And it wouldn’t be a Coalition budget without tricked-up skills and apprenticeship funding.
Last year, the government’s headline promise to spend $1.5 billion over five years turned out to be a $200 million cut to federal funding for training and apprenticeships. A revenue shortfall forced the Coalition to overhaul and extend its troubled skilled workers fund.
This time the government is hyping a $525m skills package to create 80,000 apprenticeships. But it is drowning in reallocated funding; departmental officials revealed only $55m in new money will be spent over five years. That’s just over 10 per cent of the headline figure over half a decade. This is not clearly explained in the budget papers, as the government just wants you to think it is spending more than half a billion in new dollars to help jobseekers into work.
Too often, the Coalition has reallocated funding and played around with timeframes in the skills, apprenticeship and training sector. This does not instil confidence in its bona fides.
Elsewhere, the budget suggests the government is more concerned about ALP and ACTU strategy than it is prepared to admit. Jobs and Industrial Relations Minister Kelly O’Dwyer is promising modest new funding to tackle sham contracting, concerns about labour hire and underpayment of workers by employers.
It looks unconvincing but Scott Morrison and O’Dwyer will use it to defend the government against the claim the Coalition’s record on supporting vulnerable workers is woeful. In reality, it looks tokenistic and, politically, too late for the government.
Chalmers is already gaming ‘reform’ roundtable
Chalmers is perfectly entitled to make political comments. But it’s another thing to claim to have delivered ‘a better living standard’ when per capita GDP has declined in seven of the past nine quarters.
EPA emissions clamp on state coal industry
Environmental regulators have ordered NSW coal mines to dramatically cut emissions or face penalties, with fears the state will miss its climate targets.
If you are unimpressed by the Coalition’s record on wages, skills and workplace relations, this budget is not going to convert you. After a sustained period of low wages growth, optimistic wage forecasts have been revised downwards for the next two financial years. It is fresh ammunition for Bill Shorten as he seeks to make the election expected next month a referendum on wages.