Why Anthony Albanese’s jobs summit failed big and small time

The Prime Minister’s ‘light-bulb moment in May’ summit was a big and even impressive success and an utter and what should have been an embarrassing failure.

Anthony Albanese with Jim Chalmers and Katy Gallagher at Parliament House after the jobs summit. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Gary Ramage

The Prime Minister’s ‘light-bulb moment in May’ summit was a big and even impressive success and an utter and what should have been an embarrassing failure.

Then wannabe PM Anthony Albanese sprung it from nowhere at a business lunch late in the election campaign – there was no mention of it in the ‘The Plan’ that he and now-Treasurer Jim Chalmers talked about incessantly, or on the campaign website, and there still isn’t.

In delivery last week, it was the talkfest version of the advice to government to ‘never hold an inquiry unless you already know the answer’.

The fix was in, well before the summit, on the only two ‘decisions’ of significance; and the fix was then duly delivered – with impressively straight faces from PM and Treasurer.

The big one was the return to industry-wide IR bargaining – or, from the business and especially SME business perspective, bludgeoning – delivered to the unions and the embattled ACTU leadership duo in particular.

The second was the increase in permanent immigration by 35,000 to 195,000 a year, as the double ‘gimme’ payoff to business.

Why not the 40k to 200k agreed and expected?

Presumably ‘someone’ thought the 35k/195k would look like it had emerged from serious and deep analysis and discussion at the summit and not just the delivery of a ‘fix already in’.

But in any event, it gave business the two major things it wants. Ever more people, to sell ever more stuff – from TVs to apartments and properties, to services and infrastructure, from hospitals to schools and roads. And at the more immediate end, the desperately needed workers for farms in the spring picking season to wait staff to check-out chicks, non-gender specific, to delivery bike and motorbike riders.

The summit enabled PM and Treasurer to claim 36 so-called points of ‘concrete action’ – most of which had been formally, and indeed formerly, pre-written by Treasury into the summit ‘outcome’ before the summit had even started.

That’s to say, they all knew what fixes were in, and they were duly delivered. Success. But as to another S-word – substance – there was four-fifths of five-eighths of copulating all.

There was zero attempt to actually analyse at any depth or breadth how we actually could get the jobs – both quantity and quality – that we need to keep building a more prosperous, fully employed, 21st century Australia. Just look at the two big decisions. How does industry-wide wage bargaining create either jobs or skills?

Yes, higher benefits to workers, maybe; and as the 1970s and 1980s showed us, fewer jobs as businesses were driven to the wall. And another 35k permanent migrants? Yes, they are officially dubbed ‘skilled’, but they are really just to plug all the existing empty jobs, mostly at the low end of the skills spectrum. The other 34 so-called ‘action points’ were all the sorts of things governments are expected to do in their ‘day job’.

Governments have for decades been deciding how many TAFE places there should be and who should pay for them. Governments have for decades been deciding what pensioners can earn before they start losing some of their pension.

And pu-leeze – Another $4000? Who came up with that generous figure? A treasurer adviser exhumed from the 1980s? Can anyone in Canberra actually do some basic maths?

Gee, a pensioner is going to be able to earn all of an extra $76.92 a week before losing any of their pension?

What’s that – a two-hour-a-week job? And just enough to pay the extra cost of gas and electricity?

And, it’s only a one-off for this financial year anyway.

Forget about actually getting their skills back into the workforce. Forget about helping them pay their – even higher – gas and power bills next winter. Yes, a hugely successful failure.

Originally published as Why Anthony Albanese’s jobs summit failed big and small time