COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA Official Committee Hansard · WINTERS, Ms Tracey Anne, Director, State...

COMMONWEALTH OF AUSTRALIA

Official Committee Hansard

SENATE EMPLOYMENT, WORKPLACE RELATIONS AND EDUCATION

REFERENCES COMMITTEE

Reference: Current and future skills needs

Roundtable

TUESDAY, 1 APRIL 2003

GLADSTONE

BY AUTHORITY OF THE SENATE

INTERNET

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SENATE

EMPLOYMENT, WORKPLACE RELATIONS AND EDUCATION

REFERENCES COMMITTEE

Tuesday, 1 April 2003

Members: Senator George Campbell (Chair), Senator Tierney (Deputy Chair), Senators Barnett, Carr, Crossin and Stott Despoja

Substitute members: Senator Allison

Participating members: Senators Abetz, Boswell, Buckland, Chapman, Cherry, Collins, Coonan, Denman, Eggleston, Chris Evans, Faulkner, Ferguson, Ferris, Forshaw, Harradine, Harris, Hutchins, Johnston, Knowles, Lees, Lightfoot, Ludwig, Mason, McGauran, Murphy, Nettle, Payne, Santoro, Sherry, Stephens, Watson and Webber.

Senators in attendance: Senators Allison, George Campbell, Stephens and Tierney

Terms of reference for the inquiry: To inquire into and report on:

a) areas of skills shortage and labour demand in different areas and locations, with particular emphasis on projecting future skills requirements;

b) the effectiveness of current Commonwealth, state and territory education, training and employment policies, and programs and mechanisms for meeting current and future skills needs, and any recommended improvements;

c) the effectiveness of industry strategies to meet current and emerging skill needs;

d) the performance and capacity of Job Network to match skills availability with labour-market needs on a regional basis and the need for improvements;

e) strategies to anticipate the vocational education and training needs flowing from industry restructuring and redundancies, and any recommended improvements; and

f) consultation arrangements with industry, unions and the community on labour-market trends and skills demand in particular, and any recommended appropriate changes.

Tuesday, 1 April 2003 Senate—References EWRE 93

EMPLOYMENT, WORKPLACE RELATIONS & EDUCATION

Committee met at 2.02 p.m.

Participants ABBOTT, Mr John, General Manager, Operations, Southern Pacific Petroleum (Management) Pty Ltd

ATKINS, Mr Roger, Principal, Toolooa State High School

BURNS, Mr David Langley, Manager, Gladstone Area Group Apprentices Ltd

CLEGG, Mr Andrew Charles, Skills Development Coordinator, Bechtel, Comalco Alumina Refinery

FRY, Mr William Henry, Institute Director, Central Queensland Institute of TAFE

JOYCE, Mr Phillip, Manager, Support Services, Aldoga Aluminium Smelter Pty Ltd

MITCHELL, Mr Ian William, Chairman, Gladstone Council, Queensland Council of Unions

PRATER, Associate Professor Robert John, Head, Gladstone Campus, Central Queensland University

WINTERS, Ms Tracey Anne, Director, State Development Centre Gladstone

WOOTTON, Mr Noel, General Manager, Gladstone Area Promotion and Development Ltd

CHAIR—I declare open this round table meeting of the Senate Employment, Workplace Relations and Education References Committee. As part of its inquiry into current and future skill needs, the committee is conducting a series of round table meetings with people involved in various ways with identifying and responding to the skills needs of industries, communities and individuals. The committee is also holding more formal public hearings with those who have made submissions to the inquiry. The committee wishes to have the opportunity to discuss or explore views on current skill formation policies and programs and suggestions for change with those representing a diversity of interests and viewpoints in the community.

The purpose of this round table discussion is to allow the committee to consult with a broader range of people than is possible through the more formal hearing process, including those who do not wish to make formal submissions. Although these round table discussions are meant to be informal, we are bound to observe one important rule of the Senate in regard to privilege. This discussion is privileged and you are protected from legal proceedings in regard to what you may have to say.

Hansard will produce a transcript of evidence which will be provided to participants and available also on the committee’s Internet site as official documentation of the committee’s proceedings. This recording is not intended to inhibit informal discussion and we can go in camera if you want to put something to the committee in confidence. I point out, however, that such evidence is often difficult to report in an inquiry of this nature and, in any event, the Senate

EWRE 94 Senate—References Tuesday, 1 April 2003


may order the release of such evidence. Many of you have provided the committee with some brief written information about yourselves or the organisation or interest that you represent and your key issues in relation to current and future skills needs, for which we thank you. For the benefit of all participants, I will start by asking each of you to introduce yourselves. Following introductions, I will ask a couple of questions to kick off discussions.

Mr Joyce—I am Manager, Support Services at Aldoga Aluminium. Aldoga is a $3.8 billion aluminium smelter that will be built in Gladstone. We have been going through a large process in the last four years to get to a point where we are able to commence our operation, probably within a six-week timeframe. I am interested in discussing the issue of skill shortages with my colleagues and everybody else. As a large organisation which will be employing in the vicinity of 3,000-odd people during construction and 900 people during our operational phase, we are interested in ensuring that we have the right skill base to operate effectively.

Mr Clegg—I am from the Comalco Alumina Refinery project, a $1.5 billion project that commenced in November 2001 and is obviously fairly well progressed with about 900 people on-site at the moment. My role is as a skill development coordinator for Bechtel, the company contracted by Comalco to construct the project, so I am speaking from a construction point of view rather than the operation side.

Ms Winters—I am the director of the State Development Centre, which is part of the Queensland Department of State Development in Gladstone. Our interest is in the availability of an appropriately skilled work force to support the major project investment currently underway and proposed in the Gladstone region.

Mr Mitchell—I am representing the Queensland Council of Unions; I am president of the local branch. I am a full-time official with the CPU in Central Queensland. I am also a member of the local Central Queensland Institute of TAFE advisory committee.

Mr Atkins—I am principal of Toolooa High School which is seeking to develop more effective pathways for students from school into work, further training, higher education and employment.

Mr Burns—I manage the Gladstone Area Group Apprentices scheme, a training company. We are a large employer of apprentice trainees and, in addition, about 460 young people. I am also a member of the Central Queensland Institute of TAFE.

Mr Fry—I am the director of the Central Queensland Institute of TAFE and the previous two gentlemen are on my council and I am happy to have them there. The Central Queensland Institute of TAFE is the largest regional training provider in vocational training outside of the Brisbane area. We are fortunate enough to have memorandums of understanding with both Comalco and Aldoga to provide the training for their projects as they progress. Our interest is both in the construction phase and in the operational phase for the long-term benefit of this community.

Mr Abbott—I am here with two hats. I am the general manager of operations for Southern Pacific Petroleum, the shale oil plan, but I am also chairman of the Gladstone Area Industry Network, which is an unincorporated group of all the major industries in town, including Boyne Smelters, Queensland Alumina, the Gladstone power station, Gladstone Port Authority, Orica,



Ticor and Comalco Alumina Refinery—the operations side. I will be speaking on behalf of that group, which is about $15 billion worth of plant and equipment employing around 5½ thousand people in total.

Prof. Prater—I am the head of campus for Central Queensland University. The university is very pleased to host this inquiry today and to have the members of the committee here. The campus is celebrating 25 years of CQU or its antecedent’s presence in Gladstone. I make that point because it is not as if we are a recent arrival. When you look at this campus you might think that we are very new but the first programs were taught in Gladstone in 1978. This campus has a key research presence with both the Centre for Environmental Management and the Process Engineering and Light Metals centre. PELM has been established—Process Engineering and Light Metals—as a Department of State Development initiative to assist the growth of light metals in Central Queensland. The campus is an interesting one in that, while we have a small but healthy undergraduate cohort reflecting the size of the local community, we in fact have more students studying in postgraduate programs. One of those key programs is the maintenance management program, which is residential and there are 80 or so students in this building studying maintenance management at the moment.

That is one of the programs that has come out of a strong partnership with industry; and that is the focus of this university and this community—to work closely with industry on developing programs. Our concern is to ensure that we are developing programs that meet industry’s training needs and that we are doing that as much as possible within a cross-sectoral environment and working closely with education Queensland and TAFE.

Mr Wootton—We are a community organisation, although we operate as a nonprofit company on behalf of a membership which currently consists of about 350 businesses and local government authorities. We cover an area of Gladstone city, Calliope shire and Miriam Vale shire. That represents a total population of close to 49,000 people. It is a relatively small region but a very diverse and intense one in terms of industry. Gladstone city’s population is about 28,000 at the moment, perhaps approaching 29,000. We are here to promote the development of the city and the region for tourism, business and industry. That has been quite successful over the past two decades but at the moment we are on a new wave of intense industrial development, including the large-scale mineral processing plants, which brings a whole new range of challenges and opportunities for employment and infrastructure and all of the pressures that that is going to bring. We can talk further on that later.

CHAIR—Thank you all for coming along this afternoon and participating in the round table. I will pose some questions to get the discussion started. By no means feel limited to the issues that I put on the table, but I think they are a reasonably good starting point. The first issue is how all of you see the relative importance of Commonwealth and state incentives in promoting training. The second issue, which goes along with that, is whether or not you view the current training programs and policies of both state and federal governments as being adequate to meet the current and future skill needs of industry, particularly focusing on this area. The third issue I ask you to give some thought to is whether or not industry’s investment in training their work force is adequate and what you believe is the best way to facilitate that investment—whether it should be through new apprenticeships for existing staff, tax incentives or training levies, as has been floated recently by some organisations.



Another issue is your views of the types of activities that Roger Atkins’s school is getting involved with in the apprentice to work programs that are occurring in his school and the way in which they are dealing with VET. Finally, for a regional area such as this, how do you see the role of TAFE in the provision of the whole training agenda—how important is an organisation or institution like TAFE in providing or facilitating the training framework in a regional area such as this? As I said, do not feel limited to those four or five issues but hopefully that will get the ball rolling.

Mr Mitchell—One of the issues that has been concerning me is the abolition of the HITT program in the building and construction industry. In a town like this, a very small percentage of apprentices are employed directly by building, plumbing and other construction companies. The local group scheme employs what—80-odd per cent, Dave?

Mr Burns—About 65 per cent in carpentry and about 70 per cent in plumbing.

Mr Mitchell—When the HITT program funding has gone, it takes away the ability to train carpenters, plumbers and painters in the district. At the moment, they are building state government housing and they are getting a complete training program from foundation through to finish. The apprentices that are not employed directly by the group scheme are employed by the local small contractors. They are only getting work on these sites providing they take apprentices on. We had the experience some years ago where the state government made rules—if you want to put it that way—that government contracts would not be given out if contractors did not employ a percentage of apprentices. Unfortunately, it ended up with the unions policing it, and getting us into trouble for doing it, I guess, because it was not being policed by the government instrumentalities. As a result, we will fall behind very badly in apprentice training in the building industry when the funding is taken away. That is a major concern for this community, and I am talking about the larger community not just the city of Gladstone.

Mr Burns—Further to that, there are two HITT programs: one is HITT and the other is HITT plus. The HITT program runs out in June. HITT stands for Housing Industry Trade Training. What happens is that money is allocated from the federal government to the state government for affordable housing, the group scheme tenders on a commercial basis and there is a training component attached to that commercial tender to enable the training of apprentices. Currently the group scheme employs about 40 apprentice carpenters. If it were not for the HITT program, we would be lucky to employ a handful of apprentices. It is going to mean about 30 positions a year in carpentry alone just in the Gladstone region. I believe there is a squabble between the state and federal government about funding for affordable housing. It protects us because we put young people out to builders. When the work runs out, they are sent back to us and we have to have somewhere to put those apprentices otherwise we are in for down time. If you want to go to the NTB, we have to stand down maybe council indentures and that is not the way to train our young people. When you sign them up there has to be some security there to get them through that time. As I said, if HITT—the Housing Industry Trade Training program—disappears, there are 30 positions that will not be available in carpentry alone. All up, I would say about 45 positions a year for young people in Gladstone will disappear.

Mr Fry—For training in the construction of these major plants in Central Queensland, the incentives from the federal government in the form of dollars for training has been nil. The incentives that have come are from the Queensland government. I understand that the money



most certainly comes from the federal Treasury to start with. The Queensland Department of Employment and Training has made available some $5½ million for training across the region, which my institute administers. We have encountered some very good success and some areas that I thought would have succeeded that have not. With your permission I would like to make you aware of those.

CHAIR—Sure.

Mr Fry—We have money available to subsidise industry training where they identify a skill shortage on a dollar for dollar basis. Industry put forward some money and we put forward some money. That has not been embraced by industry to any great extent. This money is not available for the Andrew Cleggs or the Phil Joyces of the world, for Aldoga or Comalco; this is for small to medium companies in the region. The response when we have been out to investigate that, at the request of my council, is that the small to medium companies say, ‘I won’t have any contracts on those big jobs so it doesn’t worry me.’ In reality, those people will lose their staff. We have had difficulty trying to encourage a training market.

Another area though that has worked exceptionally well has been where we have conducted what is called in Queensland a Workplace Trainer and Assessor Certificate IV program which allows industry people to train at their place of work. We have provided them with what we call a registered training organisation service. We look after the quality assurance, the assessment, the enrolment and the issuing of qualifications. We have trained 95 people in the last few months in that particular area from various industries from Gladstone to Mackay, and we are training another 14 in Gladstone in a few weeks. This training culture has started coming along in some of the larger industries, but it has been quite noticeable that the small industries have not embraced any incentives to any extent because they believe that the impact will not affect them. That is quite sad, because it is already starting to do that. I would say that the incentives, while being well intended, have not necessarily been as effective in the areas that they were intended for, which means we have to go back and have a rethink on how we get to those industries.

Mr Burns—I do not know if you are aware of this, but school based apprentices were started by Gladstone Area Group Apprentices back in 1986. They have spread throughout Australia, but they actually started here in Gladstone. We have tried to get a number of programs off the ground by applying for state money and, occasionally, federal money, and we have been unsuccessful. However, we have received funding through Construction Training Queensland from the fund they control in Queensland for employment.

We receive roughly $70,000 and, with the cooperation of the TAFE, we run pre-vocational courses. The legislation will not allow us to employ these apprentices up front, so we have to say to the kids and their parents that, if the kids are successful in this pre-vocational course, they will be employed by Gladstone Area Group Apprentices. We have targeted skills shortage areas and, to date, we have put 34 kids through the scheme and have had a 100 per cent success rate. It works out to be about $5,000 per student to take them out of year 10 and put them into skills shortage areas. The areas I mention are boilermaking and carpentry, and just recently we put 14 electrical apprentices into a course and indentured the lot of them. So we have a 100 per cent success rate, but we still cannot get money out of the government to run these programs. They have the highest success rate of any scheme that has ever been run in Queensland or even—I will put my neck out here and say this—in the country.



We have proposed to them what we call skill based apprenticeships. We take the money that hangs over kids’ heads for their normal education and—at the end of year 10, with the cooperation of the high schools in the area—put kids through these courses. This overcomes the reluctance of industry to take up green first years and put them on the shop floor. With this sort of funding as part of their education we can bring them up to a point where they have the hand skills and know-how to be profitable for business. Business is reluctant to put apprentices on these days because it is so competitive. There are thousands of kids out there and there is a real skills shortage, and what do we do? We get some migrants in; we import the labour. That is not the answer. We have the solution here and we need to look at that solution.

We cannot get funding to run TAFE based apprenticeships, even though we are batting 100 per cent by going through the back door to Construction Training Queensland and the BCITF. I appeal to the government to just have a look at it. I have had my head against brick walls for three years now with this program. We are not making any headway at all, except through the likes of the BCITF. We did start off school based premises. They have lost their way a little bit in some schools—fortunately, not here in Gladstone. We had an instance where a school in Brisbane indentured an electrician and cancelled his indenture at the end of year 12. That is not the sort of garbage we need. We need to take a long, hard look at what we are doing with our young people, and make the employment into trades and the pathways part of their education at an earlier stage. That is all I have to say.

Mr Atkins—We did kick off the first school based apprenticeship in Queensland, and I think that means we have a strong heritage in this town of vocational education and training. I think there is a strong argument to be made for students leaving at year 10 if they are going to go into trades. I think there is also a very strong argument that a lot of people are not choosing that pathway and that the school based traineeship or apprenticeship is a very effective method of transitioning students from school to work. There are others; we are the first to admit that. There is certainly mixed opinion in our discussions with business about the desirability of having students leave at year 10 or year 12. That is possibly an area in which we may continue to disagree.

Nonetheless, we are pursuing the idea that that extended transition is a very useful, valid and effective way of transitioning students. By that I mean moving students out into work, first of all through a work experience model, maybe in year 10, followed by structured workplace learning—where they go to the workplace and get their competencies ticked off as part of the curriculum—through to school based apprenticeships, and on into the work force and further education and training. I would also like to say that the federal funding we have received through the ECEF or groups like the Schools and Industry Network is also a very effective use of dollars in terms of engaging students in the workplace and industry. It really is an effective organisation. It works across all our schools and across the community. It will probably be playing a far larger role in the future in terms of connecting schools and industry. So I congratulate the ECEF and the federal government for their involvement in that.

CHAIR—Mr Atkins, this is a question, which I should probably have asked you this morning but the issue has been raised so I will ask it now. In Brisbane yesterday some apprentices came in and talked to us. One of the apprentice electricians said that he had done nine months—I am not sure whether he said at a school or a TAFE college in Brisbane—of a similar sort of training that you are giving to boys through your VET system, but he got a six-month credit for that in the first year of his apprenticeship. Will that apply to the kids coming through your system?



Mr Atkins—Certainly, if they are doing school based traineeships and apprenticeships, that will be the case. Our model is that they will move through TAFE and move on to certificate 2. Most of what we do is at certificate 1 level and it is anticipated that we will do the certificate 2 in partnership with TAFE, so there certainly should be a reduction in the time that they spend in apprenticeships.

Mr Fry—To add to what Roger has said, the young man that you were speaking to would have done some form of a prevocational program. In times gone by, apprenticeships were time served not competency based. Ian Mitchell may be able to correct me when I get this wrong because he is an electrician. It used to be that, if you did a prevocational program which was about nine months long—we called it a 12-month program but it was actually nine months—you got an exemption from the first six months of your apprenticeship. That meant that in six months you then went on to a second year rate of pay, which was once again time served. Apprenticeships these days are competency based so if a student comes to a training organisation from a high school with certain competencies achieved, they do not have to repeat those. Equally, a student has to get the competencies signed off on the job. If they have the underpinning knowledge from a school or a TAFE and they can accelerate through their time on the job, it is quite possible that an apprentice can finish their time in less than the traditional four years. So that would have been what you were probably hearing from this young man.

CHAIR—He certainly expressed it in terms of getting this six-month credit for the nine months he had done.

Mr Burns—One thing you have to remember is that industry kicked up a bit of a stink about that quite some years ago because you may have got a young person that had done the prevocational course but had very little practical experience and then was thrown up to a second year rate of pay. Industry did dispute that sort of thing. Further to Bill, most trades are now competency based but there is a safety net there of time served as well. It is a bit of a mishmash. No-one has ever sat down and said this is the way to go. The difference between some of these skills—and you have to be careful with the skill base—is the amount of time they get released to industry. That will have a big bearing on when they move on to the second year. Some schools only let them out for a day a week. When we initially set the skill based apprenticeships off they went to TAFE and school during school time but during the holidays they went out and got paid for working and that was 14 weeks a year. Some of these schemes have been changed slightly and they are not getting enough time of live experience on the job.

CHAIR—Can I just raise one other question? I think Mr Atkins alluded to it. I served my apprenticeship a hell of a long time ago. I started at 16 and there did not seem to be any impediment then to turning out tradespeople with fairly good skills. I wonder how much of an issue there is about the difference in knowledge that is gained between the 16-year and 18-year age groups and if the difference is so great that it actually does change the attitude of employers in terms of who they take on in apprenticeships. I wonder if there are not a lot of kids staying on until age 18, missing out on matriculation and not going into the apprenticeship system or on to higher education and falling through the cracks as a result of it. I would be interested in your views on this. Mr Abbott, you are a big employer so let us hear from you.

Mr Abbott—It is a very difficult issue that we are faced with often when companies are recruiting for apprentices. As has been said earlier, there is a great competition for apprenticeship places particularly in this town. Generally, employers are faced with the situation



where you have one position and 20 applicants, 18 of the applicants do have a senior education and two have a junior education. Even based on skill or future competency, the issue for the employer is to select the one who is likely to have the best potential. The decision will generally tend to fall in favour of the person who has already completed the senior education—there is more to judge on. When there is competition for positions, it really does not fall down to the question of whether a 16-year-old is equally or better capable of passing the modules at a TAFE or similar institution and the skills based work; it often just comes down to that straight basis of selection.

Mr Mitchell—Having worked in this town since 1970 and served the same sort of apprenticeship as you did—a five-year real tradesman—I believe that what has just been said is one of our downfalls. Employers have been selecting the best academic person for the job, but we end up losing half of these kids halfway through their apprenticeship because they lose interest in a trade and/or they go on to do engineering when they finish their apprenticeship and they are not there in the industry doing the mechanical, electrical and civil trades that are necessary to carry the industry on. I am a firm believer in a link between TAFE and ‘Junior’ leaving with a decent junior certificate, and I believe they produce the best apprentices.

Mr Burns—Just to comment on that: I went to school at a technical college—Belmore Technical College—where, from day one, we were trade bound. You hit the nail on the head when you said that a lot of the young kids going on to year 11 and 12 really do not want to be there. Some four years ago, Ian and I went to Brisbane to float school based electrical apprenticeships. We were told by everyone concerned in Brisbane, ‘It won’t work.’ We came back here, and we indentured seven electrical school based apprentices. Every one of those kids except one got through the course. You will not pick a harder trade to take a kid out of year 10 and put them through than an electrical course. At the time, and Bill will bear this out, they dropped third year modules back to first year. These kids got through.

A lot of these kids do not want to be in high school. Seventy per cent of the kids are not going to university. We have got to start training them, informing them and educating them towards making a decision. It is their future; it is not our future. We have got to start to educate those kids to be able to say, ‘Yes, I want to be a boilermaker. I like that,’ or ‘I want to be an electrician.’ We interviewed 150 kids for 21 jobs at QAL. We asked them, ‘What do you want to be?’ and for most of them the answer was, ‘I really don’t know. I don’t know what’s involved.’ That is where the education is needed—to educate these kids to make an informed decision. The kids can do it from year 10. All of those kids—34 out of 34, 100 per cent—who got through were plucked from year 10. None of them failed. I blame the government, and I make no apologies. Go back quite a few years when the government were trying to hide unemployment. They encouraged kids to stay on to year 12. That was one of the worst decisions we ever made in this country. Any old tradesman around this table will tell you when they started their trade—at the end of year 10. If you want to go to uni, you do year 11 and 12. We made that mistake and we are still paying for it.

Mr Atkins—I can see Dave’s point of view, although I do not agree with it. I think a lot of students are voting with their feet to go on to year 11 and 12. I think you are probably quite right in terms of the decision when that was made. There was a move to stay on into senior, and we were not prepared for it. We were offering a curriculum based on the 30 per cent who were going to university to the 70 per cent who were not, and that was a fundamental problem. I believe we have gone a hell of a long way down the road to catering for that. I believe that



schools still offer a connectedness to the community and to each other in terms of that year level, that age group, that parents still want to continue with and the students want to continue with.

So, yes, I agree with Dave entirely that they do need to explore industry options and they do need to work out what they do not want to do as much as what they do want to do. I believe that forcing them to make that decision at the end of year 10 is generally and often not a good one. I do not believe that a lot of kids do not want to go on to senior. I think they do but we need to make it worth while for them. We need to make it real for them what it is that they are doing. I would have to agree that we often have not done that in the past. I think some of what you saw this morning was a very good strategy in making that happen. I certainly do not want to downgrade what Dave is saying, but I need to say that there is another point of view that what we are doing in schools to transition kids into industry is very effective.

Senator ALLISON—I want to pick up on your point, Mr Burns. We heard this morning that students who do an extra two years have much more useful mathematics skills—for one thing. Do you not see that? In fact, the two workplaces that we visited said that there was a very clear difference that was easy to see, particularly in maths, between those who go on and do the extra two years and those who do not.

Mr Burns—I could agree with you but there is also trade maths in that when you take on a trade there is maths involved in your trade. For argument’s sake, electricians do a certain amount of basic physics and stuff like that. They do that in their trade. It is similar to what they do in schools. As a matter of fact, schools are starting to align the maths and the physics that they teach with the stuff that is useable in a trade. I find it hard to define the difference between going to TAFE and doing the trade based maths, and doing maths at school. I do agree with Roger that there are certain trade areas and certain students where a bit more education is needed but on average most students are far better off at the end of year 10. It did not affect the senator and I hope it has not affected me—it probably has, but I have not noticed any changes! We have to start educating at an earlier age. The money hanging over the kids should be used to educate them in a trade and to educate them on that path.

Senator TIERNEY—On the same point but a little more complicated in the way it was explained to us at the power plant this morning was that not only are the maths skills better but so are the communication skills. I am not just talking about academic English; I mean communicating and being able to fit in to the workplace and to work with your colleagues. This is where they were getting the edge. It seemed to us that the program they have developed out there still moved through to the final years of schooling but it had a pathway into a trade. It not only gave the students the further academic side and further personal development but it also gave them basic trade training that was industry based. It looked like a pretty good model. They still come out in effect with year 12 and then go in.

Mr Mitchell—I have done a fair bit of work with apprentice electricians in recent months. Of the last group of kids coming through under the old system—what we call the CN100—that is the four-year training period, 46 per cent of those kids failed to achieve their electrical licence when they finished the time. They had to do further time and do extra training to get their licence. In a lot of cases, it was because not only the logbooks were illegible but also the actual English that they were written in was shocking. These are kids who have done grade 12. So there is something else that has to be done in basic English report writing skills rather than in



academic English for kids who are coming into the industry. They were not putting the right emphasis on the work that they had been doing, they expressed themselves badly in what they did and they did not really understand the questions that they were asked to answer on paper. They need skills so that the people in a training centre in Brisbane who do not ever see them but get their logbook to assess whether they have done their full training can understand what they have written down there.

Mr Joyce—I have a couple of comments. I agree to some degree with what Roger is trying to do with the amount of work when it comes to school based apprentices and the actual curriculum that goes into years 11 and 12 and so forth but I also agree with what Dave is saying about children who go through to year 10. When you two gentlemen were given the opportunity to go to an apprenticeship, you were most likely employed within the public sector because a majority of apprenticeships around 1975 came from the public sector. In fact, there was not much youth unemployment up to that point. When the federal government decided to cut back on apprenticeships and moved that responsibility back into industry there was a huge increase in unemployment. It comes back to the skills and things that are taught within year 11 for those children who are not able or academically gifted enough to go on. There needs to be a just-in-time curriculum designed for children who can move into industry through the apprenticeship systems that Roger is talking about and trying to develop. Dave is right in the sense that we need to look at trade education skills more so than those academic skills that are required for people to go through to university.

Mr Burns—We are not poles apart. All I am saying is that there is more than one pathway for kids to follow if they want to get into a trade. Some kids are ready at year 10; others may not be ready until year 12. We are not poles apart: between us, we are all about getting kids through the system and into gainful employment. That is what we are about. There is not a great difference.

Prof. Prater—I want to continue on about pathways and how they might support each other. Senator Campbell, I am sure that you did not cease learning when you completed your apprenticeship.

CHAIR—That is when I started learning.

Prof. Prater—Absolutely. Part of the remit of this inquiry is to look at future areas of skills shortages. I do not think any of us has a crystal ball and can predict what skills are going to be required in a decade, two decades or five decades—when some of the people who are now going to Toolooa State High will still be in the work force. I suggest that, because of the likelihood of further technological changes and the impact on the work force, what we need to do with people entering the work force—and, indeed, those within the work force—is to imbue them with a sense of continuing their learning and expanding their educational horizons and to work on the concept of lifelong learning, to work on the pathways that exist between institutions and to work on articulation. These are areas that I feel we are lacking in in the sector.

Certainly the schools, TAFE and the university are working together in this community. We see it as being mutually advantageous to work together, but we are not given any real incentives. I think, speaking from the university perspective, that there are ways in which we might be encouraged or rewarded to work more closely with the TAFE to have embedded programs and to have greater articulation. We might be rewarded by getting extra dollar values



for those students who have made those transitions. That was the broad point that I wanted to make. I am happy to pursue it further with the committee during the afternoon.

CHAIR—Professor Prater, you raised a hobbyhorse of mine. It is an area about which I have grave concerns. I think it in part feeds into a cultural problem we have with the parents of kids who want them to succeed and do not see success other than measured against whether or not they have reached university or they have a degree. I think the issue of articulation needs more treatment than it is getting. For the life of me, I do not see why a person cannot go into a trade at 16, 17 or 18 and continue to build credits up through the process of learning that trade and for the period that they are in the trade and then come back into the higher education system—maybe to do an engineering degree or to pursue some other totally different walk of life—and for the skills and the learning they have picked up during that period of time to be recognised as contributing to the lifelong learning process.

We know that it was a conceptual thing and it was talked about in the 1980s and the 1990s, but it is not happening. Mr Abbott and Professor Prater, maybe it is easier to do it in a regional area like this, where there are stronger links between the institutions, than it is to do it in the metropolitan areas. It seems to me that we ought to be able to work out a more effective articulation process between the institutions than is currently operating at the moment.

Prof. Prater—Again, there are some Commonwealth government regulations that indeed militate against this. Recognition of prior learning is something that many universities have looked at and consider as being something that they ought to be doing. With respect to all the things that you have just said about building up learning credits and looking at experience and using that as a basis for furthering their qualifications, universities are actually impeded from charging for assessing recognition of prior learning. The DEST regulations actually prevent us from doing that. Countries like New Zealand have made great steps in this because they are not hamstrung in that regard.

Senator TIERNEY—Could you expand on that a bit further? Can I have clarification on that?

Prof. Prater—I cannot quote chapter and verse the DEST regulations, but I do know that universities are unable to charge for the assessment of prior learning for an applicant to a university course.

Senator TIERNEY—Can you send the committee something on that?

Prof. Prater—I could try and find something.

Mr Abbott—I will just confirm what Bob said: industry, generally speaking on the engineering profession in particular, values the earlier experience. I know Mr Mitchell mentioned earlier about the loss of people from the electrical trade to the engineering trade. We think that is a good thing because generally speaking engineers who have a trade background, whether it be a completed apprenticeship or a partially completed apprenticeship, are actually better engineers. I know the industry in Gladstone has been working with the CQU to develop bridging programs and courses that take tradespeople in some cases and give them postgraduate qualifications—this is mature age entry or adult entry into those courses—and those courses are acceptable to the Institution of Engineers. One course that was mentioned earlier was the



postgraduate course in maintenance engineering, which is a very successful one in this area. I am not sure, Bob, but a reasonable proportion of the entrants into that course are from trades or paraprofessional ranks rather than from engineering ranks.

Prof. Prater—The important thing there is that the companies are supporting their staff to take graduate entry into these programs at the graduate certificate level. If those students achieve the necessary outcomes, they are able to articulate on to a diploma and ultimately on to a master’s level, complete a thesis and end up with a very high degree qualification. The particular thing I want to draw reference to is that the three postgraduate programs that we have—the maintenance management program, process engineering and environmental management—were all industry sponsored to the tune of a quarter of a million dollars each. It was people like John Abbott, when he was working at QAL, who assisted in developing maintenance management. The companies are very committed. There are 80 students here today from across the country, and indeed some from overseas, who have come in for these residentials. But aside from the intrinsic benefits that the companies receive from improving their work force, and indeed their commitment to education that they displayed through making that contribution to the development costs, there are no real incentives for them. I suggest that the committee looks at education credits—something like greenhouse credits—as a way of giving tax incentives to companies that are prepared to invest in programs like our maintenance management program.

Mr Fry—Not wishing to take the conversation away from school students because there certainly is an area of importance for the youth—even my own department and the Queensland government have a white paper on Education training reform which may very well be worthy of discussion separately to this—I would like to refer back to where John and Bob have just come from. I have only been in Gladstone since 1985, so I have not been here as long as some of the others, but the situation as I see it, having been a leader of TAFE during the Boyne Smelter expansions, the QAL expansions, Orica’s development, Ticor’s development and Suncorp’s development, is that there are a couple of realities in life which as a town we tend to forget sometimes.

One of them is that it is impossible for there to be enough skilled people in this town at any given time to build any project within the short time lines that you get for them to be built. So accepting that, I believe that we have to understand that there are a number of people who are going to have to move to town with specific skills. Our programs at the moment are based around providing, in a lot of cases, the support skills, including the riggers, the doggers—Phil and Andrew might be able to help me more on this because we have been dealing with them—the steel fixers and the cement finisher type people. We are doing pipe welders programs at the moment, and my understanding is we will be doing instrumentation programs. These programs are for existing people who can be upskilled. But if all those people come from the small to medium industries in this town, it will shut this town down, because we still have to have our lights fixed at home, our cars fixed and those sorts of things. People will have to move into town.

If we could adopt the lifelong learning that Bob Prater was alluding to then surely it could benefit the Central Queensland and Gladstone region, because the jobs that are going to be here for the long term are the 900 that we heard Phil talk about for Aldoga and the 400 that Comalco will have up the road. Some of those people will come from QAL and go to Comalco, but that means that QAL will have vacancies to fill and those people will require learning. We cannot



take our eye off that ball either. It is very easy to get wrapped up in the $9 billion or $10 billion worth of projects in Central Queensland, but let us understand that the big numbers of long-term jobs are in these new, emerging positions. That is where the lifelong learning Bob was alluding to will have to come from.

Ian is right, we will lose some tradespeople into engineering; and John is right, they make very good engineers. But at the end of the day we still have to be able to backfill where those people come from, and that is where Dave and Roger are coming from. They are coming from different angles but with the same intention: Gladstone and Central Queensland have to have an industry base and that has to have a support base coming in behind it. That is where I believe incentives should be in the long term, not in the construction side.

Mr Abbott—That presents a difficulty in this area, which we are managing at the moment and which the gentleman down the end will have to manage soon. The majority of the discussion to date has been on education, apprentices and developing the feed-in of the skills in this town, and we have been focusing on trades, although a lot of what I am about to say applies to professional and non-professional areas as well. The real issue we have in this town is a skill shortage today, not in four or five years time when the people who might start these new programs come out at the other end.

When Phil’s project kicks off with 3,000 construction workers in a few weeks time, it is only going to get worse. Just getting enough people to cover shutdown peaks is making life very difficult for the existing industry. The competition for labour in this town is considerable. Because of the effect on the local community of rents and the cost of living, the ability to attract people into town has proven very difficult in recent times. When people want to move to town, they cannot find a house to live in. That is a problem we are grappling with at the moment ourselves. We spoke earlier about a lot of issues, such as education, but there are a lot of other issues in this town. This town has handled a peculiar peak on three other occasions I can recall, where all of a sudden you need 3,000, 4,000 or 5,000 employees—and that will happen particularly in the next little while.

Senator TIERNEY—Given that high demand, what is the unemployment rate here?

Mr Abbott—It is not much different from the regional average, because people moved to town looking for employment. If it was not for the growing employment, it would probably be not much different.

Senator TIERNEY—What are the figures?

Mr Burns—The overall rate is about 11 or 12 per cent, but youth unemployment is something like 30 per cent.

Senator TIERNEY—So, despite that and all the jobs, you cannot match these people with the jobs for skilled trades?

Mr Abbott—That is right, because what the projects need particularly are skilled tradesmen. I can give an example, and it may not be a very good one but it is one that our company had to deal with in a couple of weeks: we had a shutdown where we required stainless steel pipe welders—that is, very specialised welders—and we tested 24 welders in town but only three



passed the qualification test. That is not an indictment on their skills; it is just an experience thing. Stainless steel welding is a very specialised skill. We ended up having to bring in people from Brisbane, Melbourne and all around the place, just to be able to handle the skills, and had to pay to put those folk up. That is fairly typical in this town—people move to the town to follow the work, which means that it does not affect the youth unemployment. That underlying problem still exists in this town. It is a function of the very lumpy nature of employment in this town driven by construction and, to a lesser extent, shutdown work.

Senator TIERNEY—It is an interesting example. You have had a long history of construction—all sorts of plants have gone up—and one would assume there are enough similarities in the sorts of skills. Why can’t the area be upskilled?

Mr Abbott—The main area—if I can steal an expression from our Bechtel friends—is that the multi project continuum does not exist. The problem is that you do not flow from one project to the other. When the concrete setters or the steel fixers move on, there is not another project for them to move straight to.

Senator TIERNEY—There are substantial gaps between them.

Mr Abbott—Yes. They disappear and then the pipe welders, the electricians and the control systems guys move in—they all demob. There is probably an 18-month gap between the earthworks at the Comalco Alumina Refinery and those at Aldoga. Similarly, with the structural work, there is probably an 18-month gap. So the people come and go, which does not facilitate in this town the upskilling to any great extent, because if the people were upskilled and trained to meet the peak load, when Comalco finishes, they are going to have to leave and go to the North West Shelf or somewhere for the next project.

Senator TIERNEY—I appreciate that.

Mr Wootton—It emphasises that one of the overriding things in the Gladstone area is peaks and troughs. There is a vast employment demand which is rising now, but in three or four years time, it will probably be a lot less, although Gladstone itself will have grown. It reached its peak in the mid eighties—several major projects and expansions finished around 1982-83 and then everything died. That was the reason our organisation was formed—to try to get diversification into other industries and attract more industries. So that is still an overriding factor. Then when there is a peak, you have employment pressures, rental pressures and everything else on top of that. I think also the existing industries that were here in the eighties and nineties tended a little to rest on their laurels—they thought they did not need to train new apprentices for the new industries that were going to come here—so there was a bit of a lessening off in that area.

Senator TIERNEY—So when the construction has finished and you have a new plant—whether it be a power plant or an aluminium plant—how much of the employment in that plant comes from the local area? Or do you end up importing more skilled people to run these organisations?

Mr Wootton—It is a fair mix of skilled and unskilled locals and out of town people, but the construction work force does not necessarily transfer to a large degree to the operating work force.



Mr Abbott—There is a culture where people chase major projects. So they will move to Gladstone for three to five years, do the projects and then the next time you see them might be in Port Hedland or somewhere.

CHAIR—There is a very significant transient work force in this country that moves from project to project.

Mr Burns—That is the point I would like to make. It is a case of ‘ET call home’. There are a lot of people who live in Gladstone who follow construction all over Australia. You can go to any construction site in Australia and you will find familiar faces from Gladstone, and that is how it is overcome. We have a program now running with all of the out of trade apprentices. It was funded by the Comalco Community Fund, whereby we are seeking all out of trade apprentices—first year through to fourth—in an effort to overcome this. It is a case of, ‘Do you want to resurrect your trade?’ Maybe the business went bust or whatever—they went out of business—and the apprentice lost his job. In that way, they may not come here, but we are going to fill the vacuum that is left by the tradesmen leaving Cairns, Townsville or Mackay. That is one step that has been taken. That program is just about up and running. We have a lot of tradesmen who live in Gladstone; their families are here but they are all over Australia, although they will come home.

Mr Atkins—What we are saying, basically, is that, despite the particular circumstances that Gladstone faces, it is a state wide problem where for the last decade or more that investment in education and training has been seen as a cost not an investment. There has been some level of dropping the ball at both the corporate level and the government level and now we are seeing costs. Yes, I agree that we cannot react on the basis of training needs for the next year or two—it needs to be planning for the next four or five years—but there are going to be Gladstones elsewhere and there are going to be people who need to be trained to move around, so we need to have a long-term training picture here. We need to see that what we are doing at the moment is an investment in our future, whichever pathway we go down and our kids go down.

I also believe—if I can add to that—that we are constantly being told through our ETRF, our education and training reform, that we need to prepare our students very differently than would have been the case in previous generations. They need to have a greater degree of initiative and be more reactive, more self-motivated and more multiskilled in using technology and a whole range of literacies which has not been the case in the past. That is going to require continued and attentive support at all levels of government and business.

Mr Clegg—From our point of view two issues come up together. There are the long-term strategies that are particularly focused on the operations side, and then there are the short-term needs that come with a construction project. You cannot address them as one issue, because if we create enough apprentices to do what we are doing—and we are going to take on, for instance, up to 200 electricians over six months—it is not constructive to then put them off again 12 months later. You cannot create them in that time frame anyway. From a project point of view our needs come in many forms. I think pipe welding is a good example locally of upskilling individuals to do the particular tasks they will be required to perform as part of a construction project. Although some of those skills exist locally and are designed around the maintenance of various plants in the area, the sheer volume of them is far more when we are putting together the project itself.



So for us it comes down to an issue of balance: developing that locally and not destroying local industries by taking the skills in those areas in such volumes—particularly when, purely from a project point of view, many of those industries are producing parts and elements of the project itself. So that process has to be managed internally. We have to balance that with bringing labour in from within the state itself. It is really those types of processes that require the funding, probably in the 12 months prior to the project, to bring people around to exactly what will have to be done to give as many locals as we can an opportunity.

It is a good use of contributions towards things such as apprenticeship programs because, realistically, first-year apprentices are not going to do much for a construction project in the short term. The Building and Construction Industry Training Fund money is well focused in that way because it comes out of a levy on industry and major projects. So it is really to separate those two issues and not put in place strategies that are going to deal with the next one to two years of major construction projects—or however long they go on for—and then leave their significant work force centrally. However, I know a lot of people who have been working all around the country and internationally have come back to Gladstone for our project.

Mr Fry—There are three things I would like to comment on. John partly addressed the issue I was going to raise, and that was of the peaks and troughs. There is no way we as a training provider could equip those 24 people John tested with stainless steel welding skills in the period of time that would be available after John’s need arose. Neither would it be a good use of the money to have a heap of people in town with stainless steel welding skills if only a few of them are going to be used only occasionally. A lot of those skills are use it or lose it type skills; you become obsolete with your skill if you do not practise it on a regular basis. So that is certainly an issue for us.

This also relates to Andrew’s issue. If we go out there and train 200 apprentices right now and put on 200 apprentice electricians in the district I am in—I know that is extreme—in 18 months, when Bechtel take their cranes and move on to the next project, can Dave Burns pick up those kids in this town and carry them? The answer at this moment, under the existing arrangements, is no. That is where the HITT program—the housing program—was very good. You have heard Andrew make reference to the fact that, in the first 12 months, an apprentice is not much use on a construction site. It is obvious that you were a tradesperson, and you probably understand that. But Dave cannot carry that number of apprentices in a town this size without some sort of incentive. That is not just money to pay their wages, because these kids are going to have useful training. That is where that housing program was exceptionally good. Maybe there are other options outside that as well.

Then we come to the situation with TAFEs and high schools. Where do they come together? What do we do with these young people out there? Right now there is another scheme in Brisbane called Group Scheme Australia. They have asked for permission to talk to the students in my institute—which is in Rockhampton, Mackay, Emerald and Gladstone—because they have in excess of 50 apprenticeships in the engineering and construction areas in Brisbane that they cannot fill. Yet, here, we have 20 and 30 kids or more for every single job that he puts out there. These are 15-, 16- and 17-year-olds; neither their parents nor they are keen to see a kid of that age go to live in Brisbane without mum or dad to look after them.

What I am seeing—and this is put forward by one of my council from J.M. Kelly in Rockhampton—is that we have shortages of people with skills; we do not have a skills shortage.



For the money that Andrew pays in his and I am assuming Phil will pay on his job, they will attract the amount of people they need to build those projects. What we have not got is enough people trained. It is not that this country does not have the skills. People talk about skills shortages which in the mind of some people mean that the skills do not exist in this country. They exist. There are just not enough people with them at the places where they are needed at the time they are required. How do you do that juggling act? That is why I am a lowly TAFE director and you guys sit in Canberra. You have the ability to work that one out for me. In my mind that is the exact problem. The skills exist; they are just not where the jobs are. The number of people trained in those areas is not identical to the number of positions that exist. I would hate anyone to think that Central Queensland did not have a skills base that could service the needs of these companies. That is why they are here, among other things. We certainly have the ability; we just do not have the heartbeats.

Mr Joyce—I think there are some issues that fall squarely within government, some squarely within the TAFE sector and some squarely within our sector. One is really the promotion of the skills to a whole range of different target groups that may not necessarily have seen themselves as being suitable to work in an aluminium smelter, for example. We would like to see a large number of women enter the work force through our project. How we do that I am not too sure at this stage, except that we have to demonstrate to the local women in the region that working in a smelter is not just a man’s domain.

There are responsibilities across the whole board whether it is government or industry. The other thing is that things like the mature age apprenticeships scheme, from my understanding, allow subsidies to be provided to industry but they are only available to people over 45 or, if you are lucky, down to 42. I suggest that, if we are going to have a mature age apprenticeships system, it should be made available to people in their thirties so we can pick up on those people who may have had some sort of industry experience before and have decided that they would like to do some sort of apprenticeship training that can link into an organisation like ours.

Senator ALLISON—Can I ask Mr Joyce what he would do to attract women to a smelter?

Mr Joyce—It is all to do with the ethos I think of the organisation. We have a whole range of new philosophies about how we attract and make our smelter look attractive to women. It is a case of getting back into the school based arenas and saying, ‘This particular industry, such as boilermaking, could very well be more attractive to males now but because of the company philosophies could be attractive to women as well.’ That goes through the whole range of age levels from schoolchildren right through to mature age women.

Senator ALLISON—So you think it is attractive now but women have just not discovered it?

Mr Joyce—No, I think that we have a responsibility to demonstrate to the general public that it is not just a male dominated industry. In the aluminium industry, there are some areas within the smelter that are dirty and so forth, but the majority are computer controlled. There are a whole range of skills that can be taken up. Historically that was not the case. The industry as a whole has about five per cent women. We want to increase that and we have a specific corporate objective to do that.



Mr Atkins—I think a lot of attitudes to work are formed at a very early age about what can be done and what cannot be done. A lot of males are excluded from some areas that should not be and vice versa. I think we need to do a great deal more about effective career guidance as opposed to sitting down at the age of 15 or 16 with a guidance counsellor and a book. We need to do a lot better than that. We need to integrate much more into the community and say, ‘This is what an engineer does. This is what a boilermaker does. This is, for that matter, what a police officer, a nurse or a doctor does.’ We need to do that a great deal better and I think over the coming years that will certainly be a real demand. It is certainly part of our education training reforms. The career involvement that our young people will get will be much more effective than it is at the moment. I believe that no matter how beautiful you make your smelter, if a young lady believes she cannot be an engineer or an apprentice or thinks that it will be an unattractive place to work, then that will be the case. Perceptions are reality. We will have to go back even to primary school years in some cases to change those perceptions.

Prof. Prater—Central Queensland University is very active in attracting women into its engineering programs. We have a Women in Engineering program and we have some excellent mentors who act as role models for future students coming into engineering.

An additional point I want to make is about the impact of economic development in Gladstone on skills across the board. This is being felt in areas other than trades as well. The anecdotal evidence is that the hospital and the Area Health Service are having a lot of difficulty attracting professionals—filling the positions of doctors and other professionals. If you want to go to a dentist, you have got to wait a minimum of six weeks unless it is an urgent case. One firm that wants to increase consultants from three to nine has only been able to fill three of those additional places. They are having difficulty attracting environmental managers.

As soon as we graduate people from our Bachelor of Learning Management, they are straight out there in the schools—we can hardly keep up the supply. Indeed, at this campus, we have our own experience of the difficulty of finding lecturers in management and information technology. So this skill shortage exists across the board in this period of economic expansion. Part of the solution to that, I believe, is for us to offer the training and educational programs locally. That would allow us to retain our youth and allow people to move through any of the professions locally rather than be lost to south-east Queensland or other areas in Australia.

Mr Abbott—My point is very similar. In all areas we have moved away from trades into other areas. I will give one example which Bob and I have talked about on many occasions. Just about every engineering school in the country produces civil, mechanical and electrical engineers, yet this town is predominantly made up of manufacturing or chemical processing plants. Companies have always had trouble recruiting chemical or process engineers into this town. What is the reason for that? They all happen to be trained in capital cities, where there is no great demand for them, but you cannot lever them out of there with a tyre lever! Yet there are very few, if any—certainly Central Queensland University does not qualify—regional universities, where you could get local people who may stay local, are able to offer chemical engineering courses. In fact, the University of Queensland—one of the biggest—continues to grow, yet you still cannot get people out of Brisbane to move to Gladstone to exercise their career.

So there is certainly support required for tertiary institutions, particularly regional universities, to supply industries such as those that exist in Gladstone with the types of



professionals that they need to do their business. Certainly, what Bob has said is right: at the moment, because of the amount of work around in Gladstone in particular and maybe nationally, it is very difficult to attract to Gladstone the professionals we need to do the work locally. There are just too many more attractive places to live, perhaps. I do not know what the reason is, but it certainly is not for want of remuneration. It is a broader issue than just trades; it falls into the professional areas as well.

CHAIR—Doesn’t it come back in part to the point, I think, Mr Fry was making when he said that it was not a skills shortage, it was a question of the shortage of skills? That goes to the question of what we are doing around the country in skills matching and whether or not there is enough effort being put in, in the institutional sense, to matching the skills required in various industrial areas. It is an issue that I have raised on a number of occasions with Job Network, who have said that, with the new system they have got, there would be no problem—that they would know where every skill in the country would be, where every skill in the country would be required and that they would be able to match them. Now, it is a fairly big country!

Mr Fry—I think that is a very good idea but, in reality, people will not move. As we heard Mr Abbott say, people will not leave Brisbane to move to Gladstone, in spite of what is going on here. One of the questions you posed to us went to what sorts of incentives may need to be made available. If we take, for instance, the chemical or process engineers, maybe Central Queensland University could give incentives to train those types of engineers here, just as the Gladstone Group Scheme gives incentives.

But the incentives may be different: Bob may very well need money so that he can employ the appropriate lecturers; Dave may need money so he can build houses so that plumbers, carpenters and electricians can be employed as opposed to giving an employer a chunk of money to take on a trainee or even an apprentice for a short period of time. It would probably be more beneficial in the longer term if we identify where the skills gaps are and then look at how we can fill them; that is, not just throwing money at people, but identifying those institutions that can attract the skills base to help alleviate the shortage—for example, Dave’s housing or Bob’s ability to run, say, a chemical engineers course in this town.

Mr Mitchell—Picking up from what Bill said, there are two major towns in this region—Mackay and Gladstone—which have very large work forces of skilled tradespeople, engineers and rigging people, who do major shutdowns and project work throughout Australia. They may be on the North West Shelf this year and back again. A lot of them come back here. There are TAFE colleges in both these towns with the capacity in the slack periods to upskill tradespeople for future technology.

To me, there does not seem to be enough planning. For example, Bechtel and Aldoga come to town and we know that, in the next 12 to 18 months, they will be looking for skilled welders and stainless steel pipe welders and there is a shortage of instrument tradesmen, so you have to upskill electricians to do that instrument work—but it is too late. Somehow or other, industry should have been working with TAFE and state and federal governments and saying, ‘We need a training plan over the next two years. We want to use certain institutions which have the spare capacity. How do we pay for it?’ That is the big question. Do we use government levies? Do we use a combination of state and federal government and industry levies through ARG and other institutions that represent big industry? Another question is: who does the future planning? That is what we have to emphasise for the future.



CHAIR—Ms Winters, does the state government have a view on any of these issues?

Ms Winters—To make a formal comment on that, I would have to take it on notice.

CHAIR—We will take it as being informal.

Ms Winters—That would be very good. The construction work force for these major projects is national, not local. That is the way it is in Australia. In fact, many Australian construction workers with high-level welding skills work offshore in the Middle East, South East Asia and elsewhere. I would say that quite a lot of Bechtel’s work force work internationally and follow the projects around the world.

The area we need to focus on is the area that Bill talked about—that is, on optimising the number of local people we can have trained for the long-term positions. Regardless of what we do in Gladstone, the construction work force for these major investments will continue to be national and international. It is not realistic to think, for example, that Gladstone is going to be able to attract, on a continual basis into the future, $3 billion projects to support a work force; in fact, it may not even be desirable, because to attract people to the area—as John Abbott mentioned—we need a diversified economy. I think that is one of the reasons that we have difficulty in attracting health workers, town planners, teachers and people in other professions. We need to put a lot of effort into lifestyle attraction and diversifying the economy to make it an attractive place for people to live and accept that the construction work force is in fact a national one.

Mr Clegg—While we are talking about a national work force, to date just over 70 per cent of the work force has actually been drawn locally. Although that is not going to hold, particularly as we move into a series of the more trade based areas—such as electrical and mechanical trades—that will drop, but there is still clearly a fairly big impact that comes with drawing over 70 per cent of the 900 people who are there currently from the local area. To understand the impact of that at the end of the project is something that has got to be considered as well.

Mr Abbott—I would just like to make a comment very briefly. I do not mean to pay out on Bechtel, but there is the local propaganda that they recruit locally. They sure do; they take them from other companies, including ours.

CHAIR—Is that a hint that there is a bit of rivalry here?

Mr Abbott—No, it is an important point. If you are interested in the politics of it I can go into it. However, the point is that, sure, the two people that left from our project to go to the Comalco Alumina project last week have been replaced with people from out of town. So with regard to the statement that the percentage of the work force that is recruited locally is 70 per cent, if you look at where you draw the boundaries it is not a true statement.

Mr Fry—In support of what Tracey had to say, one of the questions you posed related to current programs. The State Development Centre, who Tracey represents here today—through their minister, Tom Barton—has put together a committee in this town, of which some of us are members. It has subcommittees around it, and my people obviously sit on the vocational education and training committee. One of Tracey’s staff is out there at the moment talking with industry, including the metal fabrication industry, about what their training needs are. John is



right: Andrew’s company has attracted people from other companies in town and they are backfilling from out of the district. But with what Les Salter is doing at the moment, we are identifying where those skills are and we are even offering options with other TAFEs across Queensland. Bundaberg is reportedly one of the larger unemployment areas in Queensland. I do not have the figures but that is what I hear on a regular basis. So we are saying to our colleagues at the Wide Bay Institute of TAFE, ‘If you can provide training in Bundaberg that could be useful up here, then those people could move at a time when they are employed.’ I do not want to see them all move up here as unemployed people looking for a job. I would prefer to train them where they are.

Tracey, what Les is doing is quite good with that—and I cite the case of Babcock, who lost, I think, seven welders to Andrew’s project. Babcock is a company which has shut down contracts on the powerhouses around the district. They lost seven of their 12 pipe welders and boiler welders to Andrew’s job. They were paying good money at Andrew’s job and I have no criticism of people who move on. One of the tasks Les took on under this project that Minister Barton has put in place is to help Babcock upskill existing people to a higher level of welding so they can bring people in with a lesser skill that at a future time could be lifted up. There are those sorts of programs out there so that when John gets people from out of town, should we be able to assist them with those skills, before they ever get here, we can do that. So there are programs out there of that nature. They are not necessarily widely known, and that is probably a marketing issue on our part and on the part of the State Development Centre as well. But understand that there is a realisation from our employers, the Queensland government, that this is a state-wide issue. There is another thing to remember with these big projects that are occurring here in central Queensland. Andrew, how much is coming up on barges from Brisbane?

Mr Clegg—It is a significant amount. There are several hundred people employed at Hemmant doing day work. Actually recruiting sufficient numbers of qualified welders in Brisbane is of as much of a problem as it is up here, because of the impact of that work that is not just done at Hemmant but is also subcontracted out around Brisbane workshops. That is clearly drawing on some of the same work force that would be the non-local work force to come up here.

Mr Fry—I would assume that Phil’s project, the Aldoga, will be not significantly different to that. But, can I say, I think we would all appreciate that situation better than the one we have had with other projects that Ian Mitchell, through his union, were certainly involved with, where it was not manufactured in Australia or Queensland. It came in on ships through the wharf. It was manufactured in other countries, wasn’t it, Ian?

Mr Mitchell—In Indonesia and Malaysia.

Mr Fry—And there was just no work for Queenslanders. So, while we have these problems, I find them great problems to have rather than the other one where everything comes off the boat. We are in there trying to solve our own problems, but it is good that you are here today listening to some of us.

Mr Joyce—It appears to me that it is an uncoordinated response, as it were. Possibly there is an opportunity for determining funding availability through both federal and state issues when it comes to education and training. I have found that there is no coordination between what the



federal government offers and what the state government offers. You will go to the state government to talk about various funding issues for disadvantaged groups and they will have particular programs and then you will go to the federal government and they will have particular programs as well. From my perspective, it would be much better if they were amalgamated.

But, from listening to what people are saying, it appears to me that we are not strategically focused enough at a higher level. By ‘we’, I mean everybody. I am talking about state government, federal government, industry, TAFE and so forth. If there are all these projects going on and we know that there is going to be a major project coming into a central region in two or three years, what is being done in order to coordinate a whole of government and whole of industry response to the skill shortage? It appears to me that it is very disjointed. If a group was able to get together and have a 10-year strategic plan on the development of all of these projects or on the skill shortage issue then we would have a much better response than the one we have at the moment, which is a piecemeal attitude of, ‘Okay, we have a project coming in today, it’s going to be here for three years and we need so many welders and all the rest of it now.’ Why can’t we have a much more strategic approach to the education and training of our young and our work force?

Mr Atkins—I certainly agree with the 10-year thing. That is what I am saying: the genesis of a lot of our problems was 10 to 15 years ago, and the problems are being felt now. The trouble with that—and again I am talking from a schools point of view—is that in trying to pick winners, you create pools of redundancy as well. That happens if you train 10 years ahead for skills you anticipate needing. From our point of view we are trying to create people who are capable of being very flexible and making a number of career changes over their lives. We all know the story—my father worked for the one crew for 30 or 40 years, most of us have probably had one or two career changes and in a few years time we are probably going to see young kids having three or four career changes. The emphasis is on creating a flexible, capable, competent work force—and I would like to reinforce what Bob was saying before—that is prepared to learn and change directions in response to what is there rather than to say, ‘We can now plan for 10 years ahead.’ It is the nature of our work force that we are talking about rather than the particular skill set it carries. That would be my argument. That starts with schools, TAFE and universities.

Ms Winters—Firstly, just following on from what Roger said, I think one of the good things about the school based apprenticeship program combined with the linkages to TAFE and then to university is that—looking to the long-term future, which none of us can predict very accurately—it gives students the widest possible range of options for pathways for future training and education. I think that is one of the strengths of the program, because it is very difficult to plan 10 years ahead. I will use the PNG gas project as an example: if we were to have planned on the day the environmental impact assessment commenced and trained up welders to deal with that pipeline, we would have a lot of unemployed welders today. It is very difficult. Often these major projects do not reach commercial close until the day before they are ready to start construction, so that sort of planning is very difficult.

The other thing is that, looking to the future, we also have to remember that we are going to be competing for capital investment and for our share of the work that they do in a global environment. It is a little hard to predict how much of that work we are going to be able to keep in Australia unless we improve the technology of our manufacturing industries, our trades and so forth into the future. That is another consideration that I think we need to keep in mind.



Mr Burns—I really am an optimist, but the more we talk around this table the more I begin to realise that we have an unsolvable problem. In Gladstone, the only answer that we have to the problem that we face here is called a group scheme. If one company runs out of work, we flick the kid over to another company and we find him work. I came to Gladstone in 1965 on a construction job, I am still here and I love the place but we have had this problem with skill shortages from 1965 to the current day. All we can do is address it. I hate to say it, it takes the optimistic outlook away, but we have to address the problems as they arise. You just said we could not plan for 10 years down the track.

In Gladstone, the group company I manage employs 460 kids. The only reason we can do that is that when they run out of work here we look for work somewhere else. That is the nature of the construction game. It is a difficult situation. All we can hope to do is address it through the schools and the group training companies by trying to get as many young people in there and into universities to give them skills. Then when the opportunity arises to use those skills, they can be upskilled and get into the work. You have really got the tiger by the tail trying to solve the problem that we have and you are never going to solve it. It is always going to be there, no matter what we do here and what we do in the future. There are peaks and troughs.

This country is not big enough to have construction jobs in Gladstone where we are talking about $6 billion or close to $7 billion currently under way. We are not going to solve the problem. I do not like saying that but, until we get a pool of labour and we have the jobs to move them to—and this country is not big enough—we are going to have this same discussion over and over again. What we have to do is create pathways for our children where they can gain the skills to a certain level then when these opportunities come, we can upgrade them and get them ready in a shorter time than we are at the moment. To train an apprentice and put him out with either Comalco or Aldoga takes a minimum of four years. They will have been and gone in four years time. They need certain skills but if we have 3,000 people, the company will take up 900 of them for their skills and that leaves a lot of people with all these skills with nowhere to go. That is the sort of situation we face here today. I would like to have the answer but they nailed that poor bugger to the cross years ago and we cannot come up with it.

Mr Abbott—Just shut down the capital cities is all you need to do!

Mr Burns—We try to entice people out into the country but they will not come. Gladstone is a lovely place. I have been here since 1965 and I will vouch for it.

Mr Atkins—The fishing has gone off.

Mr Burns—The fishing has gone off and the crabbing has gone off a bit.

Senator STEPHENS—In the terms of reference of our inquiry there are some other issues about state and federal government policy that are of interest to us and one of those is the institutional arrangements that actually exist at the moment. I am interested in two issues: one is the issue of user choice and the system of user choice and whether or not user choice and the growing number of non-TAFE providers is impacting on both the quality of training and the capacity for transfer between the vocational education and training sector and higher education. That is one issue that I am interested in having a response from the coalface. The other issue is about whether there are more effective ways of credit transfer and whether or not we should be looking at a pool funding arrangement or some other kind of institutional arrangements that



would improve things for the people who are trying to access and provide that range of education.

Mr Burns—If you want an answer on user choice, it was the greatest disaster to hit the training system in Queensland in years. We are still recovering from it. I wish Senator Santoro were here because it was under his regime that they brought in—

CHAIR—That is why he did not come today!

Mr Burns—If he knew I was coming—no, I cannot take the credit. It was a disaster. It brought TAFE into an area where they had to lower their standards to be able to compete with some of the shysters who were delivering training—and I say shysters, and I make no apology. There was one training provider that went out to a meatworks in Biloela, signed up the whole crew out there—some 200 or 300 people—under user choice and made them all trainees. He made one mistake: he tried to sign up a qualified butcher to do a meat traineeship. That was the sort of atmosphere we would operate in. There was so much money in the bucket and the private providers were taking it out. I have been through the worst of TAFE; I have been on the board for some 10, 12 years or more, and we went through one of the worst times in TAFE’s history. It nearly brought TAFE to its knees, to a point where people who wanted training were steering clear of TAFE. It was brought to its knees; it could not compete with people who were not providing what they were contracted to provide, and TAFE was trying to maintain its level of training. It was a disaster.

Mr Abbott—I would say industry agrees.

Senator STEPHENS—Just in this region, how many registered training organisations are there?

Mr Fry—With regard to that it is very difficult for me to know, but I have been told that there are more than 1,000 training providers that operate in Queensland. They all have access to operate here, but they are not all in the user choice market. Some are also in the other training markets outside apprenticeships and traineeships. There are less now than there used to be. There are a number of providers that have lost their registration or that have lost their contract for the types of reasons Dave was alluding to. It is impossible for me to say because I am not privy to that information. They will not let me see what my competition is; I would love to know. Also, they will not tell me where they operate. But can I say that, in the last week, the Central Queensland Institute of TAFE has been required to pick up aged care trainees in Rockhampton as a result of a training provider from Townsville losing registration. The week before that, I was asked to pick up 45 child-care trainees in Central Queensland as a result of a user choice provider reaching the maximum that the government purchased off them, and these people had made commitments to these trainees. I had to step in with the funding made available to me for the Central Queensland region and meet that need. There are a number of providers that are not doing it well either in user choice or the other.

I have no problem with quality private providers. There are a number of them in the state who are very good in specialist areas. My problem comes with the way that some providers think they want to compete with TAFE—and you might expect me to defend TAFE; that is probably what I am paid to do and I would do that. But in reality there are some areas where TAFE does not have the expertise and should not be in the area, and we are not. I cite aerospace as one



area—TAFE is not the provider of aerospace in this state; TAFE is a partner but it is an industry owned operation out of Brisbane airport. We do not touch that because in times gone by when TAFE was trying to provide aerospace, we were guilty of the types of things Dave was talking about with the lack of quality because we did not have access to Jumbos or 737s and those sorts of things.

In the areas of the traditional trades, aged care, child care, those sorts of areas, where TAFE has had a history of working with industry and has had industry involvement, I believe that we are the very best system for that. But even there the focus has changed. I have been in TAFE since 1984. In the beginning of my time with TAFE, apprentices came to TAFE for seven weeks a year for three years, except electricians and plumbers who actually came for 24 weeks over the three years, not 21 weeks. Now most apprentices would spend about three weeks a year maximum at TAFE, and the rest is done on site. Our people now go out to John’s plant, or other plants, or Dave’s people go out in some cases. We actually assess on site, and we identify those things that the students do on site that can be credited against their competencies rather than them having to sit in front of my teachers for seven weeks even if they know it all.

CHAIR—Is that necessarily a bad thing?

Mr Fry—No, it is not; it is a very good thing. I cite an example in this town of Accurate Engineering—it was formerly Peachy Engineering—a precision machining company. The owner’s apprentices, who happen to be his sons, came to my college in Gladstone, where they had to do machining. These people spent all day on lathes. They were better machinists than my teachers, but at that time the act required them to be at college for seven weeks. So for seven weeks they sat there wasting their time basically showing my teachers how much better than them they were. These guys do CNC; they do fabulous work. That would not happen now because we would identify in developing the training plan with that company that these apprentices do these things well, and we would not have to bring them into TAFE for it.

Senator TIERNEY—Regarding the RTOs, we looked at those very thoroughly as a committee three years ago, right around Australia—it was not long after they had come in. We heard all the war stories, like those you are telling us. When it came down to determining how many RTOs were shonky, in the cases of Western Australia and South Australia about 1 per cent of them were, and they were usually sacked and gone. Are people more shonky in Queensland? Do you have any hard evidence on this? Can you tell us what the rate of this is? If they are shonky, I assume the system has got rid of them by now.

Mr Fry—I agree with that. The system certainly does weed out the shonky RTOs, and it also audits TAFE institutes. A couple of TAFE institutes have lost registration in the last few years, and they have had to work hard to get it back. I am not saying that all RTOs are bad. As I said at the beginning, there are some very good quality private RTOs, and to that extent you will find that a number of TAFE institutes partner with some of those so that, if people want the training, we will refer those people to the appropriate RTOs. It would be wrong to say that all private RTOs are shonky. That is definitely not the case. There are some exceptionally good ones, and TAFE actually learns from some of those. But there are some cases where they are not good.

Mr Atkins—We, as a system, have been burned a number of times by RTOs. It is not necessarily that they are shonky, but they are certainly unable to sustain a business, and they leave young people in the lurch. That is certainly an issue. Despite an often rocky relationship



between TAFE and schools, TAFE would certainly remain our first choice for providing outside training. However, there are a number of grey areas or issues that often prevent effective coordination and cooperation between TAFE and schools.

Mr Fry—Do you want to cite the classic example?

Mr Atkins—The classic example is the 4.20 rule. At the moment ANTA, our federal body, is saying that everything that Bill and his organisation do with my students is double dipping and therefore illegal. After 4.20 p.m. TAFE can teach any of my students anything. Before that it is classified as double dipping. ANTA is saying that, because the federal government is supporting schools and TAFE, if I have some of my students over at his place, somebody is going to go to jail—I think that was Bill’s phrase.

Mr Fry—I was hoping it would be you.

Mr Atkins—You were hoping it would be me; I was hoping it would be you. These are real impediments. We have been talking about pathways, transition, working together as organisations, trying to share the load and moving across to TAFE those who should not be at school and should be at TAFE: that is, those people Dave was talking about before. I am quite serious about that. We need to be able to do that. But, again, in the transition model there are some real inherent barriers to making schools and TAFE work effectively.

Prof. Prater—This is an example of where the sector faces disincentives to cooperation, when we should be being encouraged to cooperate. To address Senator Stephens’ question regarding the capacity to transfer, credit transfer is a small but very important part of the whole equation, and it is one that I do not think is very effectively dealt with locally. I am not saying that we do not deal with it well here. I am saying that it is more of a national issue. I have had a heightened appreciation this year of how mobile the work force is. It is not just an issue between sectors but within sectors. We have people who commenced undergraduate or postgraduate programs in Western Australia, moved here and lost part of their accumulated credits from one university when they moved into another one. It is similar between sectors. I do not think that we have a very good system. I think the national credit transfer operation failed at one stage, and that is a great pity. Senator Tierney probably knows a lot more about that. The other part of this issue relates to what I referred to in my opening remarks about collaboration between sectors. That is much more important in terms of joint programs, nested programs and embedded programs. Again, we need incentives to do that. There are not necessarily disincentives, but there is no real reason—other than that we are good guys, which we are—for us to get in and do it.

Mr Fry—And we all live here.

Senator STEPHENS—So perhaps that collaboration is more achievable when you are in a regional centre, where people are close by, than in a city.

Prof. Prater—Thank you very much for the opportunity to mention something about that. It is often seen as being more achievable in multisectoral precincts, a number of which are receiving additional funding and support. Where institutions are co-located, certain synergies are meant to develop. But I think that we have managed to achieve more here than we could if



we were co-located, because we do not have a lot of baggage to carry around and we do not have a lot of the demarcation disputes that occur when you are co-located.

We see ourselves developing a virtual precinct here across the three sectors. We may not be co-located—we may not be South Bank, Mount Isa, GippsTAFE, Coffs Harbour education centre or the Central Coast campus at Ourimbah. What we do have here is a spirit of cooperation and a recognition of the needs within the community, and I hope you will hear a lot more about the cross-sectoral virtual precinct that the education sector is developing in Gladstone.

Senator STEPHENS—You might like to elaborate on where both industry and the sectors see difficulties in terms of barriers to enhancing that concept.

Prof. Prater—The influence of industry is part of the reason why we are going to be able to cooperate in the way we want to. There is a very strong history of partnership. I have referred to the maintenance management program a couple of times already with respect to this campus, and I think that is one of the things that will unlock things. As far as a barrier is concerned, we face a situation where, at the co-located precincts, additional resources are provided as an incentive to work together. That is why we want to talk about a virtual precinct and say, ‘We may not all be on the same patch of dirt, but boy we can we achieve a lot, particularly if we are given some resources to do it.’

Senator TIERNEY—How extensive is this virtual precinct? You have mentioned that you are cooperating in the local areas. Can people come to this centre and study courses through the University of Queensland or the University of Sydney—do they have that sort of access here, or is it specifically local?

Prof. Prater—This initiative is very much a local one for Gladstone; it is not a CQU wide initiative—but I do not think that was your question. We do have Open Learning Network at this campus, which does facilitate distance studies with other institutions. I think that we will be starting off by furthering the model that exists with Toolooa and working much more at a local level, with intersectoral collaboration, before we start to broaden things but, given the way we are saying we have to go, we may well start to franchise programs with other universities.

Senator TIERNEY—I was not thinking so much of franchising; I was thinking of access. If someone wants to do a course through Griffith University by distance learning, can they use the facilities here to access that? It usually only requires the facility; it does not require a program.

Prof. Prater—That does exist through the Queensland Open Learning Network facility on this campus but, I think, to a limited extent. If we do develop this partnership further, part of what we should be doing within CQU—and I guess this is where the three sectors working together will drive a change in the policy of Central Queensland University—is much more opening up of acceptance of courses of study from other institutions.

Mr Abbott—To use the example of the master of business administration course on which industry has been working with the local university, there are any number of MBAs offered by universities both here and overseas but the industry in Gladstone has identified a particular need. We are predominantly, as I said earlier, manufacturing process engineering companies, and most MBAs do not focus on the skills required for that sort of organisation.



So the industry and the GAIN group have been working with the CQU to develop the course. We did toy with the idea of calling it a Master of Manufacturing Administration, but we chose the original name. It is very much a global sliver of speciality, focusing on the skills required for the management of manufacturing facilities such as those which exist in Gladstone. There are particular modules which we as manufacturing companies require the university to run. There has been a lot of discussion—although nothing has come to fruition yet—on particular modules, some of which are delivered or packaged by overseas suppliers.

I can give an example from our own industry—an industry specialist called James Campbell, who is petrochemical focused and the world leader in education in the petrochemical industry. We would be seeking to run that module in Gladstone, and we are proposing to do it late this year or early next year. We have requested the university consider those sorts of modules as part of an award towards the MBA which we are trying to run in this area. So it is trying to push the university into areas where they have not been before. To date we have not heard a ‘no’, so if we have not heard a ‘no’ we presume that is a ‘yes’. That is the way we are heading, but that is in the specialised end of town, I suspect.

Senator TIERNEY—Given that that is so specialist, I would have thought it would have an international market, particularly in areas like China and India, which seem to be taking over world manufacturing. Have you looked to the international market possibilities?

Mr Abbott—Bob can answer this after me. I used the expression ‘global sliver’. You can try to be all things to all men, and that is what most MBAs tend to be. There are a few specialist ones, but generally speaking they are very generalist in nature. So if the Central Queensland University tried to compete on the world market of MBAs, they would almost be an also-ran. What we are suggesting to them is one that specifically meets the needs of manufacturing industries such as we have in Gladstone, and that then would have global applicability.

The postgraduate diploma in maintenance management was developed with industry seven or eight years ago. When that course was developed, there actually was not an academic on the committee; the university said, ‘You industry go and design it and tell us what you want,’ and that is what happened. That course was delivered, and there were 75 students, I think, in the first intake, which was three times more than they were expecting. That course is now marketed overseas and is very successful overseas because it is a unique course. It is unlike any other maintenance engineering course that exists not only anywhere in Australia but anywhere I have seen in the world.

Senator TIERNEY—If I were a citizen of Gladstone and I wanted to do an MBA but I wanted to do it in retailing, which was being offered at Southern Cross through their work with Coles Myer, could I come in here and access that sort of course?

Prof. Prater—Certainly, you could use the facilities here. We would encourage you to consider doing some of the relevant courses that we offer, in either the industry based MBA or our other MBA. That really goes back to the question of credit transfer. It is less a question of what we will allow you to do, or encourage you to do, and more a question of what Southern Cross will recognise, because they are the ones awarding that MBA.

Senator TIERNEY—I understand.



Ms Winters—I wanted to ask Bill and Bob a question. Both the TAFE and CQU are huge exporters of specialised education services here. That in fact is a sector where we can leverage off the industry that we have got to provide really global specialisation for export—not at the trade level and so forth, but in terms of educating work forces around the world in the types of industries that we have got on our doorsteps. The export success of both of those organisations is fantastic.

Mr Fry—I am happy to start on that. The Central Queensland Institute of TAFE currently has students enrolled in East Kalimantan in Indonesia, and we also have students in Shanghai, all in engineering. We have also been asked to be the training provider for the Bali Papan Polytechnic that is also being built in East Kalimantan. That is based on our capacity to service those industries that operate here in Central Queensland because, as John said, they are manufacturing type areas.

We have students at Thiess, a Queensland based company operating across the world. We have apprentices in East Kalimantan from Thiess and they operate from about seven different jungle mines. The polytechnic is trying to train people who can get jobs with Australian companies that operate out of East Kalimantan. That is why we have been asked to be there. We have been asked to be in Shanghai, once again because of our capacity to train people—not in the engineering end of the world but back in the process side and the operator side. In Shanghai that training is for people who wish to enter into that sort of industry. We do not want to be a university; we do not market as a university. We market as a process and operator type end of the market and leave people at CQU to go to the other end.

Prof. Prater—Central Queensland University has nearly half of its student body as international students and, as a consequence of its growth in this market, won a national export award last year for education. Many of these students are onshore at our international campuses. Our second biggest campus is in Sydney. We have a number of operations offshore, including a campus in Fiji and other operations in South-East Asia. You might wonder what the relevance of all that is to Gladstone. There is both a current operational issue and an opportunity entailed in this. The current operational issue is that we can have a lecturer in information technology at the Gladstone campus with a cohort of 35 students—if they have a big class here, because as I said initially this is not a big catchment area; we do not have a lot of school leavers; we like the ones that we have, but it is a small area—but that person can also be teaching up to 1,000 students across our international campuses in Brisbane, the Gold Coast, Sydney and Melbourne, and can also be going offshore to Fiji or China to teach students there. But they have a vastly enriched experience as an academic because of our involvement in the export of education. They get to travel and get to mix overseas.

What we have yet to capitalise on is that having an impact on Gladstone, and there are some very real reasons why we have not been able to do that. One is the size of the staff cohort here, and the other is the availability of facilities, particularly residential accommodation. As you have heard today, there is a massive population influx with construction, and a soaking up of a lot of cheap accommodation, and this presents a real problem for us, but we have a strategy to address it. We see this campus as having a very important role in global education. We see a potential for attracting international students here. Part of that is to give a more global educational experience to the domestic students, the school leavers from Toolooa State High, who will, in the future, be able to sit down with students from other countries and study



together. We will embed that experience in part of the strategies to develop the attributes that we want in our students.

To give you an example of the way in which we do that now, engineering co-op students who have problem based learning have to form work groups. We ensure that, even in their first year when they are forming those work groups, they are across all of our Central Queensland campuses. So that a work group that might have some students in Gladstone will also have students in Rockhampton and Mackay, so they can experience that virtual learning world, which is part of the real life work experience. That is the way in which we try and embed those experiences.

The maintenance management program is the first one to start with the international market. We have South American students enrolled this year for the first time. We are seen as the lead institution in the Southern Hemisphere for maintenance management. Manchester University has the Northern Hemisphere market and it is in Gladstone where we have the Southern Hemisphere market, and that is evidenced by a number of things, such as the international convention of maintenance society holding its conference in Australia last year. It was co-located in Brisbane and Gladstone. We were able to do that, having about a third of the delegates in Gladstone, through the use of video conferencing between the sites. So the sort of technology that this institution has, and its vision, are part of the scenario in which we are working.

Senator ALLISON—Can I ask a question about the 30 per cent youth unemployment? What efforts are being made in this community to skill those people and bring them into employment?

Mr Fry—I will start, because a lot of those students would fall into what would be considered my cohort rather than Bob’s because a lot of them have dropped out of school or have disengaged at this time. The white paper will certainly mean that at a future time the high schools and TAFE will have even more closely linked programs. Out of Gladstone alone, we offer about 112 places in the engineering and construction area and a similar amount in the hospitality and office area for those students who do not have employment so that they are not walking the streets or doing other illegal activities. Our programs here are very well taken up and industry certainly supports those students. So, while we have 30 per cent unemployment, we have a very high uptake from industry of those people that we can get into a vocational training program through TAFE. My statistic for employment is 92 per cent within four months of completing our courses, which is quite good. If we can get access to those students we can offer them a program that in most cases will lead to a job outcome. The difficulty, of course, is getting to those students who have disengaged through a range of experiences, such as their family situation or whatever. Very few have disengaged because of a lack of funds. There would not be a day in the week when my organisation does not provide lunch for students at college because they have no food, put clothes on their back so they can come to TAFE, waive fees, or put safety boots on their feet. We pay those things to get those students in. I know the high schools do a very similar thing to try to engage them. I know that money is probably not the reason that a majority of my students have disengaged. A number of them are there for other social reasons, including peer pressure, unfortunately. That is what we are doing.

Mr Atkins—I agree with much of what Bill has said. We find if we lose students who are aged 14 to 15 that they will often come back within two years and find it extremely difficult to reintegrate into the traditional high school format. That is one of the reasons why we want to



work so closely with TAFE and to build alternative pathways, because the system is not working for them. In many of the cases, we have to admit that they probably stop working from about year 4 in terms of their capacity to succeed in the system. That is about 20 per cent of our kids, so we are desperately keen to look at different ways that we can manage that. One of the ways at the moment is that Toolooa High School runs a district-wide program where we monitor and track at high school level every single Indigenous student in every school that has a secondary component in the district. We know where they are, we have sat down with them, we know exactly what they want to achieve and what their aspirations are. We call them the individual aspirations plan. We support that, we work with the families in doing that and we create opportunities for them to move along that pathway. Some of this is in picture form because we have people with zero literacy. Where would they like to be? Some of it is a detailed document because some of these kids are going to go to university and do law. There is a whole range of things but we are tracking every single one of them.

This is very much for us a trial case but I think in Queensland that we will be doing it within a few years. We need to individualise the system and, rather than rolling through on mass systems, we need to be able to say, ‘Who are you; what do you want to do; what are your skills and what is happening in your life at the moment?’ Then we can support that. As Bill was saying, it may be family break-up, drugs and alcohol, pregnancy or any of those sorts of things, but we need to be able to manage those people; otherwise they will just keep dropping out. We often use the example of the end of year 10. The end of year 10 is a very artificial state. They drop out at 15 generally and that can be halfway through year 10. If we can get them to the end of year 10 and get them into senior, generally we will keep them; it is not a problem. It is that age group and I think we need to do a great deal better in tracking where these kids are because we do not know where half of them go. They go onto the street and into our criminal justice system and into our health system and those sorts of things. That individualised tracking is where we need to go.

CHAIR—What does this 30 per cent translate into in physical numbers?

Mr Atkins—At my place it might be 30 students who come back at year 11 who have not completed year 10. I will not take them back into year 10 because the curriculum is so lock step still—you have to do English, maths and social science. I put them into year 11 where they can do stuff that is interesting and that they see as relevant, where they can alter the timetable and they are not going to have to do a whole lot of stuff. You have to remember that for these kids, getting out of bed early is some time before midday: that is the lifestyle that they are into. We need to bring them back into the real world in some way and have a flexible system that allows us to do that.

Mr Fry—I could not give you a physical number. Maybe Noel and our friends up the other end of the table might have a better idea. You should understand also that not every student who comes to TAFE would be considered unemployed. These are very much like people who have decided to be a home carer and stay at home and look after a family. They do not show up on an unemployment statistic. These are people who have made a conscious decision at a point in their life to swing from this educational system into that vocational training system, and they would not show up in this 30 per cent statistic. So I would not like to give you a number for that. It may be something that we could find out for you, but the message I would hate you to take away is that all the youth in Gladstone are unemployed. We have exceedingly smart young



people in this town who are very good at career choices for themselves and who make those choices very wisely.

Mr Wootton—I wanted to follow up Senator Allison’s question. I think there has been a lot of emphasis in the last couple of hours on heavy industry, and that is certainly the Gladstone area’s focus. But there is a very strong emphasis in this area to try to diversify, so it will start to pick up the type of people we have just been talking about in terms of potential employment across quite a range of industries, other than mineral processing and maintenance.

I thought I would mention that because in the past couple of years we have done a number of studies to try to look at diversification. One of them was seafood processing, and that has been quite successful for this harbour city. Another was an aged care strategy, which will have results in terms of new aged care facilities, and that is a very high employer in that particular field. Another study involved containerisation for port, and we assisted the port authority in that area. We have done a study of Boyne Valley, an area with a depressed economy and employment and dairy problems. That study looked at what can pick things up in the valley. They have been very helpful to the Gladstone region. I would place on record the assistance given through the consultative committee system and Regional Solutions. They have helped Gladstone with a lot of the identification of where there might be gaps and opportunities.

Mr Burns—The group scheme has got a contract with the federal government in a job placement program which tries to pick up all these young people who are falling through the net. It is rather successful. We have contracted to about 400 young people. We interview them, follow them up and try to get them into work. A number of them come from there straight into the group scheme and do apprenticeships and traineeships. The area is addressed, but it is still a problem.

CHAIR—We will finish questions now, because we have been offered a quick look around the university and I know that Dr Prater is keen to show us around. On behalf of the committee, I thank you all for making yourselves available this afternoon. It has been a very valuable discussion. Hopefully, at the end of this process, we will be able to come up with some solutions to some of these problems.

Committee adjourned at 4.08 p.m.

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