Re-skilling Is A Training Issue
Sydney Morning Herald
Monday April 18, 2005
Unable to get a plumber? Builders too busy to quote? You are not alone. Even the lure of the coal boom in Queensland is not attracting enough skilled labour. Australian Bureau of Statistics figures this month list 149,500 jobs nationwide which cannot be filled. The economic flow-on is obvious; in the building industry alone residential construction costs have risen as much as 50 per cent in five years. The Immigration Minister, Amanda Vanstone, says help is on the way. Australia will import an extra 20,000 skilled migrants to plug the most critical gaps, such as bricklaying, plumbing, electrical work, cabinet-making, dentistry and podiatry. Working holiday visa holders also get a bonus three-month stay if they have lent a hand on our farms. Clearly, this promises a welcome, short-term respite. But that is not the point.
What is really at issue is training and skills at home. Australia has expanded skilled migration for eight consecutive years. Senator Vanstone acknowledges we are increasingly competing for skilled workers against the likes of the United States and Canada. But why does Australia find itself reduced to bidding for workers on a tightening international labour market.?We have known for many years that retiring tradespeople are not being replaced by new apprentices. In the next five years, 100,000 tradespeople will leave construction, and only 30,000 or so are lined up to enter the industry. The ACTU estimates Australia will be short of 250,000 trades apprentices within a decade, at a cost to the economy of some $9 billion. Yet businesses have been abandoning training in droves. In the past few years, expenditure on structured training by private employers has fallen even further, from 1.7 per cent to 1.5 per cent of the payroll. It is privatised or corporatised government utilities that have cut back hardest. A short-sighted focus on the year-end bottom line means businesses are failing to invest in the very training they need to ensure their long-term survival.Governments, federal and state, also have a central role to play in identifying future shortfalls and setting out to meet them, not only through direct training subsidies, but through the messages they send to school leavers. For decades Australian students have been pushed along the year 12-to-university path, with too little consideration for individual aptitude - just as boys were once too readily pulled out of school at 15 and sent into trades. The Prime Minister, John Howard, took a long-overdue step into the debate last month, suggesting Australia's high year 12 retention rates, much touted as a symbol of a clever society, may need to be reconsidered. "A lot of people will be a lot better off if they don't go to university," he conceded. What Australia needs is a balance between tertiary education and vocational training, not discrimination either way. Immigration brings with it many benefits, but it is not an appropriate means of meeting Australia's need for skills.
© 2005 Sydney Morning Herald