New minister opens his eyes to the printing industry

Philip Anderson, ceo and Peter Lane, national president of Printing Industries attended a meeting with Robb to raise their views on a range of training matters affecting the printing industry–such as the skills council, Australian technical colleges and apprenticeships. "We covered a variety of issues on each one of these topics and were invited by the minister to go back to him with additional information and thoughts on future directions in each of these areas," said Anderson.

As a new minister, Lane said that it was Printing Industries' duty to make sure that Robb "understood the diversity of our industry and explained that it's going through a big change." During the meeting Robb talked to Anderson and Lane about the benefits of the printing industry being involved with technical colleges.

Drawing upon the New Zealand model of training, the two told Robb that they would like to evaluate the appropriateness of this training and whether or not it would be suitable to implement in Australia. "In our opinion, their model is worthy of evaluation and the minister was happy to discuss that; he also requested more information on this training," said Lane.

The meeting was a positive experience and has opened up the opportunity for ongoing communication between Robb and the printing industry. "We believe it's the first of many discussions with the government about what's the best direction for training in our industry," said Lane.

"It was a particularly successful meeting," said Anderson. "We were encouraged by the open-minded nature of the minister's comments and his willingness to listen to our point of view."


Pictured left to right: Peter Lane , Andrew Robb and Philip Anderson.

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