11.45am Skills package a 'placebo'

LABOR today branded the Federal Government's new skills package a placebo.

A day after one of his own ministers said there was no skills crisis, Prime Minister John Howard yesterday unveiled a $837 million Skills for the Future package.
Under the deal 30,000 vouchers will be issued each year, worth up to $3000 each, for older workers with a lack of qualifications, to spend at educational institutions.

Labor leader Kim Beazley said the total of the Government's plan did not equal the sum of its parts, many of which he said were Labor ideas in the first place.
Every element of it's worthy but the totality of the package is there for politics not for a fix, not fixing the problem, Mr Beazley said on Macquarie Radio today.
What this is about is politics, it says `OK, we've said for a long time there isn't a skills crisis but absolutely everybody in the country can see there is one now, here we are, here's a placebo'.

In fact what we say is, get down and get a proper skills plan in place.
Mr Beazley accused the Government of doing too little to remedy a problem of its own making, saying the skills shortage was a consequence of cutting higher education funding.
The Government also was abusing the 457 visa class for skilled migrants, Mr Beazley said, as a source of cheap labour to plug the gaps in its skills plan.

There's nothing in this package about training kids, he's given up on training Australian kids and he's basically given up on skilling Australians, Mr Beazley said.
So he says 'OK, I need a bit of cover, we'll deal with the skills crisis by bringing in workers from overseas under the 457 visa category', which unquestionably is being abused, unquestionably, as a source of cheap labour.
Mr Beazley said that is why Labor would strictly monitor employers accepting workers on this kind of visa to ensure there was no erosion of Australian workers' wages and conditions.