STATEMENTS ON SIGNIFICANT MATTERS

Mr BIRRELL (Nicholls) (10:53): National Skills Week is upon us, and it gives us an opportunity to talk about where we're up to with skills and training in this nation and where we need to go. I think there needs to be some serious thinking about the tracks we're on, and I think we have the opportunity to look overseas, which I'll talk about in a minute, and see what other countries have done and how successful they've been in skills training, particularly in vocational skills training.

The area I'm from is one of the greatest food manufacturing regions in not only Australia but the world, supplied by the Goulburn-Murray irrigation system. Water flows out across the fertile soils of the Goulburn and Murray valleys. A great deal of produce is grown, and a lot of that produce is processed.

There are a number of food manufacturing companies, such as, from the fruit industry, the iconic SPC with its processed fruit products. While I've got the time to talk about this, everyone is welcome to come to my office and take the peach challenge. I know the member for Hunter has taken the peach challenge— Mr Repacholi: It is a remarkable business.

Mr BIRRELL: where he correctly identified the high quality of the SPC product versus the— Mr Repacholi interjecting— Mr BIRRELL: Yes; I agree with the member for Hunter. The Chinese product was significantly inferior. We have Fonterra, which makes a huge amount of the mozzarella that goes across pizzas across South-East Asia and Australia.

We have Kagome, which manufactures tomato products, and the iconic Furphy—Furphy Foundry and Furphy steel products—which has been making tanks since the late 1800s. The reason I mention all these businesses is they need the skills that will transform their businesses into the future. We had a problem, and I think we still have the problem, although I see there are signs of improvement.

Businesses were saying to me, 'We can't find the young people with the skills and training opportunities that are going to take our businesses forward,' and then I'd go over to the schools and the teachers were saying, 'The kids lack ambition, they don't see what opportunities there are for them, so they're going down a path we don't want them to go down, which is a part that young people find if they don't have hope and don't sense an opportunity.' In 2019 I applied for a Churchill fellowship to study this, and I was successful.

I thank the Churchill Trust for trusting me with that great opportunity. I was to go to Europe to see what the Germans, the Finns, the Swedes and the British were doing about this very problem. How do we link educational institutions, whether they be primary, secondary or tertiary, with the business community?

I think we need to do that better in Australia. Unfortunately, the pandemic came upon us and I wasn't able to travel until I was in this place in 2023, but I hope to apply what I learnt to this area of skills and to my shadow assistant ministry. A couple of observations from what I saw in Germany are that the vocational educational training system is, in my view, far superior to what Australia has.

Their vocational schools are better than our TAFE system. They've got better facilities, I think they have teachers who have more industry experience, and the whole system is geared up a bit better. My mantra in this place is, 'I don't think we need free TAFE, I think we need better TAFE,' and the industries are supporting me in that.

In Germany—I'll use Mercedes-Benz in Stuttgart as an example—they'll go out to the schools and say, 'Do you want an apprenticeships with Mercedes-Benz, because we need you into the future?' They've got a very futuristic way of looking at this. They don't think about the technologies that exist now, necessarily—they ask, 'What do we need in 2030, 2040, 2050 or 2060, and how can we train young people to have that mindset, knowing that things change all through those periods and you can't necessarily predict the future?' Once they get an apprentice, the apprentice will spend, in most cases, three days at Mercedes-Benz and they will do the practical work in a very good program.

Then they'll spend two days in the technical school. The technical school will be explaining and teaching the young people the theoretical aspects of the practical stuff they've been doing in the business. That happens not just at Mercedes but all across Germany.

Here's the reason that works so well: the curriculum is mainly devised by the chamber of commerce, not the government. We like the government to control everything in Australia; there, the business community have taken ownership of this. They've been allowed to take ownership of this and they have set the curriculum for the tech schools.

It's a very good system. After that, I went to Finland. What I was most impressed with in Finland, after discussing things with people in Helsinki in particular, was the Finnish attitude towards what they called the discipline of skills anticipation.

The Finns set about asking, 'What skills are we going to need in 20 years, 30 years or 40 years, and how do we develop the pipeline?' I think there has been a culture in Australian where governments of all sides—but particularly Labor governments—have said, over a number of years: 'You've got to go to uni. We want more kids in uni. Uni is where it needs to be happening.' In Finland, the interesting thing is that the mix of where students go to after secondary school is 40 per cent to university, 40 per cent to vocational training and 20 per cent straight into the workforce.

That has been the case since 2001. It hasn't changed, and they are happy with that because it suits their skills needs and they don't have an overload of people in certain areas of professional training. They've got a much more even spread in terms of vocational education, university degrees and direct entry into the workforce.

I think we can look at these European examples and try to think about how we can do things better in Australia. I would like to talk about university because it does provide skills and education. I'm an example of that—if people think I have any skills at all!

I completed two university degrees: one in applied science in agriculture at Dookie college, which is the University of Melbourne's regional Victoria campus, and later an MBA at La Trobe University, primarily at the Shepparton campus. When I was at Dookie, I was about 21 or 22, and I was 42 when I did the MBA. The reason I mention this is that I think we've got to look at university in Australia as something that should be available for people when they need it.

Not everyone wants to go to university straight out of school. There are great opportunities for people to retrain later in life, and we need university opportunities available where people need them. As the shadow assistant minister for regional education, I say that it's very important that, while there will be opportunities for young people from regional areas to study in capital cities—that will continue and that's a good thing—we also have tertiary education opportunities available where people are in regional settings.

A great example of this is a fantastic program that the previous coalition government put forward and implemented called the Murray-Darling Medical Schools Network. That moved a lot of Commonwealth funded postgraduate medical degree places out of the sandstone universities—typically in Melbourne and Sydney—and into regional areas. An example is the University of Melbourne's school of rural health in Shepparton, over the road from the hospital, training young people in the medical profession.

That training's not just a taster, which is what it used to be, when people would then go back to Melbourne. The whole four-year postgraduate degree is now in Shepparton. The first lot of those graduates will complete their studies this year, at the end of 2025, and I think what we'll see is that, because they have been living in a regional area for so long, they will stay and practise in a regional area.

That is one of the great achievements of the previous coalition government, and I'd like to see it expanded into allied health so we can train more people in the regions. In conclusion, National Skills Week is an opportunity for us to see where we're up to. I encourage the government—and I'll be doing this through a number of forums—to look overseas, look at why the Europeans have developed such a good manufacturing sector and look at what they and the North Americans are doing to keep the skills coming through the pipeline for the technologies of the future.