BARBARO, Mr Geoff, Executive Manager, Industry Skills Policy, Skills Insight Jobs and Skills Council [by video link] RAYNER, Mr Joshua, Executive Director, Engagement, Research and Policy, Skills Insight Jobs and Skills Council [by video link] ACTING CHAIR: Welcome. I understand that information on parliamentary privilege and the protection of witnesses giving evidence to Senate committees has been provided to you. I now invite you to make a short opening statement. At the conclusion of any remarks, I'll invite members of the committee to ask questions. Mr Rayner : Thank you very much for the invitation. Skills Insight is the jobs and skills council for agribusiness, fibre, furnishing, food, animal care and environmental care industries. These industries produce essential goods and services, support Australia's food security and biosecurity, and care for land, animals and the environment. As you'd expect, much of this work is undertaken in regional, rural and remote Australia. In these industries, training is not separate from productivity. It enables businesses to operate safely; meet biosecurity, welfare, quality and regulatory requirements; adopt new technologies; and get the best return from businesses' investment in their people and capital. This is particularly important for regional, rural and remote Australia, where training is not always as accessible as it needs to be. It can be costly and difficult to deliver training across large distances for dispersed employers and in specialist sectors. Providers need to manage travel, internet connectivity, difficulty attracting trainers, access to current equipment and workplaces, and the seasonal demands of industry. Where training cannot be delivered locally, businesses have fewer options to build the skills they need. They may need to rely more heavily on workers that have not yet had access to the necessary training; compete for a limited pool of skilled labour; or recruit from outside the region, including through migration. That can delay the uptake of technology; make it harder to meet safety, biosecurity and compliance requirements; and limit productivity. Our industry is seeking practical and flexible pathways that work in Australian conditions, and this is why Skills Insight has proposed an Australian agriculture apprenticeship, which would support a broader range of skills, provide options that suit local circumstances and help employers attract, develop and retain workers in safe, reliable employment. In our submission, we highlighted three key issues. Firstly, vocational education and training funding must better reflect the actual cost of delivery in regional, rural and remote Australia. Secondly, that productivity policy should help grow the overall skilled workforce rather than simply moving workers between industries or, critically, between locations. Thirdly, there is always opportunity to improve nationally consistent skills verification, trade recognition and credit pathways using national training packages. Ultimately, improving access to quality training in regional, rural and remote Australia is a practical productivity issue. Thank you. ACTING CHAIR: Thank you very much. Senator Ananda-Rajah. Senator ANANDA-RAJAH: Thank you, Chair. I'm very interested in some of the thinking that's going on here with attracting more people from rural and regional communities into the sector. I'm interested in your selection criteria because motivated people from the regions tend to stay in the regions. The parallel that I see here is in a medical school that we've helped establish in Shepparton, in regional Victoria, which is a partnership between the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University, and it's embedded in the community. But they have an incredibly selective process of recruiting people, and they very much base it on their community links. It's less about marks, and it's much, much more about community links. I'm interested to know what your thinking is, because the end result is—I graduated the first class—these young people are much more likely to remain in these communities because they have such deep connections to the footy team, to businesses, to family, to multiple generations of family. So I'm interested in selection here, because obviously we want this to work. Mr Rayner : Thank you, Senator. It's a really great observation that you make in terms of the unique nature of some of our regional, rural and remote communities. Although I can't speak too much to the selection criteria that individual businesses might make; what I can say is twofold. Firstly, our sectors, particularly in regional and rural settings, have a very, very diverse range of practices when they do look to recruitment, and this has some flow-on effects, particularly in terms of national data sets and the availability of appropriate data when we're looking at the way in which occupations are advertised. It's very, very diverse, so it's not a surprise to me at all that you've got some firsthand experiences in terms of the sorts of selection criteria, or the sorts of things that local businesses are looking for as criteria for their employment. The second thing that I would say is that we absolutely know that it's true that, if you do not have the opportunities to train locally and you have to go away, we're seeing a real kind of drain from those local communities. When individuals, whether they be young people or others, are going away from their local and regional communities—those networks, those supports—and having to travel or, ultimately, lift up their life for a period of time and train or educate elsewhere, there are fewer returns. We know this to be true. It's been documented for quite a long time. The final point here is that the more opportunities there are for access to available training in regional, rural and remote communities, the greater opportunity there is for more people to be staying and ultimately filling these recruitment gaps that we might have for these businesses. Senator ANANDA-RAJAH: In reference to the additionality test, which you reference in your submission, where we're bringing new people in rather than moving a scarce workforce around, what sort of data would be required to be captured at a local level in order to distinguish this, which JSA is thinking about perhaps capturing? Mr Rayner : I'm happy for my colleague, Geoff, to jump in at the end of this. I think what I can say specifically to the data question that you've got is that we know that it is really, really difficult to get adequate data sets, particularly when you look at regional, rural and remote communities and regional, rural and remote employers. This is not just because of the sparsity of the numbers, but, in particular, the methodologies and the approaches that are taken, whether that be Jobs and Skills Australia, the Australian Bureau of Statistics or others. What makes sense within a city or a metropolitan or even an urban context isn't necessarily the way in which our labour force is organised in regional, rural and remote communities. Nor is it the way in which businesses undertake their day-to-day operating environments or, in particular, as I mentioned before, their recruitment practices. So there's not a really simple answer for me to be able to give in terms of what we specifically need to do. There is work that's being done. Even at Skills Insight, we are conscious of being able to identify where there might be data gaps, not just recognising it in terms of the collection of such data but also recognising the context in which that is being presented. The specific example that I'll use is that many of our industry sectors and our businesses, particularly in regional, rural and remote areas, might not undertake the recruitment practices that an urban or metropolitan area would undertake, whether that be advertising online or through recruitment agencies. Rather, it could be local conversations. It could be who you know. It's conversations at a school level. It's conversations with other practising businesses within that community that might not actually be picked up in national dataset collections. Senator ANANDA-RAJAH: Geoff, did you want to add anything? Mr Barbaro : There are a few practical limitations that have just been discussed. It's also really difficult to have any consistency over the data, because intervening events, including things like the impact of global markets, can have a dramatic impact. So can minor events that occur within a particular town or region. During the mining boom through the 2010s, we're aware of the fact that many people became fly-in fly-out workers. Quite a few of those converted to becoming regional residents and staying in places, particularly in north-west Western Australia and a little bit in Queensland, and that contributed to population growth. On the other hand, you can have these really small events that occur in a place like Weipa, where a particular role was made a remote role. In other words, it could be done by a remote centre. The company decided to relocate that to Brisbane because it was easier to replace staff, it was easier to get new staff and the centre could be developed anywhere, so why not put it in a population base? The impact of that was a closed school and closed restaurants. They established this wonderful truck-stop restaurant that they did once a week just to get the community up and running. It's a really big impact. The thing is that that's not caught by census data. It's not caught by local data. It's an event that occurs in an instant, and there's no recording that actually allows you to keep track of that sort of thing. The data issue is a major one and one that— Senator ANANDA-RAJAH: This is a really good point. I feel like this is not captured in productivity at all. What sort of thinking have you done? I'm referencing Professor Roy Green, who talks a little bit about the social and economic capital and those sorts of measures. Are you looking at any other metrics that are particularly unique to these regional communities? Mr Barbaro : As a jobs and skills council, our national organisation is specifically working mostly with regional, rural and remote, but our ability to capture data and to invest in the capturing of data is relatively limited. We've been working with other organisations to try and help address this, such as the rural research and development corporations, ABARES, CSIRO and various others. Local governments could be a very good source of information for us, but there's an awful lot of them and very few of us, as it were. One of the things you mentioned there was the social capital, and it's been interesting for us to see a move over the last few years where, within the regions, the regions are taking an attraction to the region-first approach. This has been happening in Cairns, where they say: 'Come to our place. When you get here, it's a wonderful place to live. It's excellent. And, by the way, there are jobs available. If you're an engineer, this is the type of engineering you can do.' It's too early to say whether that's effective or not, but it certainly seems to be producing results. Senator ANANDA-RAJAH: To follow on from what you've just observed, on the issue of settlement services, the City of Greater Shepparton—the consortium of the council plus numerous businesses—has been running a very similar program to the one you just mentioned with great success, and I connected them with JSA and Professor Glover, because he was very interested in this. They've been doing this for years, and the approach they take is around connecting people to community and hand-holding them through the settlement process. So they're connected to the footy team and the schools, and they actually have a dedicated officer whose job is to help people establish themselves in these communities. And it has been very successful; they've managed to attract and retain people in this thing. So they might be worth connecting with; and I'm happy to do that, if that helps. Mr Rayner : That would be terrific. ACTING CHAIR: I'm not sure whether the team in Canberra is there. My screen looks a bit funny, so I will press on unless I hear otherwise. I'm thinking particularly about opportunities around food sovereignty and fibre. It's probably a leading question, but are we making the most of our regional advantage as a country in connecting up the opportunities that we have by our geography and size? What is the skills gap there, if there is one? What's your view about all of that? Is that something that we can factor in as we think about productivity in all the different ways we are? Mr Rayner : Geoff, given your passion in this space, I'm very comfortable for you to be able to answer this one. Mr Barbaro : 'Are we making the most of it?' is a difficult question. What we can say is that agriculture—or most of our industries, actually—routinely has relatively high productivity compared to most other industries in Australia. I think that that is a product of a number of things, including the work of the CSIRO and the rural research and development corporations. It includes the capacity for a number of our industries to have developed really strong peak bodies, and good relationships between peak bodies and unions, who tend to work together. There are a number of programs, as well, such as the PALM program, which are helping to fill some of the workforce shortages. And those people are getting training, so, for a period of time, there's a trained workforce available here as well. The other factor is the increasing work with First Nations communities—where native foods and native products, for example, have found a market not just within Australia but also overseas—and the increasing work in areas such as aquaculture and seafood. There are still, however, some fairly major gaps that need to be filled in. Obviously, workforce gaps remain the No. 1 priority for our stakeholders. The access to training is part of the issue, but the access to the people themselves is the other part of that issue. In that context, we do see some areas where there could be significant improvement. The number of First Nations people working within our industries is surprisingly low. Some of them are higher than the national average, but surprisingly low given the nature of the industries we work with. This also, though, comes back to a data problem. Again, we're not sure if that's something that's real or if it's the way in which the data is actually collected and calculated. It is certainly real to some extent, but how much it is real—the data is not necessarily that reliable. So, yes, there are certainly areas where there can be improvements, no doubt, but access to training is the one that we hear the most. It is routinely, especially across northern Australia, that we just hear: 'There is no access to the training that we need. We're having to take on untrained young people and train them ourselves. We can't get to standards. There are safety issues. There are productivity issues.' And then there are retention issues right through that. That is clearly a major gap. ACTING CHAIR: What about labour supply? Mr Barbaro : Yes. The two go a little hand in hand. According to the Regional Australia Institute, there have been more people moving out to the regions over the last few years, and that number is starting to build. That's a good thing, but, at the same time, many of those people are still actually working in metropolitan occupations and they're working remotely, so they're not necessarily contributing to local labour. There's an improvement there, but—yes. Attracting retention was a really big thing with our stakeholders, and there's no doubt that they would like to see more done with attraction. For example, we have put together a website that employers can go to to see all of the support services, all of the ideas others have come up with and some of the places they can go to get assistance, to band together to try and attract people to their region, as we were saying before. Let's get them to the region first and then work out how the workforce goes. There is something else that we're struggling with, and this is the question of seasonality. The census occurs in August. August is not a prime harvest season. It's not a prime shearing season. It's not a prime anything season, really. There are things going on in our industry, but, when people put down what they do for a living, they tend to put down what they do for a living on that day. Seasonality says that, actually, people are going through a number of jobs, particularly in regional areas. We're struggling with what is actually happening with seasonal workforces. How much of it has been replaced with things like PALM and skilled visa workers and backpacker systems? There used to be a travelling workforce up and down the coast of Australia, following the Harvest Trail. We're not so sure that that happens so much anymore. It now seems as though people want to locate in a region so that they can raise families, have access to schools and hospitals and all that. We're wondering whether they might be doing more seasonal work around their region rather than travelling a bit. Some of these issues are really hard to put a finger on because we don't have the evidence. We can collect lots of opinions and some stories, and some good qualitative data, but it's really hard to build the quantitative data that might actually tell us precisely where these issues arise. ACTING CHAIR: I want to go back to the issue about a lack of access to training, particularly in northern Australia. In your experience, in terms of some of the models that you've seen work well, what would be your recommendations about how we could improve that situation? Mr Rayner : Geoff, again, feel free to add to anything that I mention here. I think the fundamental here is that we really need the funding components for training to actually reflect the actual cost. We hear often that there might be a 50 per cent factor, a 75 per cent factor or whatever it might be that might be a loading on top of the funding that might be provided by various jurisdictions—state governments, in particular—that is supposed to be a capture rule. But it really doesn't go to the heart of reflecting those actual costs for regional training, so that has a flow-on effect on the viability of training providers to be making their choices. Also, I'm sure you'd all be familiar with this. We hear this concept that it's a vocational education training market. However, we don't necessarily hear that market concept around a higher education market or a secondary school market, so there's a conceptual issue here around leaving it to a market. The reality is that the funding just isn't adequately addressing those critical components. That could be distance; travel; small cohorts, in particular; trainer availability; connectivity; specialist facilities; and, again, as Geoff mentioned, that seasonality of workforce and, therefore, the access to potential students or enrolments at particular times. Again, the funding isn't necessarily reflecting the actual cost of delivery, and that's public, private—right across the board. ACTING CHAIR: I understand what you're saying. All of those things—distance, travel, small cohorts, connectivity—are all extra costs. As far as you're aware, in current models—I guess the private sector is different altogether, but in terms of the funded sector—is there a loading, if you like, or a recognition of the particular challenges of rural and regional areas? Mr Rayner : Again, each region, each rural community, is so diverse and so different. It's almost like comparing an industry against another industry in the way that they organise themselves and whether there's local leadership, in particular. I will say that there is a plethora of fantastic programs out there. The previous senator mentioned one in particular, but there's a plethora of locally organised, local solutions out there that may or may not attract state or Commonwealth government funding, but there are a lot of locally led programs that are designed. Many of them are successful; some of them might not be. Some of them might actually be designed not necessarily for a successful result of a completion but rather around engagement or participation. At the end of the day, the one consistent message or the one consistent thing that we regularly hear back on is that local leadership is a really critical element of those sorts of locally designed and locally delivered solutions. That leadership can come from a whole variety of different places. It could be an individual teacher in a school. It could be the local chamber of commerce that has a particularly passionate board member or staff member. It could actually be the local council. It could be a whole variety of different things, but the common success factor, quite often, is that there is a local leadership component to these locally built solutions. ACTING CHAIR: Going back to the issue of First Nations representation, or the lack thereof, I think the point that you made, Mr Barbaro, is that it's surprising, given the nature of some of the work, that there isn't a higher proportion of First Nations workforce. What do you think the barriers are, and what can we do to try and help there? Mr Barbaro : I think a number of the barriers are probably historical and are being addressed in some ways. The nature of the training market at the moment does make things difficult. You would have heard references, I'm sure, to tertiary harmonisation and the importance of improving recognition of prior learning. The viability of the RTOs at the moment is dependent upon a funding model, whether private or public, that is dependent on the delivery of units of training. That means that there is a lot of on-country learning and in-place learning that is not accepted as part of an already existing knowledge base. So those barriers exist. We've heard routinely, both for regional education generally and specifically for First Nations, that programs that have mentoring support from elders or from respected leaders tend to be more successful than otherwise. As Josh was saying, the employer support also can be really important. When you get an employer like Humpty Doo Barra, which is an outstanding company in the Northern Territory, and you get their commitment to the program, good things can happen. One of the issues—I keep saying that; there are so many—that they seem to face is that they can have short-term successes but then something happens and the support is withdrawn. In New South Wales, Thoroughbred Breeders NSW got together and created this program. It wasn't formally recognised training, but it was based on the formally recognised training. It got people into the industry. It was more than a taster program. It helped workers enter workplaces safely and probably effectively—just not very productively at that point. They had a recognised trainer delivering it, and it was a very successful program. Then, all of a sudden, the training provider pulled out and the whole program collapsed. We spent the last three or four years trying to find somebody else to just do the training, knowing that there was a successful program. There are stories like that across Australia. ACTING CHAIR: Thank you very much. I think we've expended our time now. I really appreciate you participating. I don't think you took any questions on notice, but, if you did, the answers are due by five o'clock on 11 August 2026. We'll let you go..