Canterbury Apprentices and Industry Trainees Graduation Ceremony

13th November 2004

Good evening. As the son of a tradesman, and an old tech boy, it gives me great pleasure to help host tonight's event which is about real skills for real jobs in the real economy.

Some of the graduates here tonight can expect in a few years time to be dining out in expensive restaurants where at least some of the waiters will be MA's, MBA's and holders of other worthy certificates. One of the greatest bits of silliness of the last 20 to 30 years has been the push to get people qualified without working out what and where those qualifications will be of any use beforehand. It has been a sad, well intentioned hoax that has left some people holding hefty student loans and little marketable skill to dent that loan or get a foot on the upward rungs of the ladder of life.

I guess it is true that the future always inevitably looks clearer through the rear view mirror. I have become old enough that I can remember quite a few wonderful futures that never quite arrived. Some days as I wade through the sea of papers, reports and messages that pile up on my desk I think unkindly of all the experts that predicted we would end up with paperless offices. They were wrong. I also remember how the clever clogs at the height of stock market boom in the 80's were tipping that New Zealand was past anything as primitive as making it's way by flogging off farming commodities in the world market. They were wrong. In fact as New Zealand gasps on the end of a very long leash of a huge economic boom fuelled in part by commodity trading the wrongest wrong of all has come home to put the brakes on further expansion. The polite term is a skills shortage.

I'm sure some of you working in the building trade will know the impolite term for when people have not ordered enough supplies to do the job. Well that's pretty much what happened in New Zealand with policy planning for skills in the early years of this century. When the axe went through the old economy in the 1980's nobody paid enough thought to what might be needed once things picked up again. In fact by 1992 when the cargo cult of the free market was at its batty height the Industry Training Act deleted the term apprenticeship altogether. Some of this Act was not all bad but the implication that we were somehow above and beyond apprenticeships was a decision we are still paying for.

In the recent past and still into the present we have the sad situation where businesses just busting to expand to meet demand can't because they do not have the skills. You get cartoons like the one I saw a few months ago in the New Zealand Herald. It showed two parents gathered around a baby in a cot. The father had just finished hanging up a mobile of tiny wee saws, hammers and other tools of the building trade above the cot. The caption said, "Well it's our best shot at getting a builder." It was not far from the truth.

The new working aristocracy of New Zealand are the people who have the trades. Perhaps we should confiscate all your passports. Globally it is not much better. The demand for people with specific skills and trades is huge. I read a while ago that our trained lines repair tradesmen are making hundreds of thousands of dollars a year in skills starved countries like the United States. There can be few times in economic history when apprenticeships and skills training have been quite as assured of giving students such a great return.

As the chair of the Mayors Taskforce for Jobs I am determined that we raise the status of skills training and apprenticeships in our society. It seems mad when the real life demand for real life skills is so high that we are not pointing more of our young toward what is a road of real achievement and real reward. Somewhere on the path to the knowledge economy we need to stop and remember that the new gold collar workers of the future will still need buildings to work in, plumbing that works, power points that work and transport that is kept in good repair. Real skills will always be in demand. Tonight we recognise and applaud those of you who have had the good common sense to literally get your ticket to a better future.