Quote:
Ideologically, a National-led government could easily shift more training costs to businesses, arguing they benefit from upskilling their staff so they should pay for it.
But this was exactly the deeply damaging mistake the Bolger Government made with the Industry Training Act of 1992. It radically reformed skills training, leaving only skeletal government support. Quickly, many companies developed a new training culture. Rather than take responsibility themselves, they poached skilled staff from competitors that kept training. As a result, the number of people in formal workplace training plunged and skills shortages became chronic.
Reviving industry training was one of the key planks of Helen Clark's 1999 election campaign. The Modern Apprenticeship Act of 2002 was one of her government's first major pieces of legislation. It created Industry Training Organisations, each tasked with developing government-funded programmes for its specific sector.
Between 1999 and 2009, the employees receiving industry training more than doubled, from 49,580 in 1999 to almost 126,000 in 2009. Government funding for it almost trebled in the last 10 years, from $62m in 2000/01 to $180m in 2010/11.
So National policy had a bad effect on the trades in the Bolger years, they tried it again in their latest 9 year term, and now we're paying for that with high house prices and rental costs.