Interview with Sabra Lane, AM, ABC Radio
SABRA LANE:
Treasurer, you're releasing this white paper today. What will the measure of success be say in 12 months and five years?
JIM CHALMERS:
Good morning Sabra, it's a really important day today. We release this Employment White Paper, which is the culmination of about 12 months of collaboration and consultation after the Jobs and Skills Summit around this time last year. The measure of success will be whether we can build together a more dynamic, more inclusive labour market where more people have the opportunity for secure fairly paid work, and where our people and businesses and communities can be beneficiaries of change and thrive and succeed. And so we measure that by all of the ways we measure the labour market: unemployment, underutilisation, under employment, youth unemployment – all of those really important things. We start from a pretty strong position but we want to really set people up for the future and that's what this is all about.
LANE:
The Government is aiming to double higher apprenticeship commencements in priority areas identified in the white paper over five years. How will you do that given some of the priority areas are historically low-paid jobs that struggled to get staff?
CHALMERS:
First of all, whether it's for example areas like aged care, which has been underpaid for too long, we've made a multibillion-dollar investment into making the wages in aged care fairer to properly recognise the important work that people do. But on your broader point we broadly know how our economy and how our society is changing. We know from the Intergenerational Report that we will need more care and support workers, that we will need more workers in the net zero economy, we need our workers to be better able to adapt and adopt technology. And so we know where our economy is headed and where our country is headed, and we need to make sure that we can train people to grab those opportunities and so that employers can find the people that they need when they need them. So this new announcement today turbocharging the TAFE Centres of Excellence, and accelerating those higher apprenticeships, is all about finding the workers that we need for the economy of the future.
LANE:
Just on those new Centres of Excellence, the Government will fund six of them, what exactly will they specialise in and who will decide where they go?
CHALMERS:
This is on top of $325 million investment that we've put forward under the skills agreement for TAFE Centres of Excellence. And what the new money is all about is recognising that the big opportunities will be in those areas that I mentioned, whether it's care and support, net zero, adapting and adopting technology. And so the money is to turbocharge those TAFE Centres of Excellence, to really focus on where the big job-creating opportunities will be. And as part of that as well developing further these higher end degree apprenticeships, which recognise that more and more people in order to grab the jobs that our economy will create in the years and decades ahead, they need to finish school, they need to do an additional qualification too. So whether it's the skills passport, or what we're doing in TAFE, what we're doing to make sure that the different parts of the education system talk to each other and deliver for workers and employers at the same time. All of this is a really important path forward.
LANE:
Just on those Centres of Excellence again, who will decide where they go?
CHALMERS:
We work closely with the states but one of the real secrets to what we're proposing here, one of the secrets to what I think will be the success of these Centres of Excellence is they are a genuine partnership between TAFE, jobs and skills councils, industry and universities to work together to work out where these Centres of Excellence go, work out the curriculum, so that we can give students, future workers the cutting-edge skills that they need. But really what you'll see in the Employment White Paper is amongst these five themes – whether it's full employment, job security and wages, productivity growth, skills needs and overcoming barriers to employment – is a real way to try and find where there's the common ground between employers and workers, and the education system and governments at all levels. We've all got an interest in a more productive, competitive and innovative economy. We've all got an interest in creating opportunities and making sure that people can grasp those opportunities in more parts of Australia and you'll be hearing a lot more about that today.
LANE:
When it comes to productivity, the impacts of schooling from home during the pandemic and the increase in so-called school refusals must worry you. Surely that will have an impact on the future workforce, shouldn't that be part of the Commonwealth COVID inquiry?
CHALMERS:
The COVID inquiry will give us the opportunity to learn from all of those things in the past as it relates to Commonwealth policy, and to do things better in the future.
LANE:
Including these things?
CHALMERS:
We take responsibility for the education system broadly and obviously we want to know, what we learned from COVID and how we can do things better into the future. And there's nothing in the way that this review has been set up to prevent the states participating or to prevent us looking at some of these sorts of things as it relates to Commonwealth policy.
LANE:
On a separate issue, the Nine newspapers have got access to encrypted messages allegedly written by the Secretary of the Home Affairs Department, Mike Pezzullo, where he's tried to influence and manipulate the political process and criticise Coalition figures. How comfortable are you with that behaviour from a senior public servant?
CHALMERS:
First of all, I only saw those stories last night and as I understand it, Minister Clare O'Neil has referred these issues to the public service commissioner. He will advise her on this matter and in advance of that, I'm reluctant to get into it.
LANE:
Jim Chalmers, thanks for talking to AM this morning.
