Shorten is serious about TAFE and apprentices but must deliver

Bill Shorten’s parents gave him a choice as a teenager: get an apprenticeship or go to university.

There was no question he and his brother had to get a skill. The only choice was between the two paths.

“My parents made it clear to me that both were perfectly worthwhile and they would have been perfectly happy for us to do one or the other,” the Opposition Leader recalled. “In the end, we went to uni. Grandpa was a printer and I come from a family of tradespeople. I’ve always been brought up with the value that getting a trade is a very sensible thing to do.”

This tells Australian voters about what a Labor government would be like if Shorten becomes prime minister. He is serious about spending more than the Coalition on TAFE and forcing employers to hire more apprentices. If Labor wins the election, the sector is in for significant change.

“I think we went too far in the 1980s to discourage technical education and now we’ve paid the price for it,” he said in an interview with Fairfax Media. “Many of our tradies are in their 50s and 60s and we need to replace them.”

Liberal prime minister John Howard had a similar message two decades ago but Australia continues to suffer a tradie shortage. No wonder Scott Morrison’s wife, Jenny, jokes that she could be happier if he was a plumber.

Total real government funding for vocational education and training is now 20 per cent lower than in 2003, according to research by adjunct professor Gerald Burke at Monash University.

This is not just a federal problem: the states are to blame as well. All sides of politics promise to fix it and then struggle to turn the situation around.

It is not clear how a Shorten government would check on all its contractors to make sure 10 per cent of the work is being done by apprentices. The lesson from Kevin Rudd and the 2007 election campaign, when Labor had a 10-year plan for trades training centres, is that the delivery matters more than the announceable.

Shorten’s spending commitments so far are not enough to reverse all the declines of recent years. He will have to offer more detail before voters can judge whether he can deliver on his ambitions.

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