Three steps to jobs challenge, says BCA’s Tim Reed

The challenge we face started with a health challenge that has very quickly become an economic challenge

The challenge we face started with a health challenge that has very quickly become an economic challenge.

At the BCA we started working on three timeframes.

One, what do we need to do from a health perspective in terms of safely shutting down things but keeping as much economic activity happening as possible, and then very quickly swung to how do we reopen as quickly, effectively and safely as we possibly can?

The second part was then the economic stimulus and particularly coming into the September timeframe when JobKeeper and JobSeeker was looking like expiring. So it was, what do we think the government should be doing in the short term?

The third component was very much around long-term reforms, and how do we come out of here stronger than ever?

How do we take this opportunity — you go back to the last recession we had, and there were three decades of uninterrupted economic growth thereafter.

How do we have the courage to make the decisions that tee us up for another 30 years like that?

We organised into 14 work streams, each led by a member CEO to look at those second and third phase questions: what can we do to stimulate demand in the economy immediately or stimulate economic activity immediately and what are the longer-term reforms?

There’s likely to be in the order of two million jobs we need to collectively create. The challenge is a clear one: it’s taken us 10 years to create the last two million jobs and we need to be thinking of this in a two to three-year timeframe.

That shouldn’t be underestimated as a challenge. But we do have a number of things working for us, including unprecedented co-operation across the economic actors, the government business, trade unions and community and civil groups.

Tim Reed