Australia’s Prime Minister Scott Morrison addressed the national press club on Tuesday to present the JobMaker plan aimed at giving Australia’s economy a boost via vocational training.
He said that JobMaker will “bring people together, to define and achieve the change we need”. He said that he would address many of the components of the JobMaker plan over the coming weeks and months ahead of the budget presentation in October, however the main focus will be on skills and industrial relations.
“We need Australians better trained for the jobs, businesses are looking to create. It is that simple,” he said.
“The lack of clear information about what those skills needs are, now and into the future, to guide training and funding.”
He said the average time frame to develop or update training products is 18 months with a third taking over two years to update which is not very responsive.
“For prospective student, the large number of choices they face for qualifications can be bewildering and overwhelming. Compounded by lack of visibility over the quality of training providers and the employment outcomes for those courses,” he said, pointing to over 1,400 qualifications on offer and almost 17,000 units of competency.
“Subsidies for a diploma of nursing in 2017 varied between $19,963 in Western Australia and $8,218 in Queensland. And all of this is before the question surrounding the quality of that training is addressed,” he said to exemplify some of the discrepancies in the system.
“Even if their career could be best enhanced through vocational education. I want those trade and skills jobs to be aspired to, not looked down upon or seen as a second best option,” he said.
He pointed towards the need to focus on the industrial relations system which has “settled into a complacency of unions seeking marginal benefits and employers closing down risks, often by simply not employing anyone” in a system that “has lost sight of its purpose”.
“Employees or employers. Unions or employer organisations. It is not beyond Australians to put aside differences to find cooperative solutions to specific problems – especially at a time like this,” he said.
“The minister will chair five working groups for discussion, negotiation, and hopefully agreement, to produce that JobMaker package in the following areas – award simplification, what most small- and medium-sized businesses deal with in their employees every single day.
“Enterprise agreement-making – we’ve got to get back to the basics.
“Casuals and fixed-term employees, made even more prescient by recent changes through the Fair Work Commission. Compliance and enforcement. People should be paid properly. And, unions need to, obviously, do the right thing as must employers. Greenfield agreements for new enterprises, where the new investment will go and the certainty is needed more so than ever.”
Earlier, the Prime Minister had prefaced his address by referring to the Indigenous Australian principle practised for thousands of years – “caring for country”.
“It means responsible management and stewardship of what has been left to us to sustainably manage that inheritance for current and future generations,” he said.
“We must not borrow from generations in the future from what we cannot return to them. This is as true for our environmental, cultural and natural resources as it is for our economic and financial ones. Governments, therefore, must live within their means. So, we don’t impose impossible debt burdens on future generations. That violates that important caring for country principle.”
He said that the goal was to seek to build on our strengths as well as on an educated and highly skilled workforce “that not just supports a thriving service sector but a modern, advanced competitive manufacturing sector, resources and agricultural sectors that can fuel and feed large global population, including our own, and support vibrant rural and regional communities.”
READ MORE: Pressure grows for ‘saved’ $60 bn JobKeeper funds to be redirected to those left out
He pointed on the “Australian way” as being one which allows “those who have a go to get a go” by being given “access to essential services, incentive for effort, respect for the principles of mutual obligation, ensuring equal opportunities for those in rural and regional communities to be the same as those in our cities and our suburbs. All translated into policies that seek not to punish those who have success, but devise ways for others to achieve it.”
He then offered an analogy which he learnt from working in New Zealand where he looked after the government’s then engagement with the Team New Zealand 2000 America’s Cup defence. It was there that he learned the key to Team New Zealand’s success as it had been offered at the time by Alan Sefton, head of corporations. “In Team New Zealand you only ask one question – what makes the boat go faster?” Mr Morrison said.
“To strengthen and agree our economy, the boats we need to go faster are the hundreds of thousands of small and medium and large businesses that make up our economy and create the value upon which everything else depends. Value created by establishing successful products and services, the ability to be able to sell them at a competitive and profitable price, and in to growing and sustainable markets. Economics 101. That is what happens in a sustainable and successful job-making market economy.”
In another analogy, Mr Morrison likened the economy to a patient. “At some point, you’ve got to get your economy out of ICU. You’ve got to get it off the medication before it becomes too accustomed to it,” he said.
“We must enable our businesses to earn Australia’s way out of this crisis. And that means focusing on the things that can make their businesses go faster.”
https://www.facebook.com/scottmorrison4cook/videos/740600673414509/
