to do. In fact, industry training organisations were probably only just coming to grips with the significance of that role. They had it only for a relatively short period of time and they were only just coming to grips with what providing that kind of leadership to their industries actually meant, and that has now been taken off them.

I think we should have strategic leadership around skills. I think the industry training organisations have the right people to be doing that. I think that this bill is very short-sighted and it is another one of those things where someone will look back in 10 years’ time and go “Oh gosh, wasn’t that a mistake! How have we ended up in the position we’re in now?”. Almost certainly, some of the problems we will be facing in 10 years will be traced back to this bill.

I am sorry, the clock expired some time ago—sorry.

We have heard from a number of people today—on both sides, actually—that this bill, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, and particularly the work within the industry training organisation sector, is something that is evolving and has been evolving over time. I think the National Government is very proud of the changes that it has made to date and the changes that it is proposing here. I think one of the great contrasts, though, is what we have heard from the Labour Party—that it is taking part that matters. It is taking part that matters. The fact that the Crown and the taxpayers have to fund it seems irrelevant to actually getting the outcomes that are required.

I think the last speaker rightly pointed out that there will be people who would have stepped away from their training for various legitimate reasons, but what we saw under a Labour Government—as other speakers on this side have noted—was a three-fold increase in funding but no actual increase in the outcomes required. Actually, I think “gilding the lily” was a phrase that was used, and it is quite right. “It is just taking part that matters; we will just continue to fund and throw more money at things.” is not appropriate. It is not appropriate for Government. This is a Government of responsibility, and this bill is a responsible bill.

I do have to note before finishing that I am a bit worried about the trucking industry today, if you wanted to train in that area, with the Labour Party truck ban. I am sure that will not come to pass, but—

💬 David Bennett: They can’t pass anything now.

No, you are not allowed to pass anything at the moment, but, fortunately, it is not in Government. I commend this bill to the House.

The next call is a split call. Carol Beaumont, 5 minutes.

I have to say that some of the contributions from the other side do show a lack of seriousness about what is a very important piece of legislation. The Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill is a bill that should be taking this country forward. Industry training and apprenticeships are vitally important. It should also be something not only taking our economy forward but providing opportunities for New Zealanders to gain meaningful industry skills and get decent wages and conditions. Why? Because we have structural skills shortages in this country. As an example of that, we are having to import labour to work on the Canterbury rebuild. We have high unemployment—27,000 young Aucklanders are not in education, training, or employment, and 50 percent of them are Māori or Pacific Islanders. It is not good enough. Too many people are working in low-quality, low-wage jobs. This is an opportunity to get industry training and apprenticeships right.

It was potentially an opportunity to gain a consensus about this vital area. It is an area that New Zealand has a long and proud track record in. Many of us know people—including my own father—who have undertaken apprenticeships and then had very satisfying and important work roles as a consequence and contributed strongly to our economy. So we have a proud history. This is a wasted opportunity. It is due to a Government that is ideologically driven and not willing to work strategically on such an important issue.

We indicated a willingness to work constructively on this bill, and we acknowledged the need for changes. I think every member opposite has talked about what was wrong with industry training. As my colleague Chris Hipkins said, there was a lot that was right with it, but, yes, there was a need for change. We accepted that. We have absolutely said that that was true. Much hard work has actually been done to rationalise the industry training industry, and that is good. That is good. But this bill potentially serves to undermine all of that hard work. We supported this bill going to the Education and Science Committee because we did want to try to get it right. I too would acknowledge one of the positives in this bill, and that is the removal of age limits in relation to apprenticeships. Anybody should be able to undertake an apprenticeship at whatever age. As others have said, people’s careers change much more frequently nowadays, so it makes perfect sense to not limit apprenticeships to just young people.

But I guess we should not be surprised that the Government has taken the position it has taken on this legislation. As has already been said, National is the party that abolished apprenticeships. Although it did bring in industry training, it was not necessary to have got rid of what was a time-proven scheme. In fact, Labour reinstituted apprenticeships—and with wide support in the community. National is also the party that threw out an agreed skills strategy that had been developed between business, unions, and Government agencies—a strategy that actually had a clear path forward for skills and vocational training in this country. It also stopped the tripartite group that was meeting to progress that. One of its first acts was to do those two things. So this is not a surprise that it has come up with the legislation it has got. The Government has failed to train New Zealanders to meet the skills needs that we have. We said “Why don’t you look at fast-track operations for apprenticeships in Christchurch?”. But, no—completely ignored. As a consequence, most of that work has been undertaken by migrant labour.

So this bill is a missed opportunity. I have acknowledged the positive little element of it. The things that are problems and are strongly opposed by submitters, such as the funding of industry training for non-industry training organisations—including, it seems, Foodstuffs, which never even submitted—are business specific rather than for the public good of industry training. Large, not small, businesses will benefit. Removing the skills leadership element is just ridiculous. This Government seems to be pathologically opposed to planning and strategic approaches. Steven Joyce said “Well, we want to focus on what’s important: training. And it doesn’t stop them doing skills leadership.” Well, how can you do the training if you do not know what you need to train for?

Well, like many of the speakers in this debate so far, I want to start by acknowledging the crucial importance of industry training and apprenticeships to our future workforce and to our future economy in New Zealand. The Green Party, like our colleagues in the Labour Party, was hopeful with the introduction of this legislation, the Industry Training and Apprenticeships Amendment Bill, that we might see some changes that would take us in a better direction, following—as has been referred to in the debate—the decimation of apprenticeships that occurred in the 1990s and that we have taken a long time to recover from in this country. So we supported the bill at its first reading, but we find ourselves unable to continue to support it, following the select committee process. That is for two major reasons, which we have also heard about during this debate.

The first reason is that this bill contains, as we have heard, the de facto privatisation of industry training. By allowing organisations other than recognised industry training organisation providers to be directly funded for the purposes of skills training, we are going to see what is, in effect, the privatisation of industry training for the benefit of specific businesses. They will be able to get Government subsidies for the training that they should be paying for anyway. It is telling that nobody from the unions to the industry peak bodies to the Employers and Manufacturers Association who submitted on this bill to the Education and Science Committee had anything good to say about this particular provision. As we have heard, the only organisation that gave it even mild support was Business New Zealand, and for that it was very lukewarm support indeed.

We have a bizarre situation where every submitter to the select committee on this point raised concerns and said that they did not think that this was necessary. These are the organisations that are working directly in industry training every day, that have the expertise and the knowledge of how the system works, and whose expertise the select committee should be taking seriously and Parliament should be listening to. None of those organisations wanted to see this change happen, yet it persists in the bill. The only explanation that we can think of for why that is the case is ideological stubbornness on the part of the Government.

As has been pointed out, the whole purpose of industry training is to equip workers with industry-wide skills that will be transferable and applicable as they move throughout different workplaces and throughout different experiences in their careers, and allowing individual businesses to access the subsidy for industry skills training essentially means that they will simply be able to train people for their specific workplace and their specific job. The skills will be less transferable, and the only beneficiaries will be the private businesses that take this funding and use it to pay for the training that they should otherwise be paying for themselves for their workers. We fear that the Government will end up funding training that would and should be done by the business itself. It is simply another example of this Government trying to throw subsidies to its mates in the business sector and using the publicly funded education system and industry training system to do it. It is very disappointing.

The other significant area of concern that we have is the proposal to remove skills leadership from the purposes of industry training organisations. We were told that having this for only one part of the industry meant that others would not be involved. Essentially, what it boils down to is that the Government is hoping that leadership will just emerge in the sector. It is not going to mandate anyone to take that skills leadership role. It is taking a very hands-off approach and just hoping that it will magically emerge. That is not good enough, because skills leadership is a very important component in ensuring that the future skills sets of the industry are identified and factored into the provision of training. Unless we nominate where that leadership is going to come from, we cannot just hope that it is going to come from somewhere.

By contrast, the Green Party would like to see a very different vision for industry training in New Zealand. We want to see a smart, green, innovative economy. We want to lead the world in greentech and sustainability. We want a highly skilled workforce. We want to focus on value-added industries where we have skilled workers and opportunities for apprenticeships and training for all young people. We want a vibrant manufacturing sector. We want a thriving small and medium enterprise sector that has the skills that it needs. We want gender to be taken into account too and considered so that women can enjoy skills training opportunities to the same extent as men. Sadly, none of these are provided in this bill.

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