The trades training community is up in arms over the government’s decision to abolish long-established Industry Skills Council and replace them with the highest bidder.
The Electrical Trades Union described the decision by Industry Minister Ian Macfarlane to axe the organisations and hand over training packages and workforce development to a bidding process as short-sighted and ideologically driven, with potentially catastrophic implications for Australian industry.
“Australia has been dealt a major blow in the global skills race, with the Abbott Government’s short-sighted decision to abolish Industry Skills Councils — ending two decades of tripartite cooperation on training development — condemning Australian industry to a looming skills crisis,” the union said in a statement.
“Industry Skills Councils, which operated throughout the Howard, Rudd and Gillard Governments, bring together industry, unions, training organisations, students, workers, and other voices in the vocational training sector to identify the skills needed in the years ahead, and ensure workers acquire them.”
“Where currently we have a model that brings together voices from throughout an industry, combined with specialist staff who intimately understand the sector, we will be left with narrow, self-interested training that don’t provide the skills we need for the future,” ETU national secretary Allen Hicks said.
“Only last year, the Australian Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Australian Industry Group joined with unions to reaffirm support for the current model of national industry training packages as the backbone of a training system that will provide the skills for the future.
“The twenty-first century is already being defined by a global skills race, with those nations that have the best trained workers at a major competitive edge as businesses are increasingly forced to compete internationally.
“Making sure workers have the skills they need, not just for now but the decades ahead, is the most strategically important act the Federal Government can do to secure our place in the global economy.”
Mr Hicks said that in 2012 there were 1.5 million students enrolled in training package qualifications, developed by industry skills councils, while 79 per cent of all changes to those packages were the result of specific industry needs.
“Industry Skills Councils actively support the ongoing development and improvement of training material, bringing together a broad range of voices to ensure we not only have the skills needed for today, but that the emerging skill needs of new industries are also met,” he said.
“Before we had this system, there were more than 16,000 accredited courses, each developed by individual training providers to varying degrees of quality and currency, which is why the current national training system was introduced two decades ago.
“Without properly funded Industry Skills Councils we risk returning to the chaos of the past, where workers are trained for the needs of one employer, rather than a whole industry.”
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