KEVIN Rudd has outlined an ambitious plan to develop specific targets to increase productivity growth in Australia including slashing the number of Australians without trade or Year 12 qualifications.

 

I am curious as to whether the "slashing" will be achieved through natural attrition, forced deportations, or involuntary euthanasia of any adult unable to produce a trade or year 12 certificate?

Yeah, somebody will have to start a "rights for slugs and dumbarses" campaign to protect anybody who doesn't want to get a qualification or lacks the aptitude to get qualified.

But serously, I think that the representation of the current problems that Australian employers have finding staff as a "skills shortage", is mistaken. Here is a quote from a speech by Peter Costello in 2005,

 

"A lot of the recent commentary has focused specifically on shortages of skilled labour in the traditional trades. Anybody who has built or renovated a house in the past few years will readily confirm that it is hard to get skilled tradesmen and women and that prices are pretty steep.

But the labour shortage is not just confined to skilled workers. Labour shortages are also present in a range of unskilled occupations. Indeed, of the 87 000 vacancies registered on the Australian Job Search database, the occupation groups recording the most vacancies are: labourers, factory and machine workers (at 14,000); and hospitality and tourism workers (at 7,000) ? occupations that economists would not normally define as ?skilled?.

In other words, Australia is not in the grip of some unique skills problem. Australia is in the grip of record low unemployment. When unemployment is low it is hard to find labour."

 

As Costello said we have a labour shortage, NOT a skills shortage. As such IMO Rudd's policy of throwing money at vocational and higher education is wrong-headed, as our economy needs warm bodies to fill all those unskilled jobs as well and just educating the existing population will just mean that people redistribute between low and high skilled jobs.

 

While I broadly supported the former government's policy approach of the "back to basics" approach to education (though I am a recent convert to the ALP policy that digital skills are a "basic" requirement for high schools), encouraging mature aged participation, welfare reform, workplace relations reform, encouraging increased fertility and (quietly) increasing skilled immigration to record levels, I think there is more that they could have done to address the labour shortage. In particular I believe that immigration should be opened up to unskilled migrants and quota's should be removed. Competition from migrants would  encourage a lazy Aussies to get off their arses and invest in their own education with the view to taking a skilled job without the government having to pay them to do it, rather than sitting in an unskilled job and expecting to have their conditions protected by a union. The extra population also won't only increase labour supply, but would increase domestic demand as well and would therefore contribute to jobs growth rather than just taking jobs.

 

To protect against problems such as ghettoing and crime I would favour migrants paying a bond upon arrival, that is sufficient to send them home at their own expense if they go broke and get stranded here, or if they cause any trouble. I would also preclude them from social welfare benefits, so that if any are unable to get work they would leave pretty quickly. Beyond that the reality is that Australia will always have a minimum wage which would protect basic conditions and employers are going to prefer workers that they can communicate with, so such a policy would inherantly favour those with english language skills (I'd expect we would get a lot of Indians) which would assist with ensuring social cohesian.

 

Anyway, both sides of politics are hostage to the anti-immigration element in one way or another (the Coalition with the major proportion of the ex- Hansonites and the ALP to both a smaller proportion of the ex-Hansonites and the unions), so I doubt that something like this is going to get up without inspired leadership. Rudd seems to be obsessed with the idea that we actually have a "skills shortage" and that public investment in education is going to magically solve it, so I think the problem is going to persist for the next decade at least.

There is a skills shortage and it started a long time ago in the Whitlam years when many of the financial incentives of doing a trade or studying engineering / science were removed when base wages were increased to the point that tradies and professionals actually earnt no more or sometimes less than production workers, clerks etc.

 

Hawke made it worse when he started shutting down or privatising most of the government enterprises that trained many of our tradesmen, technicians and engineers.

 

Howard then finished the job by cutting financial incentives for private enterprise to train the people we are now so short of.

 

30 years of short sighted policies that failed to invest in our greatest strength, our people.

30 years of short sighted policies that failed to invest in our greatest strength, our people".

Easy many of them are already doing the jobs they would be doing if they were qualified but not as well as they could if they had the right back ground.

 

A good example is the team I work with, they all have more experience than I do in the role, most of them have done a variety of job specific training and certification courses that I haven't done yet, but within six months of starting I was mentoring and coaching them as my back ground in trade and engineering gave me a level of understanding they never had. they knew the job but I understood the product and how it worked.  My qualifications are listed on the job description as the minimum for the role, but due to the skill shortage they were forced to employ unqualified people with aptitude and spend a lot of time and money training them. 

 

Basically if the other members of my team had the skills I have, combined with their aptitude and experience, they would be doing the job much better, in fact we could probably get the work done with half the people.  The extra people could then be redeployed into other areas that have shortages there by helping to reduce the skill shortage.  I am not better or smarter, just fortunate to have had a thorough technical education when I was younger meaning there are many things that are second nature to me that the average person, no matter how smart, has never encountered.

The problem with that suggestion is that during a time of  labour shortage, bosses can't afford to give their workers the time off to spend time getting that sort of substantial training. Conversely if we had have trained all these people up during periods of high unemployment, we would have had a bunch of workers doing jobs that they were overqualified for, which would just have led to them de-skilling and being pissed off.

 

The only way to properly manage the problem is to be able to vary labour supply according to the current state of the economy through freer movement of labour internationally. We have pushed for freer movement of goods and services, as well as capital, so labour is the next logical step. It would work well because different economies usually peak and trough at different times, so people flow to the opportunities. The free movement between NZ and Australia works well in that regard, with Kiwi's coming here to fill jobs in the good times and going back when the opportunities dry up. Also, for all the whinges about the "Polish Plumber", I reckon one of the major benefits of the EU to participants will be the freeing up of the movement of labour.