PRIVATE MEMBERS' BUSINESS
Mr NEUMANN (Blair) (12:32): I thank the member for Moore for his excellent motion. As someone who was an employer for 20 years before coming into this place, I know how important it is to get a job and to give a person a job. It really makes a huge difference.
It changes their whole life; it changes their lifestyle and their livelihood and provides financial security for them and their family. Now, like everyone on this side of the chamber, the member for Moore understands just how critical it is that we pull the full range of levers to ensure that more homes are built for Australia. In June this year, the Minister for Skills and Training and I visited a building site in Ipswich, in my fast-growing electorate, to meet with some first-year apprentices—including several female apprentices from the local group training organisation Apprenticeships Queensland, who are this year celebrating 40 years of supporting skills and training in the Ipswich region.
These young people are completing their apprenticeships in carpentry and roof plumbing, and they're renovating one of the beautiful old Queenslander-style homes for which Ipswich is famous, as it is the heritage capital of Queensland. They provide a lot of work, these Queenslanders, I might add, for tradespeople. I saw the minister was out this morning, meeting with a local builder and his carpentry apprentice here in Canberra.
When he visited my electorate of Blair a couple of months ago, he dropped into a house at Karalee to meet with Moses, the owner of solar panel business Alpha Bright Solar, and his electrical apprentice, Makbol, who was undertaking a training course in solar panel installation and maintenance. They were working at that house at Karalee. All of these apprentices are benefiting from the Albanese government's Key Apprenticeship Program, which provides $10,000 bonuses for apprentices, paid in instalments, backing apprentices like Makbol to start and, more importantly, to finish their apprenticeships.
Moses benefits too, as an employer, because he's among the thousands of small-business owners backed by an employer incentive scheme. The Albanese government inherited a skills shortage from the former Liberal and National Party government. It was the worst in 50 years, and no protestations over the other side can deny the reality.
Together with Australians across the country, our government is working to turn that around. New data shows the Albanese government's commitment to building the workforce for Australia's future is on track, with thousands of apprentices signed up to the Housing Construction Apprenticeship stream of the Key Apprenticeships Program. We now have 32,000 new housing construction apprentices who've signed up to the program in just the first year, with more than 7,400 in my home state of Queensland.
That's 32,000 Australian apprentices who are backing to build more homes in every corner of the country, including 11,600 more carpentry apprentices, 6,700 more plumbing apprentices and almost 6,300 more electrical apprentices like Makbol. Indeed, apprentices in areas of carpentry, joining and electrical trades workers have been the top three housing construction occupations for commencement under the program in Queensland, alongside occupations like glaziers, tilers, plasterers, bricklayers and concreters, with more signing up every week.
We're targeting support through this program to businesses like Moses' to take on apprentices and apprenticeships for people like Makbol to become qualified tradespeople. On this side of the chamber, we're helping people to be trained and to build homes—to build homes in my home city of Ipswich. Under the former government's untargeted schemes, the former government also ripped billions of dollars in skills and training from TAFE.
There was a 60 per cent drop-out rate under their former schemes, and the Leader of the Opposition can't even mention the word TAFE. I noticed that the previous speaker was pouring scorn on TAFE as he was speaking. We know the LNP doesn't support free TAFE, which has seen more than 814,000 people enrol in the last three years.
In Queensland alone, we've seen 134,000 enrolments in free TAFE courses ranging from construction trades to high-priority areas like nursing, cybersecurity and disability support. Before the last election, the LNP opposition even threatened to abolish free TAFE. If you listen to the previous speaker, that remains their policy.
They need to come clean: do they support free TAFE and the Key Apprenticeships Program that's delivering to Australian workers, businesses and apprentices, or do they support what they've said previously, where we were allegedly throwing good money after bad? It really makes no sense at all not to back small business and apprenticeships all the way.