Reality check should bring jobs summit down to earth

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese speaks to the media at a press conference in Brisbane this week. Picture: NCA NewsWire / Sarah Marshall

It’s difficult to know whether the intelligent – and indeed even basically sane – reaction to the Albanese government’s coming Jobs and Skills Summit is to be afraid, seriously afraid, of the damage it will likely do, or laugh-out-loud ridicule at the totality of its utter pointlessness, or some combination of both.

Right now, a fortnight out from its two-days of programmed wall-to-wall fatuousness, it’s looking pretty good to end up turning Kevin Rudd’s 2008 summit into a model of crisp, focused, high octane, intelligent discussion and outcome, in comparison.

Or, to put it more directly: the best thing to be said about the Rudd summit is that it achieved absolutely zilch, zero, nada, well, nothing. Not in 2008 and even less so in 2020.

Whereas the Albanese Summit won’t be content with simply – and I use that word, very deliberately – achieving just the Rudd summit’s Net Zero, which has become the two-word self-identification of idiocy, but is aiming for the summitry equivalent of a net minus.

The Hippocratic Oath cautions doctors to first do no harm. It appears the Albanese-Chalmers equivalent is embarked on quite deliberately or unknowingly targeting net harm.

The summit was announced by the then-wannabe prime minister at a business lunch just two weeks before the May election.

Prime Minister Anthony Albanese. Picture: Steve Pohlner

It looked like either one of those “good ideas at the time”, thought up in the week before the lunch, or a carefully planned and timed “one big blockbuster idea” announcement, deliberately held back to lead to gushing business endorsement and sweeping the field.

Whatever, it never actually made it onto Labor’s “Our plan” – more simply, “The Plan” – for a better future for all Australians” website page. That page listed 30 big policy promises, but there was nary a sign of the jobs summit. Not even the “Secure Australian Jobs” promise made any reference to it, all the way down to election day and beyond.

Indeed, the tenor of those promises, wrapped up as “The Plan”, was that an incoming Labor government had all the answers. We just needed to be allowed to get at implementing them.

Now the message is: please tell us what to do.

They will certainly be very loudly so told, but not, I suggest to any good or productive purpose.

This past week, Jim Chalmers finally got around to releasing the issues paper for the summit. He urged participants to prepare themselves to make a contribution around five broad themes.

● Maintaining full employment and growing productivity.

● Boosting job security and wages.

● Lifting participation and reducing barriers to employment.

● Delivering a high-quality labour force through skills, training and migration.

● Maximising opportunities in the industries of the future.

It would be easy, but appropriate, to dismiss that as a best of all possible worlds Wish-list with a capital-W. And a tad embarrassing, to boot, for both new government and (tired) old bureaucracy.

Gee, tell us how we can maintain full employment; boost productivity; make every job secure; deliver higher wages every year; replace our, by definition, low-quality, workers with higher quality ones; and best of all, identify those “industries of the future” and get the workers ready.

Welcome to Canberra Bloviation Central. My only question would be, is that with or without masks? Who could possibly say no to any of that – except for reality?

That reality which stretches from China as the absolute but increasingly shaky foundation of our prosperity, mixed with the – until Covid-19 – population-driven property-price explosion and infrastructure-spending boom; into all the uncertainties, challenges and, yes, opportunities of the digitised, online, computerised and globalised world.

Merely reacting to all that and more, as it changes and clashes – as the two years, and counting, of Covid-19 so graphically demonstrated – requires government to make real-time decisions that support business and the community rather than impose rigid structures and rules.

It is also the reality of the world the new government has already embarked on trying to create, around the one big and only policy decision so far delivered: the 43 per cent emissions cut, across the entire economy, to be done in just eight years.

If you wanted to actively embrace a policy that could be more anti-jobs, and so job security; more anti-productivity, and so rising real wages; and more anti-skills, it is hard to conceive one more effective than this absurd and brutal and quite pointless target.

I would, though, have to concede that aggressive pursuit of the emissions cuts might well help with the third theme – lifting participation in the workforce as more pensioners came back desperately looking for jobs to pay their power and gas, and food and housing and medical bills. At some theoretical level it might be possible to see a Kumbaya-like meeting of union, business, academic, social and community, political and bureaucratic minds at the summit.

But again, I’m not sure which is to be more feared: such a consensus or unresolved squabbling between the unions – seeing and seeking to seize the first opportunity they have had in more than 30 years to achieve, as they see it, pro-worker outcomes – and business, ultimately seeking protection against those unrelenting cold winds of reality.

The most pressing, immediate, challenging and dangerous reality is the biggest fall in real wages in any year since the 1980s, revealed in the wages data from the Australian Bureau of Statistics.

The CPI up 6.1 per cent; wages sub-3 per cent (depending on your measure); real wages down by at least 3 per cent. And with a bigger fall to come through 2022-23.

Hmm: a summit about lifting real wages and jobs precisely when the first has been cut and both have to be cut again.