Election 2018: Business SA ad campaign aimed at stemming South Australia’s brain drain

A CONFRONTING campaign demanding action to stop young people being forced interstate for career opportunities will be launched by the state’s peak business group.

• Bookies: Jay should have some cause to smile
• Energy: 430 jobs as battery maker moves to SA
• Business SA: Cut the ‘morbidly obese’ public sector
• Builders: Scrap first-home stamp duty to stem brain drain
• Election 2018 HQ: Latest news and announcements

A CONFRONTING campaign demanding action to stop young people being forced interstate for career opportunities is being launched on Monday by the state’s peak business group.

In a deliberatively emotive election campaign ad declaring one of South Australia’s most valuable exports is its people, Business SA urges political parties to focus on creating a thriving corporate sector.

Featuring a group of people being loaded onto a truck with a forklift, the video urges people to demand their local candidate tell them how they will act on uncompetitive taxes, high power prices and outdated shop trading laws. The final message is: “Give our kids a fair go before they’re all gone.”

Business SA chief executive officer Nigel McBride told the Sunday Mail the flood of about 7000 people a year leaving for other states had to be stemmed.

Business SA chief executive officer Nigel McBride.

About half of those, he argued, were in the critical cohort of young people aged between 20 and 35 years, while many thousands more had gone overseas in recent years.

“Every grandparent and parent in this state has a common theme that they don’t see their children or grandchildren because they’ve had to leave the state to find the right jobs and career opportunities,” Mr McBride said.

“We want all parties to tell us how we can recreate a compelling corporate sector so that these kids do have careers.

“We simply cannot create the economic opportunities and career opportunities for these young people with a structural distortion of a mainly small business state with a massive public sector.”

Mr McBride argued SA’s relevance to Australia’s public capital markets had declined substantially over the past generation.

He cited figures showing while the state has about seven per cent of the nation’s population, it is home to fewer than one per cent of directors of companies listed in the Australian Stock Exchange’s top 100 companies and houses headquarters of just three per cent of those ASX100 companies.

“Our problem with that is three things. One, its personal — families don’t get to see their kids and grandkids and that’s very much the fabric of South Australian communities that’s being torn apart,” Mr McBride said.

“Secondly, it’s the cultural vacuum, from the vibrancy of a state and a city that comes out of that cohort of young people.

“The third problem is economic, These are the highly educated, well-trained people from great South Australian universities, schools and training colleges all being exported to build somebody else’s economy, not ours.”

Both major parties and SA Best have put job creation at the heart of their campaigns for the March 17 poll.

Labor has declared SA jobs its number one priority, promising major infrastructure projects supporting thousands of new jobs annually, creating hundreds of new places for apprenticeships.

The Liberals are vowing to spend $100 million to create more than 20,000 new places in vocational education and training, giving more young people the chance to secure an apprenticeship or traineeship.

SA Best is promising to be relentless in revitalising the state’s economy and giving “our kids a solid future”, but has not yet released detailed economic policy.