Interview with Tom McIlroy - Guardian Australia Politics Podcast

TOM MCILROY, HOST: Minister, welcome to the podcast.

ANDREW GILES, MINISTER FOR SKILLS AND TRAINING: Really great to be talking with you, Tom.

MCILROY: It's been a big couple of weeks for you in the portfolio, coming out of the Economic Reform Roundtable last week and speaking to the Press Club this week. Can you tell me a little bit about your message there? I was interested in what you were talking about with fairness in the skills sector and how that can contribute to growing the economy.

GILES: Yeah, Tom. Look, it has been an busy period for skills as we think about two things. One, how we better equip every individual in our communities to get the skills they want to do some of those jobs that we need. 

And secondly, how we address some of these really long-running skill shortages that impact both our productivity growth and which are really exacerbating some cost of living pressures. For me, my starting point is making sure that we give everyone every opportunity to fill their potential and to think about how we can better align individual aspiration to our collective goals as a nation. So that's the focus that animates me in this job. It's something I'm really excited about.

MCILROY: How far into it do you think you are? I mean, the Economic Roundtable has given the Government a reset on a number of big areas, AI is included, and that will be important in skills. But you've been charged with turning the ship around after some problems in the VET sector, some broader problems in skills recognition. Do you feel like the government is digging in now? Give us a progress update.

GILES: Yeah, I think there's three stages that I think we should think about. The first one is how we started. And when the Albanese Government was first elected, Australia had the worst skill shortage in 50 years, the second worst across all advanced economies. And this was, in large part, a long running challenge, exacerbated by a number of decisions taken by the former government, but reflecting some long term trends. So that's the problem. That's stage one, where we started.

Stage two is the foundational work that the Government's done, principally led by Brendan O'Connor, my predecessor in the portfolio, looking at the challenges before us, being a big part of our response to the Jobs and Skills Summit that we held just after the election, and putting in place some systems that can help us solve these problems. 

And when I think about those systems, I think about Jobs and Skills Australia, the body that enables us to better understand our labour market and how it's changing, which is particularly important when we think about generative AI and its impact on the world of work. I think about the Jobs and Skills Councils, industry-led bodies that cover 10 chunks of the labour market, bring together industry and union perspectives so we can think about how skills needs are changing and how we can bring parties together to find common ground around those questions.

And the other really big bit is actually having a National Skills Agreement, because this is one of those areas where the Commonwealth and the states have got a shared responsibility. Having that agreement recognises that shared stewardship of the skills system in the national interest and gives us a long-term, five year currently, template to get on with solving the problem. So that's stage two.

Stage three is what's next. And that's really what I tried to talk a bit about at the Press Club around some key themes that are really important to me as I think about how we, on the one hand, better equip every member of our community to realise their potential, and on the other hand, try and link that to some of the big national challenges we have, whether it's about building homes, whether it's about net zero or building the sort of care economy that will sustain our youngest and oldest citizens in the dignity that they deserve. And for that, these three themes that I'm focused on are firstly, making sure that we equally value vocational education and training. I think for too long, it has been regarded as a plan B and we do need to turn that around because that's a really big chunk of where the labour market demand is, particularly in areas like electricity and obviously housing construction too. These are really important roles and they have been undervalued for too long.

The second one is to think more about lifelong learning, because often when we think about skills, we think about people acquiring them as they exit the schooling system, and that's obviously fundamental. But for many Australians, we need to focus on making sure people can upskill and reskill, not just for a particular job, but for the fact that most of us will go through different jobs and probably different industries in our working lives. And thinking again about what technology means. As people get a bit older, those of us like me who aren't digital natives may well need a little bit of extra help to make sure that we can continue to be as productive as we would like to be as technology changes the tasks within our roles.

The last one is about partnership, because everything we really do in the skills space is about a partnership. Firstly, between the Commonwealth and the states and territories, involving employers and industry associations, involving workers and their unions, and making sure that the voices of all Australians in all of our diversity are really brought into the conversation about building a skills system that's not just about today, but looks ahead to the challenges and the opportunities of tomorrow, and which makes sure that everyone can have a stake in that.

MCILROY: You were talking about how realising our full potential as a country in skills and as individual workers in the economy was really part of the fair go that we celebrated in the country. Is one of those challenges, and linking this back to the Roundtable as well, making sure that people's skills, whether they're achieved here or overseas, are properly recognised around the country and getting full potential out of people who have done study to have and have expertise in particular areas?

GILES: Yeah, exactly. I mean, I think what makes our country special is this combination, this unique combination of the world's oldest continuing cultures and the fact that we have people who bring to this country every culture from around the planet. That's an incredible benefit and the evidence is overwhelming about within workplaces that diversity is such a strength. The challenge for us is to make sure we're harnessing that diversity and a big part of that is skills recognition. It's obviously best if we can do that before someone who's seeking to come to Australia actually arrives. That's maximum efficiency both for them and for our economy. But there's a lot of people who've been in Australia through various pathways, whether as a refugee, perhaps initially arriving as an international student, or perhaps someone whose partner came here through a skilled visa pathway. Making sure we do better at opening up the door of opportunity to them is a really big challenge.

So how we recognise their prior learning, which is an area that I think, as you touched upon, has been an issue that has had some challenges in terms of the integrity of some aspects of our private RTO system here in Australia. Whether it's about having a better approach to oversighting how qualifications are recognised, this is a really important piece of work.

MCILROY: Is that something you envisage as an achievable goal in this term, that someone who's here perhaps driving an Uber or working in hospitality, when really their qualifications should see them in a more professional setting, closer to what they've studied? How quickly could we make progress on that kind of challenge? Apart from anything else, as you say, that will help with skill shortages that we've already identified.

GILES: Yeah, look, three things on that. One, obviously there's nothing wrong with working in hospitality or driving an Uber –

MCILROY: Sorry, I didn’t mean to suggest that –

GILES: And I know you're not suggesting that, but I think it's a really important point to make about the value of work. So it's about not me or anyone in the Australian Government telling anyone what to do but opening up opportunities for people to work in a manner that's most fulfilling to them, that enables them to make a contribution and make a good life. So I just want to emphasise that point from my perspective.

The second one is I think we can make progress and I know we are making progress, but it's going to be a journey. It's going to be a journey because this is complex and it's not just about the skilling system. It's about how the incentives in the migration system operate and shape people's outcomes. It's also about attitudes in the community. So I think we do need to get better at encouraging people to, not just if they're employers, look for Australian experience, for example, in a particular role, but to really look at the person and what they can offer in addition to making sure that we've got a skill system that both says to the Australian community unequivocally that a qualification means exactly what it says and meets the expectations of the community, but which does not involve putting in the way of a migrant any delay, cost or uncertainty barriers around their ability to work at the level that they would like to work.

MCILROY: Is there a challenge for employers here, apart from anything else, migrant status, language of origin, even age is a point where discrimination happens in the hiring process? I mean, older workers every day face real barriers getting new jobs.

GILES: Yeah, I think this is one of those spaces where we have to see the world as it is, imagine how we would want it to be, and chart a pragmatic but principled path between the two. No one should pretend that discrimination on all the grounds that you've referred to and a few others don't currently exist in Australia. 

There is a challenge across community for government and for employers to continue to adopt a zero tolerance attitude to those kinds of discriminatory attitudes, recognising two things. One, that in a good society, everyone should be valued for who they are. Again, there are great benefits to diversity. One of the things I touched upon in my remarks at the Press Club was the data which shows that, for example, occupations that are gender segmented are much more likely to be in shortage. And the data also tells us that where we have a broader mix of age ranges and a representation, for example, of people with disability, we see more effective, more productive workplaces. So it's about both the moral imperative of a good society recognising that people's attributes should not be a barrier to their full participation, and the practical imperative of harnessing our talents and recognising the benefits of diversity.

MCILROY: In the Roundtable and in your speech, you talked a lot about AI and the challenge that that is going to bring the opportunity as well across economy, probably for almost every worker in lots of parts of our lives. Is it a challenge that Government is going to be equipped to deal with? And how do you see it in the training part of the skills portfolio?

GILES: Yeah, that's a really good question, Tom. The short answer is I feel government is well-placed to realise the opportunities and meet some of the challenges of AI technology. And in large part, that's because we've got this fantastic national resource that is Jobs and Skills Australia. And the capacity study they've done on AI, I think is a really useful tool. It really gives us a clear picture what we think is going to happen to various bits of the labour market and the extent to which tasks will become augmented versus ones that might become replaced. 

So it gives us a really clear sense of what we think the future is going to look like. And also the opportunities when we better equip workers to understand how they can make effective, indeed productive, use of AI in the performance of their roles. So I think we've got that tool, but we also have, I guess, a wider obligation, and I really acknowledge the work of my colleagues, in particular Minister Ayres in this regard, of thinking about how we'd lead a community conversation that's about this, that's clear-eyed about some of the challenges, but also optimistic about the opportunities where we bring people, and particularly workers, with us on this journey.

MCILROY: There's probably no greater example of lifelong learning than AI. I think it's going to be rapidly evolving, probably for the rest of our working lives. Will we have to take a different approach to training and keeping skills up to date? You know, I can think of somebody maybe in the later stages of their career seeing that as quite a challenge, training a technology that you haven't had to deal with up until this point.

GILES: One of the themes that I've touched on in my work has been trying to elevate foundation skills. And I think when Australians hear those words, if they think about it at all, they probably think about traditional literacy and numeracy. And of course, that's really, really important. But I think foundational skills today need to be understand as having a really big digital component. And particularly, I think we need to think about AI skills as being absolutely foundational for pretty much everyone. So I think when we talk about lifelong learning, I'm not simply talking about formal skills acquisition. I'm talking about the informal ways in which we can enable, on the one hand, experience to be better reflected, but on the other, how we can make sure that people are better equipped to navigate a changing world of work on their terms. 

It’s something the OECD have really highlighted, the need to have flexible and adaptive systems, both in the formal skilling system and those less formal ways where we support people to navigate change and be confident that they can be part of that process rather than having a wave of change wash over them. Because I think that's the anxiety here, a sense that some workers have that they are powerless, because I think we've got to acknowledge that we've managed some aspects of technological change well as a country, and other times we haven't. And there's a really critical role for government in both a narrative sense and in a policy sense in equipping people to make sure that we have agency in this journey.

MCILROY: If there's one issue that really animates Guardian Australia readers and listeners in this area, I think it's the situation facing people who are still trying to get into the jobs market and perhaps living on JobSeeker and trying to get their foot in the ladder of work and in the community. Do you think that skills is the answer to that challenge or perhaps part of the answer? And do you think the Government can do more for people who are at the moment reliant on support from government to make ends meet?

GILES: In terms of my responsibilities, I think the great thing about the skills portfolio is it's almost always part of the answer and almost never the answer. So that's how I kind of see it in this sense here. I think about the extraordinary change that Free TAFE is bringing about, and I'm so pleased and indeed proud that we've legislated to make Free TAFE permanent, because one of the things Free TAFE was designed to do, as well as to better align skilling to the needs of the economy, to where good, secure jobs are, has been to, I guess, unlock some of those cohorts who'd previously been locked out of the labour market. 

So we're seeing, obviously, a really large enrolment in Free TAFE courses by First Nations people and we're working about how we can work with Aboriginal community-controlled organisations to really expand that to some geographic areas of Australia that are harder to reach for traditional skills provision. Obviously, young people are overwhelmingly a big chunk of the enrolment, particularly job seekers. Really, well over 100,000 Free TAFE enrolments have been job seekers.

So if you think about that, you think about our expanded SEE, that Skills for Education and Employment program, a program that really helps to support people with some of those foundational skills, including, and I touched a few moments ago on the digital side, but those soft skills around employability we know are a challenge for a lot of people who have been out of the labour market or haven't found their way in. So the skilling system's got a really big role to play in building a bridge between those people who've been locked out and giving them the opportunity to more effectively participate in the labour market and live lives that are more satisfying and more secure.

MCILROY: Okay, Andrew Giles, one of the big questions facing the Government now immediately out of the Roundtable and with a stomping majority in the lower house after the election is this reform ambition. What do you see the next few years in the reshaping of the economy and putting in practice some of the things that the Roundtable recommended, do you think that the Government's got the guts to go big on improving the system?

GILES: As I see it, a really big challenge for parties of government, particularly those of the centre-left around the world, is to push back on some of the cynicism and pessimism that's driving the politics in many countries today. And how we've done that, and this has been an absolute signal of the leadership of the Prime Minister, has been to be really clear about doing what we said we'd do. So focusing on delivering the commitments we made to the Australian people is important, one, because I think they are really good commitments that will change people's lives and strengthen our economy, but they will also build that sense of trust, that sense that politics, formal politics, can make a difference. And I think that's absolutely fundamental and foundational for any reform journey we're on.

MCILROY: You're also a student of politics and you know how this place works, having been around for a while. Is the expectations game on the Government’s side here? The Government has explained the problem of productivity and, as you say, brought leading thinkers around the Cabinet table. Do you think that the average voter is expecting big things to come out of it?

GILES: I think Australians are thoughtful people, and I think they understand that some of the problems facing our economy are long-running ones and they require deep thought and considered responses, not a knee-jerk response. I think that's what they legitimately expect of the Australian Government. They also expect of us, and they’ve seen this, I think, us to talk directly about the challenges, to be open about bringing in voices, as we have done, about engaging entities like the Productivity Commission to guide us, about listening attentively to the perspectives of the people who employ Australians, the people who represent working Australians, and the diversity of voices in the Australian community about where we can build consensus on a direction of reform.

MCILROY: Well, we're speaking at the end of one sitting week, a weekend off, and then another sitting week coming up next week. Tell us a little bit about how you turn off from Canberra politics when you've got a bit of free time, perhaps time with your family in Melbourne. How do you relax? How do you recharge for what is a pretty demanding job?

GILES: Yeah, that's a really good question, and I hope my family aren't listening in at this point. But I feel very fortunate to have a family who I really look forward to getting back to in Melbourne and hearing about what's been happening at school and in my wife's work as well. I love to read. I'm trying to read more fiction. I'm reading Barbara Kingsolver's Demon Copperhead at the moment. So I'll get back to that. It didn't make its way to Canberra this week, which may have impacted on my productivity. I'm also, I love reading history. So I'm rereading Hobsbawm’s books on the journey to modernity at the moment to think about some of the lessons of history for policymakers today. I'd love to play a bit more tennis and I'd love to be a bit fitter too. So those are the things that I would like to do. Whether I match those aspirations to reality this weekend remains to be seen.

MCILROY: Andrew Giles, great to have you on the pod. Thank you for taking the time.

GILES: Thanks, Tom. I really enjoyed the conversation. 

ENDS