Labor leader to accuse some employers of using overseas workers as a low-cost substitute for local staff

This article is more than 3 years old

This article is more than 3 years old

Australia must not become an “unskilled enclave in a modernising Asia”, where Australian workers lose out to exploited overseas workers, Bill Shorten will warn in a major speech to lay out Labor’s 2017 agenda.

The opposition leader will also accuse some employers of using overseas workers as a low-cost substitute for local workers.

He will say while the government issued 10,400 visas for trade and technician jobs last year, apprenticeships in those sectors are in decline. “We cannot allow our country to become an unskilled enclave in a modernising Asia,” Shorten will say.

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Shorten argues Australia should be putting more resources into skills training, saying Tafe should not be pitted against universities in a Hunger Games-style competition.

“It’s become too easy to import skills – rather than train our own people,” Shorten will say.

In a speech at the National Press Club designed flesh out his appeal to the political centre after the Brexit vote and the US and Australian elections, Shorten will say a good job with decent wages is the “anchor of society”. His speech comes just one day before Malcolm Turnbull sets out his agenda at the press club.

Shorten’s comments come after Labor announced a policy to crackdown last year on temporary workers holding 457 visas. At that time he said the plan would institute more rigorous labour market testing requirements before employers could hire foreign workers to fill skills shortages.

“Everybody loses when people are brought in from overseas and exploited,” Shorten will say. “Good employers, Australian companies who do the right thing – can’t compete with third-world labour costs and conditions.

“Local people, looking for work, miss out on jobs they could be doing: nurses, carpenters, cooks, early-childhood educators, electricians and motor mechanics.

I don’t believe the world is too hard for Australia to compete in Bill Shorten

“These practices drive down everyone’s wages, they undermine everyone’s safety – and they corrode our national skills base.”

He warns that Australia can not be allowed to lose more skills at a time of rapidly advancing technology, automation, increasing casualisation, insecure work and growing demand for high-quality services and skills, and says Labor plans to focus on skills with broad access for Australians. He accused the Coalition of treating the VET sector as second class.

“This government has cut $2.5bn from skills and training – and Australia has shed 128,000 apprenticeships,” Shorten will say. “Meanwhile, youth unemployment in New England is over 15%, in Launceston over 20% – and in Cairns over 25%. Labor will not give up on these kids – or these communities.”

In targeting those areas, Shorten chooses Coalition regions vulnerable to independents and populist candidates such as One Nation members. Last week the deputy prime minister, Barnaby Joyce, urged people fed up with housing prices in Sydney to move to Tamworth, in his electorate of New England, sparking a debate about whether there were any jobs in regional areas. Cairns in far north Queensland is in the Coalition seat of Leichhardt, next door to the seat of Herbert – a seat the Coalition lost at the last election.

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“We know Tafe can be transformative for people who are doing it hard, bringing new skills to Indigenous communities, helping close the gender pay gap, empowering mature-age workers with the chance to retrain – not standing by while people from Holden and Ford are cast on the scrapheap,” Shorten will say. “I don’t believe the world is too hard for Australia to compete in.”

In the past decade, Shorten will say, while spending on university students has increased by 45%, spending on Tafes had declined in real terms – while spending on capital infrastructure such as workshops, labs, classrooms and hospitality centres has fallen by 75%.

And he will touch on private training colleges, suggesting “too many institutions have been allowed to chase profits and dud students – at taxpayer expense” in a reference to the VET fee rorts – though the fees system was expanded by the former Labor government and allowed to flourish in the first years of the Abbott government.

Shorten will also recommit Labor to the 2016 election policy for one in 10 jobs on government priority infrastructure projects to be reserved for an Australian apprentice – a move he claims would create 2,600 apprenticeship places.