PM Anthony Albanese’s jobs summit tries to square wages circle

After the PM’s job summit, the government will have to turn all the talk into policy and bureaucratic delivery, which will involve making highly unpalatable choices.

Well, we have now arrived at the two days of the Albo talkfest and you couldn’t pick a better place for it than Canberra.

Are expectations for it too high or too low? Or just cynical? That the ‘fix is in’ to return to a 1970s-style industry-wide, so-called ‘pattern bargaining’, future, that the ACTU desperately wants and indeed needs, and SMEs might see as a net positive, but could come to deeply regret?

Yes, SME’s really don’t have the resources, indeed the ‘skills’, that the big end of town has for enterprise bargaining. Industry-wide deals could be very mutually beneficial to both employer and employee. But for that to prove actually true in future practice is highly unlikely to be the case.

It really would end up back to 1970s-style union power, plus far more 21st century red tape. I don’t use the word ‘talkfest’ to be either pejorative or dismissive, but simply to state a very basic reality, that is crucial to understanding what happens next, what can happen next. The mixed-assorted 143-plus summiteers can only talk. Yes, they can agree, yes they can recommend. But then ‘government’ - certainly the federal one but also the states to some extent - will have to turn their talk into actual policy and bureaucratic delivery.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Damian Shaw

And not only government, but all the other players in the employment, in the ‘jobs and skills’, spaces. Like most prominently the Fair Work Tribunal. Furthermore it won’t just require action, but for government to make choices; often highly unpalatable choices, but also mutually-exclusive, clashing, choices. That’s when unpleasant reality will kick in. Take for example migration. It’s all very well to talk about lifting the migration target by 40,000 - as the ACTU reluctantly accepts - or by as many as 200,000 as some - many? - businesses and the odd politician want. But to rework the old Kevin Costner quote: if we “open the door, will they walk through it?”

We are not going back fully or smoothly to the 2019 pre-Covid migration and tourism realities. And you might say exactly the same thing about the working-from-home dynamic. That leads straight to the absolutely core challenge - I could have said, ‘problem’ - for the Summit.

Many of the objectives clash and often head-on. Business wants more migrants to fill the massive shortages of workers.

But in ‘filling it’, that would put downward pressure on wages. Obviously that would not appeal to either organised or unorganised Labor. Hence the ACTU attempt to set a wages floor of $91k for special visa migrants.

But hasn’t the greatest downward pressure on wages - running up to Covid - come from foreign students and backpackers? The wrong policy shift could deliver not a good outcome but something akin to the worst of all possible worlds. That’s something like continued modest wage rises across most of the workforce, precisely when inflation is now seriously hitting pay packets in real terms and home loan repayments are rising sharply, with another rise to come next week.

But without actually delivering either the quantity or the quality of workers that business - from big to small - desperately needs. Let’s not forget this Jobs Summit was not part of ‘The Plan’ that Labor - and most especially the wannabe-PM - told us so repetitively before the election, that it ‘had’.

Yet it’s become the absolute pivot of a Government desperately trying to square the circle.

Yes, inflation is 6 per cent and heading to 8 per cent (actually, it’s already there; the real question is will it go higher). But wages are rising by only 3 per cent, and we - a responsible government (that actually wants to get re-elected) - can’t allow them to grow much faster.

And certainly not at the rate to match inflation.

I doubt that was on the now-PM’s mind when he ‘sprung’ the summit at a business lunch in May just two weeks before the election. But it has certainly become the real reason for it. And what will also prove the real measure of its ‘success’.  

Originally published as PM Anthony Albanese’s jobs summit tries to square wages circle